A business-as-usual style
Scandals may loom, but governor’s briefing focuses on renewal, resilience
In a Wednesday briefing, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo talked about resilience and renewal after disasters.
Deploying the business-as-usual style that he has attempted to maintain amid the overlapping scandals facing his administration, he invoked the memory of calamities such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and talked about how New York must bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic with similarly innovative thinking to prepare for future health crises.
Conspicuously missing from the governor's upbeat discussion — though flanked by staff, he spoke without interruption for almost an hour — was any reference to the fact that more than half of the elected members of the state Legislature have called for his resignation amid the alleged coverup of nursing home deaths and the sexual harassment charges lodged against him. Impeachment proceedings began in the Assembly on Tuesday.
The Wednesday briefing was before the Times Union also reported that high-level members of the state Department of Health were directed last year by Cuomo and Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to conduct prioritized coronavirus testing on the governor's relatives as well as influential people with ties to the administration.
As Cuomo spoke Wednesday of coastal resilience after the devastating storms that struck New York during his first term, it was hard to miss what seemed to be the implied comparison between the state's recovery from multiple natural disasters and the governor's current embattlement.
Cuomo used the briefing to announce that Cornell University will offer a crash course in public health to New Yorkers for free, a program the governor hopes will reduce the risk of future epidemics. The class — 16 hours over eight sessions, with enrollment now open — had been previously announced in the governor's State of the State address in January, and is designed to create a statewide cadre of volunteers ready to assist during future outbreaks.
"There will be a next time," Cuomo said. "Anyone who says with COVID, 'This is one and done, this is one in a lifetime' — no, my friends . ... This was in many ways predictable because we had seen many warnings signs before."
He took questions on camera for the first time in weeks, albeit via conference call. Asked to respond to his critics who have said he's incapable of governing while beset by scandal, he dismissed the idea outright.
“It’s clearly not true," he said. "The reality is the exact opposite, right? We’re opening new vaccination centers all over the state. We’ve increased capacity dramatically. You’ve seen my doing that. We’re negotiating the budget as we speak, and we’ve been doing that. So they were just wrong, and they don’t even understand the nature of the job. The nature of being governor is that there are always multiple situations to deal with."
Political observers interviewed Wednesday afternoon noted that the core of Cuomo's self-created political brand is a relentless pragmatism that's always moving forward with little time for analysis of error. Setting that mode of operation aside could be devastating to his image and even multiply calls for his ouster.
Bob Bellafiore, a former political reporter now working in public relations, said that it's a style the governor shares with his late father, Gov. Mario Cuomo.
“It’s impossible to know what he’s thinking inside or what’s happening behind the scenes, but externally he’s doing a classically Cuomo thing: head down, arms pumping, pushing ahead like he’s boring a tunnel under the Hudson River," said Bellafiore, who left journalism to serve as a senior aide to former Gov. George Pataki, who ousted Mario Cuomo in 1994.
For Bellafiore, Andrew Cuomo's performance on Wednesday brought to mind an essay Mario Cuomo wrote in 2013 for New York Magazine about his own father, Andrea Cuomo. Bellafiore said that it was a story the elder Cuomo told frequently as governor. In it, the former governor described a beautiful tree near their Queens home that was uprooted by a storm, and his father's determination to replant and sustain it — a monumental task of renewal that no one else thought possible.
Those looking for a political analogue to that struggle might point to
Andrew Cuomo's hopes to make it to the end of his third term, or even win the fourth term that eluded Mario Cuomo.
"He was going to prove he did something his dad couldn’t do," Timothy Kneeland, a history and political science professor at Rochester's Nazareth College, said of the current governor. With that goal in jeopardy, Kneeland expects Cuomo to continue to project calm and normalcy — so long as his legal situation doesn't devolve, and his polling numbers continue to show enough of a base of support. (Recent surveys from the Siena Research Institute and Quinnipiac University show New Yorkers support Cuomo remaining in office, but only through the end of his current term.)
"Does he get to the end of his third term? Possibly, if he doesn’t get indicted by the feds," Kneeland said, referring to the current investigation of the administration's handling of COVID -19 in nursing homes that's being conducted by the U.S. Attorney's office in Brooklyn. "But I don’t see a fourth term in this guy's future.”
Cuomo's immediate future includes his 11th state budget — a deal that in his Wednesday briefing he said might be delayed. The governor acknowledged that while he's "obsessive" about getting the budget done on time, "We're not going to risk public health to get it done." (Cuomo inaccurately stated that all of his budget's have been "on time," though several were finalized after the April 1 deadline; in the past, he has described them as "timely.")
In a moment that would have been impossible before social media, Cuomo mentioned that state Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie had recently tested positive for COVID, a development that could also delay the deal.
Heastie responded on Twitter while Cuomo was still talking: "My COVID diagnosis and any quarantine of staff will not affect budget negotiations," the Democrat said.
Asked about the Speaker's real-time response, Cuomo clarified that he meant the pandemic generally would affect budget negotiations, and that less people can meet in-person to negotiate.