A surprising number of adult Americans are, in fact, tiny little babies who need a big strong daddy to keep them safe – not so much from the coronavirus as from the degeneracy of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, many of these tiny babies spend a lot of time watching cable news.
Hence the #PresidentCuomo Twitter trend. As we all know, Donald Trump is a buffoonish liar who has spent the last month or more spreading medical misinformation, stoking anti-Asian sentiment in an effort to shift blame to China for his coronavirus policy failures, and emphasizing that he values the stock market a lot more than he does human life. New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s televised press conferences have presented an alternative, and viewers have taken notice.
Cuomo is a professional. He speaks coherently and authoritatively, with sincerity and gravitas. He’s dignified. He does his job.
With his polished TV performances in March, Cuomo became the heir to Robert Mueller, the conservative spook who served as a hero to MSNBC-addicted liberals between 2017 and 2019 for his solemn, nonpartisan investigation of Russian interference in the last presidential election. Mueller represented an antidote to Trump in the liberal imagination not only because he seemed poised to upend Trump’s administration but because he conjured a bygone era of diligent Washington bureaucrats with neat haircuts and – by golly – a heck of a lot more patriotism than any of the crooks in the White House have today.
In the current political landscape of the mainstream media, there are two poles: the alt-right and the honorable establishment. Trump is a scary outsider, an invader, a repulsive and incomprehensible stepdad. This must be a bad dream: where is our real dad? What if he were a decorated intelligence officer or (now) a competent machine politician? Wouldn’t that make us feel better?
Sometimes I think that TV news should be illegal. Newspapers can be evil, too, but at least their readers don’t come away from them judging political figures solely according to how much they look and sound like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. Good or bad, print media contains information of some sort, not just spectacle.
I have no idea what Cuomo’s actually been saying at his press conferences. Apparently it’s all very reasonable stuff. Who cares? Anyone who has given New York politics anything more than a cursory glance since 2011 knows that Cuomo is an asshole.
Like Trump, Cuomo got his start because of a powerful father. As Bill Clinton’s HUD Secretary, he oversaw the demolition of public housing under the HOPE VI program and empowered subprime mortgage lenders in a misguided strategy to increase home ownership. After his successful gubernatorial run as a Democrat in 2010, he schemed with the Independent Democratic Conference to preserve Republican control of the State Senate, ensuring that progressive legislation wouldn’t reach his desk. When the Democrats finally won the Senate in 2018, Cuomo vetoed more bills than ever before.
Cuomo does not support legislation like New York Health Act, which would create a statewide single-payer healthcare system, or Good Cause Eviction, which would fight displacement from gentrification. He has given major tax breaks to real estate developers, which have made it harder to fund NYCHA and the MTA, both of which continue to crumble.
On the national stage, Cuomo may only be a fad. Substantively, his handling of the coronavirus isn’t so impressive: he’s refused, for instance, to call for rent cancellation or to instruct the Department of Corrections to offer compassionate release to elderly prisoners who don’t pose a risk to public safety. But, perversely, as the number of COVID-19 cases in New York grows, so does the rationale for putting Cuomo on TV: he must talk about the crisis.
Rumors have begun to swirl around Cuomo’s newfound popularity. Democrats expect 77-year-old Joe Biden to win the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, but the combination of his embarrassing political record on the federal level and his rapidly deteriorating brain would make him a sitting duck for Trump this fall. Young voters dislike him, and a sexual assault allegation from a former staffer has recently emerged. Conspiracy theorists are whispering that, after Biden has dispensed with Bernie Sanders and clinched the nomination, party bosses will persuade him to step down for “health reasons” (the scare quotes may be unnecessary – Joe looks bad these days) and will replace him on the ballot with Cuomo.
I’ve heard crazier ideas. Right now, credulous CNN viewers may inadvertently be laying the groundwork for such a plot as their infatuation for Cuomo intensifies.
Most CNN viewers, of course, are unlikely to have heard of Long Island College Hospital (LICH), the former medical center in Cobble Hill that served many Red Hook residents between 1858 and 2014, before decreases in Medicaid reimbursements led to its insolvency. Under Cuomo’s orders, SUNY Downstate closed the facility in order to sell its valuable land to a real estate developer who had donated to Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign. The luxury condo towers are under construction.
LICH’s 506 beds might have come in handy during a pandemic. Meanwhile, even now, Cuomo continues to pursue billions in Medicaid cuts in the state’s new budget. While he may look like the opposite of Trump on TV, he’s not the leader anyone should want during a public health crisis. In fact, he’s just another slimeball.
Who’s the actual opposite of Trump? Bernie Sanders, duh.
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