QUEEN OF CORONA

QUEEN OF CORONA

Meet Andrew Cuomo, New York's third-term Governor.

At sixty-two, this baby boomer is a former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, a former Attorney General of the State of New York, and even a former Kennedy, divorced as he is from one of RFK's children with whom he has three of his own.

In the 1980s he earned a reputation for both sharp elbows as his father's campaign manager and foresight and compassion as the founder of WestHelp, a non-profit that created housing for the homeless.  As HUD Secretary, New York's Attorney General, and Governor since 2011, he has attracted  similarly schizophrenic reviews.

On the plus side, he was an early supporter of tax equity and gay marriage, spearheaded NY's landmark gun control legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook, and signed in 2019 the Reproductive Health Act that protects a woman's right to choose.  He courageously banned fracking, even though it was popular in western NY. As Attorney General, he  led the successful investigation into university preferred lender programs that rebated millions to students, shut down on-line child porn channeled through major internet service providers, and attacked non-profit abuse.

But there are also minuses.

As a candidate, he self-destructed in 2002 by condescendingly (and meanly) describing the  incumbent as someone who just "held the leader's coat" following 9/11.  Much later as Governor, his top aide went to jail for accepting bribes, he disbanded the Moreland Commission investigating political corruption, and he helped form the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC) that until last year allowed Republicans to control the state Senate with less than half the seats. As HUD secretary, his Community Builders program was criticized by HUD's Inspector General as a de facto  political operation on behalf of the DNC. Even his divorce was messier than it had to be, mostly because he couldn't resist bad-mouthing his wife in the tabloids.

He's also an attitude guy.  That's a species of the male New Yorker who grew up in "the City" and spent a lot of time in schoolyards.  There are a number of "tells" when it comes to attitude guys. One is that they call New York City "the City",  expecting everyone else to know what they mean because . . . well, what other cities are there, really?  Another is an outer-borough accent of the Robert De Niro "you talkin' to me" variety, which is generally perceived more as an invitation to fight rather than converse.  Yet another is a self-assured swagger that comes from never having backed down in a street fight, apropos of which the important thing (and Trump -- who's probably never been in one --  doesn't get this) is not winning or losing . . .

It's being there.

So that's Andrew, warts and all.  Easy to love.  Perhaps even easier to hate.  And at the very least  . . .

Annoying. 

Until now.

Yesterday, veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield said we were about "two Andrew press conferences away" from a Draft Cuomo for President movement.  This was over the top. Drafts don't fly  in America, they fizzle, and if Cuomo is anything, he is politically savvy enough to know that.  He is also savvy enough  to know that he himself would be a tough sell outside "the City".  That's why, persistent rumors to the contrary notwithstanding, he took himself out of this year's presidential sweepstakes long ago.

But Greenfield's rapture does underscore something real.

Because, in this pandemic,  the Queen of Corona is  turning out to be New York's  Governor as much as it is the virus.

And for good reason.

Cuomo has now held more than a dozen press conferencs on the coronavirus pandemic.  They usually start at 11 a.m. and last about an hour. 

In them, power point in hand, Cuomo lays out the current state of the disease in NY and nationally. He reports the number of known cases, the number of deaths, the number of recoveries, and victim demographics.  He outlines the responses to date  and the deficiencies in those responses; the latter include a lack of sufficient testing and a shortage of needed equipment --  especially so-called personally protective equipment or PPEs for health care workers, ventilators, and sufficient hospital capacity to treat those likely to get sick.  He  then announces whatever new measures he is ordering or steps the state is or will be taking.  

Over the past week, he gradually banned in-person workforces throughout NY so as to close high-density venues where groups congregate, embarked on a worldwide search for more PPEs and ventilators, and ordered in-state hospitals to increase their capacity by 50%.  By Monday, the state had purchased about a million PPEs of one sort or another (masks, gowns or shields).  He is strenuously advocating  for federal intervention where needed, having been successful in getting Trump to order the Army Corps of Engineers to build temporary hospitals at four sites in the state but continuing to  demand that the President invoke his power under the Defense Production Act to require that private companies manufacture ventilators and more masks.  

And just in case you think he has left his attitude at home, he has had no patience for legislators who don't think they should be in Albany during the crisis, curtly telling them to do their job, and has repeatedly admonished millennials  to get real, stop congregating and  start distancing . . .

