The guardian
‘Meet the governor we’ve known all along’: how Cuomo fell out of grace
At the start of the pandemic, the governor of New York found himself on the national stage with his daily briefings. Now he faces calls for his resignation and a federal investigation Andrew Cuomo speaks in Washington DC on May 27, 2020. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin / AP On March 20, 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic was underway in New York, Andrew Cuomo announced new restrictions on the home. visits for older and vulnerable people. During his televised daily briefing, the governor revealed the rules, which Matilda’s Law was named after his mother, passionately talking about the need for New Yorkers to take care of each other. “Those three-word sentences can make the difference,” he said. “I miss you”, “I love you”, “I think of you”, “I wish I was with you there”, “sorry you went through it”. “It was,” he later recalled, “a very emotional moment for me, and it was reported that I shed a tear. I do know that I got excited about emotion that day. Cuomo’s Matilda’s Law moment – tears and all – was made for TV. Such displays of unbridled emotion quickly turned him into an American icon, the Italian American tough guy who was in touch with his tender side fighting for people in the heart of a terrible pandemic. His daily briefings became mandatory and pushed Cuomo to the center of the national scene as the empathic contrast to Donald Trump. The New York Times declared him a politician of the moment, CNN fantasized about a ‘President Andrew Cuomo’, and even far-right Fox News guru Sean Hannity praised him in his radio interview. To compare everything, Cuomo (63) got a book deal. With distinctive hubris, he titled the work: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic. What a difference a few months make. Fast forward to today, and Cuomo now faces calls for his resignation, an investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors, and angry state legislators from his own Democratic party who want to deprive him of the emergency powers they provided him during the pandemic. has. Andrew Cuomo will hold a media conference in Manhasset, New York, on May 6, 2020. Photo: Lev Radin / Pacific Press / Rex / Shutterstock As for emotion, there is still a lot of it. But it’s not of the “Matilda, I miss you” variety. One of the New York Democrats who signed a letter in which he had to sign the withdrawal of Cuomo’s emergency forces told the New York Post that he had received an unexpected call from the governor last week. According to Ron Kim, a meeting of Queens, New York City, the call began in silence before Cuomo said, “Mr. Kim, are you an honorable man?” He then shouts for ten minutes on the phone and shouts, ‘You will be destroyed’ and ‘you will be done’. When the Post’s report appeared, Cuomo responded by devoting much of his press briefing to an attack on Kim on a daily basis, accusing him of a series of unethical practices. The contrast between this week’s unbridled attacking machine Cuomo and the tearful empathic he predicted in March is so staggering that it has confused many outside observers. But for politicians in New York who have been in the Cuomo lane for years, it was just as surprising as the spaghetti and meatballs the governor likes to cook for his family every Sunday night. “Meet Governor Cuomo, who we have known all along, during the Emmy-winning performance he presented for months,” New York City Public Defender Jumaane Williams said on Twitter this week. The pandemic exposed many things, and this is one of them Jumaane Williams The Guardian has asked Williams, who acts as the official watchdog for New Yorkers, to elucidate. “The pandemic has exposed a lot of things, and this is one of them,” he said. “It was like a secret that Cuomo has gotten away with so far – his lack of accountability, the way he only reacts to political winds when forced.” Ironically, the area that Cuomo landed in such hot water is exactly the same as the area that named his tear-jerking announcement after his mother – who cared for older and defenseless New Yorkers through the pandemic. Three days after enforcing Matilda’s law, he created a new provision that protects hospital and nursing home managers from possible liability for decisions that could lead to the deaths of people by Covid. As the journalist David Sirota noted in the Guardian, Cuomo received more than $ 2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association and its associates and managers and lobbying firms – the group in the healthcare industry that claims to have “drafted” the immunity clause. The immunity provision had a detrimental effect on the ongoing investigation into Covid deaths in New York nursing homes, which accounted for nearly a third of the total death toll of about 46,000. In a declining report released by the state’s attorney general, Letitia James, last month, she says it has led to confusion over whether homes that do not meet health standards