BOB MCMANUS: Scores Soon To Be Settled: The full weight of New York’s political establishment bears down on Andrew Cuomo.
Most of the rest of America knows Cuomo from his pandemic presentations—more than 100 days of daily Covid-19 briefings, beginning in March 2020. They were informative, occasionally somber, but often funny—and hugely optimistic. For a brief moment, he was the nation’s pandemic prince. There was even talk of his supplanting Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket.
But this was a sugar high, fading quickly when the state’s true Covid casualty numbers—still among the nation’s highest—began rolling in. And soon it was reported that the governor’s staff had cooked those statistics to understate vastly the number of elderly New Yorkers killed by Covid after infected patients were forced from hospitals back into nursing homes.
It was a coverup, pure and simple, and while this may have startled outsiders, it came as no surprise to New Yorkers familiar with Cuomo’s career. In the beginning, he was chief enforcer for his dad, quickly learning that the executive chamber is power central in New York’s strong-governor system.
The public contrast between the two Cuomos was vivid, and this was not by accident. Mario could hold a grudge, but he presented as a principled intellectual—and he got away with it because he had Andrew at hand for the dirty work. The son embraced that task with disconcerting enthusiasm—doing sometimes-necessary chores for his father, but regularly giving the knife an unnecessary twist or two and smiling as he did so. Andrew Cuomo’s methods haven’t changed, though he’s been his own knee-capper for 11 years now, still smiling as he goes about it. It would be impossible to overstate the seething resentments he has generated along the way.
His undisguised arrogance, moreover, went hand-in-glove with a casual contempt for rules. Those surprised by the appalling litany of abuses detailed in James’s report simply don’t appreciate Cuomo’s invincible sense of entitlement.
He has gotten away with it until now, for one simple (if well-camouflaged) reason: virtually every dollar spent by state government in New York is constitutionally subject to gubernatorial approval and distribution.
It’s harder to survive a scandal when so many people hate you and want to bring you down.