Lest they kill grandma.

Or themselves.

His briefings are factual, detailed, coherent and informative.  

If he doesn't know the answer to a question, he immediately checks with the available expert.  If together they don't know, he says they'll find out.  He also doesn't whine or bitch. At the end, he says he is going back to work.  

Unfortunately, and at a number of levels, the contrast between Cuomo's daily briefings and Trump's is too obvious to miss.  

The President accepts no responsibility for his early (and false) happy talk that delayed a unified national response or for having ignored intelligence briefings that warned of the possible pandemic months ago.  He routinely goes off on narcissistic rants against enemies real or imagined that have nothing to do with the disease, yesterday bemoaning the absence of appreciation for his willinghess to forego the  Presidential salary and even appearing happy that Mitt Romney is now in quarantine given potential  exposure from Sen. Rand Paul, the latter of whom has tested positive.  He continues his almost daily attacks on the press, even when they are asking soft-balls. And he gets the facts wrong, whether it's about the fatality rate on the flu (not even close to that of Covid-19) or when the government actually knew there was a possible crisis (it was no later than January; in fact, as a general rule, experts have been warning about the possibility of coronavirus pandemics for three years) or when a vaccine might be available ("rapidly" says Trump; 18 months says Dr. Fauci).

Cuomo, on the other hand, is basically inviting responsibiity. Both today and last week, he said that if anyone was annoyed at his executive orders, or their impact on our lives or on the economy, they could "blame" him.  

And they may.  

Cuomo is warning that the crisis may last for months and he presumably is willing to keep New York shuttered while it lasts.  Some experts, however, are warning that this may on the one hand be unnecessary and on the other economically fatal.  Just this morning, op-ed columnist Tom Friedman warned in the New York Times that a more tailored "vertical" approach to containment that focuses on high risk individuals while testing and clearing others to go back to work may be preferable to the "horizontal" stay-at-home orders that have ground the economy to a halt. Sensing the Hobson's choice presented, Cuomo today acknowledged that we "have to start to plan the pivot back to economic functionality.  You can't stop the economy forever."

No one knows when this will end or what shape we will be in once it does.

In the meantime, however, the tabloids are agog over Andrew's new-found popularity. 

A mom from Great Neck on Long Island called his 11 a.m. pressers her "morning fix."  A Staten Island blogger is "crushing" on him  . . . and so is her husband.  (For the record, Long Island and Staten Island were two of the many places that went for Trump in 2016.)

Why?

Because, like Trump, Andrew lives on the streets, attune to whatever is necessary to generate curbside appeal from Mr. and Mrs. Average.  

Both he and Trump are uncomfortable in their own skins, however tough those might be as products of shared outer-borough upbringings.  The "tell" here, apart from attitude, is that  neither of them is particularly funny.  Cuomo can't tell a joke (he's even tried at those press conferences, but you can't marry DeNiro and Colbert),  and Trump doesn't even recognize one.  

So, they can both appear forced, even artificial.

But that's where the similarity ends.  

For unlike Trump, Andrew is not the sum total of his resentments. In fact, if he's the sum total of anything, it's those four decades in and around government and the fact that he's his father's child. He inherited a faith in government, the big government of FDR and Lyndon Johnson and, of course, Mario Cuomo.  He believes in it, has studied it, knows it, and  knows how to make it work. And so, at the task of governing, Andrew Cuomo is . . . 

Competent.

It's what keeps the Dow from cratering when he talks.

And has Long Island crushing.

If we come out of this remotely whole, it will be on account of big government, not in spite of it.  If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are only Keynesians in depressions.  

Cuomo's strategy is to flatten the curve so that the health care system will be able to treat the influx of patients from the pandemic while a hoped for herd immunity ultimately ends it.  In the meantime and thereafter, a stimulus orders of magnitude higher than what is now on order will be needed to forestall widespread poverty and resurrect the economy.  In fact, Brandeis Professor Robert Kuttner calculates that  a stimulus on the order of those effectively created by World War II -- or somewhere between 25% and 35 % of annual GDP -- will be necessary to avoid unemployment rates above 20%.  In today's economy, that's about $8 trillion (assuming gross annual output of about $24 trillion).

My hope is that, while Andrew Cuomo tries to put out the fire . . .

Joe Biden is crunching the numbers.