for the delivery of the pandemic are ever responsible. can be held. James demanded that the new immunity rules be scrapped. That was not the end of it. Two days after the immunity clause was introduced – five days after Matilda’s law was announced – Cuomo issued an advisory notice. It recommends nursing homes to remove patients from the hospital who are infected or infected with coronavirus. The houses had to allow everyone who was ‘medically stable’. No resident could be readmitted, solely on the basis of a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19 ‘. The motivation behind the notice was clear – there was an “urgent need” to expand hospital capacity in order to satisfy the increase in Covid cases. In other words, free up hospital beds by getting older patients back to their nursing homes. The rest is history. A report from the New York Department of Health found that between the issuance of the advice on March 25 and May 8, more than 6,000 Covid-positive residents were readmitted to nursing homes and long-term care facilities. There has been a great deal of debate about the extent to which the governor’s advice was blamed in March for the large number of deaths in nursing homes due to Covid. When the Poynter Institute’s fact-checking arm, Politifact, reviewed the question, it came to the conclusion that Cuomo did not force nursing homes to admit sick patients as his Republican opponents claimed. But Politifact concluded that the notice gave care managers the clear impression that they had no option but to take the residents back. As with so many other political scandals before, the real problem with ‘Cuomo holes’ was not the disputable one. mistakes made, but the lack of transparency about what happened next. This is what really bothers the public defender. “My problem with Cuomo’s leadership is not that mistakes are made, but that mistakes are always made. “If you can not take responsibility for it and what went wrong, mistakes are made again and again, and people are killed for it,” Williams said. The unraveling began with the Attorney General’s report last month, which revealed that the deaths of residents of nursing homes in New York were significantly higher than those recorded by the Cuomo government. Residents who fell ill and died after being transferred to hospital were mysteriously removed from the official count. Then the New York Post dropped a bomb. The newspaper reported that Cuomo’s leading aide, Melissa DeRosa, admitted during a conference call to Democratic leaders that the government had withheld the actual death toll from the legislature’s old age home. Melissa DeRosa at one of Cuomo’s daily briefings at Covid in New Rochelle, New York, on May 29, 2020. Photo: Lev Radin / Pacific Press / Rex / Shutterstock DeRosa told them in the leaked conversation that ‘we’ froze ‘because Donald Trump tried to use the deaths as a ‘giant political football’. What started as a dispute over health guidelines and immunity has quickly turned into a full-fledged cover-up scandal. In the wake of the Post story, the state revised its official version from 8,500 to more than 15,000 deaths. It makes a mockery of Cuomo’s years of fame that his state had one of the best records in the country for Covid deaths in nursing homes. Cuomo was forced to apologize on Monday. “We made a mistake,” he said, before quickly going on to explain that the mistake was to create a “gap” that allowed “misinformation and conspiracy” to flourish. But he stubbornly continued to deny that the death toll had been massaged and insisted that everything possible was done to save lives. The semi-apology left many dissatisfied. “That sounds to me like the ‘excuse I was caught,'” Williams said, adding that on Friday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democrat representing parts of the Bronx and Queens in Congress, added her powerful voice to a complete “Thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers have lost their lives in nursing homes throughout the pandemic,” she said in a statement. “Their loved ones and the public deserve answers and transparency from their elected leadership.” The public advocate wants an even more thorough accounting – a full investigation into every aspect of Cuomo’s response to the health crisis. There are leadership lessons to be learned here, he thinks – rather less rosy than those the governor in the title of his book implied.Williams points to the faltering start of the pandemic when the state took several days to close schools and ban rallies, the classification of “essential workers” wa t was forced to continue working and who was overwhelmingly drawn from black and Latino communities; and evidence of striking racial differences now emerging only in the distribution of the vaccine. “From infection to injection, the governor’s decisions were wrong almost every step of the way,” Williams said. He is writing a book on leadership during the pandemic, while at the same time hiding data and killing people. The arrogance is incredible. ”