Cuomo’s plague year
This is Day 365 of Gov. Cuomo’s COVID countdown (or count up), marking the end of an horrendous year for New York, America and the world from the deadly virus that tore across humanity. It was also a year that saw Cuomo gain national acclaim for his leadership in the crisis’s early days, only to tumble back down to earth, amid allegations of a coverup and sexual harassment.
In truth, he was never an unblemished paladin of virtue or wisdom. Not last spring or ever. As we’ve long said, he’s a piece of work, a complex man of considerable political skill.
At the beginning of 2020, Andrew Cuomo was in the political backfield, a non-player on the main stage of President Trump’s impeachment for Ukrainian meddling and the wide open presidential campaign. But COVID, from that first case in New Rochelle and then a flood of infections and hundreds of deaths a day, changed it all. It was Cuomo’s moment, with New York being ambushed by the virus and national leadership absent.
His actions saved lives. His actions took lives. He could have, and should have, shut down earlier. He could have, and should have, ordered universal masking earlier. He was right to try to prevent hospitals from overflowing and collapsing, with people dying in hallways and in streets. He was wrong to have nursing homes take COVID patients released from those same hospitals.
This we all know now. And this we did not know a year ago. We know how the virus spreads and how it doesn’t. We know how to protect against it and how to treat it. Last year, as we tried to sterilize our mail and desperately secure what we thought were life-saving ventilators, we had yet to learn.
Cuomo’s briefings, exuding stability and confidence amid worldwide fear, contrasted with Trump’s erratic promises of quack miracle cures and recommended bleach-drinking, elevating his status beyond New York. But as the COVID response evolved and policies changed, including having nursing homes accept COVID cases, there were questions, legitimate ones, not about the high death toll in nursing homes and hospitals, which were known, but about how many COVID patients had been transferred into the homes, potentially spreading the disease.
These questions weren’t being asked by Cuomo’s enemies on the right and the left as the governor kept saying, but by state Sen. James Skoufis and Bill Hammond, once of the Daily News, and now a health care expert at the Empire Center for Public Policy. Instead of handing over the data, Cuomo’s administration stalled and delayed. Only a court order won by Hammond opened up the records. While the nursing home rules were wrong and understandable, sitting on the statistics was wrong and stupid and now those foes on the right and left have their knives out for Cuomo.
Wounded by his foolish secretiveness, Cuomo is now denounced as a nasty control freak and hit with charges of sexual harassment from a former aide. He should welcome an investigation. Is he rude, belittling, condescending and insulting to women? Is he the same way towards men? Most important, can he change?
There’s a reason that Gov. Cuomo, Emmy-winning TV star and best-selling leader of the fight against the coronavirus, has abruptly gone dark. Actually, there are a few reasons. The fatal moment, politically speaking, probably wasn’t Cuomo’s decision last March — when it looked like the hospital system here could collapse like it had in Italy — to require nursing homes to take medically stable patients back in from hospitals without testing them for COVID and to give both nursing homes and hospitals a legal shield. It’s his refusal, nearly a year later, to acknowledge the literally fatal consequences of that decision.
Last month, Attorney General Letitia James released a devastating report estimating that the number of deaths of nursing home residents in hospitals was 50% greater than the state had previously acknowledged, forcing Cuomo’s health commissioner to finally disclose 4,000 additional deaths tied to nursing homes.
Cuomo shrugged, arguing that since we already knew how many total people had died, the breakdown he’d concealed for nearly a year was a mere detail:
“Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”
That was remarkably callous, more so because he’d had so long to prepare his answer. But Cuomo simply isn’t built to admit a mistake.
Then came his chief aide Melissa DeRosa’s blackmail-attempt-turned-confession on a conference call with Democratic lawmakers two weeks ago. That’s where she told them that the administration hadn’t turned over the coronavirus-related nursing home death numbers they’d been asking for since last spring because Trump’s Justice Department had asked for the same numbers last summer.
Obviously, the timing makes no sense and Cuomo was determined to keep the numbers hidden, though I don’t understand to what end, since they were bound to come out eventually. But it’s pretty clear that DeRosa’s idea on the call was that if no one called BS — which is not easy to do to the person who speaks for the state’s most powerful pol — then the administration could leak its spin on the call at any time to claim lawmakers had implicitly signed off on the governor’s decision to hide the numbers. But Democrats did call BS and then punctured the caucus’s usual protective cone of silence to leak that exchange to the press.
Even after that, Cuomo insisted the Dems hadn’t really wanted the nursing home death numbers or they would have subpoenaed his administration for them. Of course if they had done that, the famously vindictive governor who says his only regret is that he wasn’t aggressive enough responding to his foes’ false claims (sound familiar?) would have waged a vendetta against them.
Cuomo pressed on with his press conferences, because Assemblyman Ron Kim — who lost an uncle in a nursing home to the virus — might be able to make it onto “The View” for a day to call out the governor’s “abusive” behavior, but the governor has a platform every day.
And Cuomo, who in 2002 famously mocked then-Gov. George Pataki as Rudy Giuliani’s coat-holder, clearly learned a few things from America’s Mayor’s post-9/11 demeanor — which Cuomo employed to great effect last year while counter-programming against the competing son of Queens in the White House.
As Alex Pareene noted in The New Republic, where Cuomo the newspaper character has an arcane and complicated backstory (like in this column!), TV Cuomo is a manly do-er who shows up in costume and exuding confidence after disaster strikes.
But TV Cuomo has been MIA since Lindsey Boylan, a former state economic development deputy secretary now running a long-shot campaign for Manhattan borough president, published an essay on Wednesday detailing his harassment — how he kept touching her in work settings, had aides do some of his creepy wooing, if that’s the word for it, and finally forcibly kissed her.
The Cuomo camp has continued to categorically deny her allegations, which she’d made more generally months ago, but drew much more attention after she detailed them this week along with a few receipts.
“The burden is not on the woman,” Cuomo said in 2015. “It’s not about, ‘Did the woman say no before she was attacked?’ It’s whether or not the woman said yes.”
In 2018, as Cuomo debuted what he claimed was “the nation’s strongest and most comprehensive sexual harassment package,” aide DeRosa declared that nationally, “women are bravely stepping up and speaking out about sexual harassment and abuse.
“In New York, we are listening” she said, with laws that “take direct aim at the culture of secrecy, dominance and power inequality that allowed sexual harassment to thrive.”
Unable to directly attack, or ever admit to having done anything wrong, the governor who loves to have the last word is finally up against a storyline so damaging that he’s surrendered his TV time to try and avoid answering questions about it.
Scarsdale, N.Y.: The United States has fought and won two world wars; it has confronted and defeated international terrorism across the world. It is now time for our nation to stand up and eliminate the threat of these homegrown radical militant terrorists that have operated freely in our country. We do not need private armed militias within our borders. Freedom of speech my foot. Take them down!
Harvey Wielstein