Gov. Andrew Cuomo | AP Photo
ALBANY, N.Y. — America’s governor is taking himself off the air.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will hold his final daily coronavirus briefing on Friday, ending a streak of more than 100 live press events that captivated a country struggling to make sense of the pandemic enveloping their communities.
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The state, once the outbreak’s epicenter, has finished its descent from the metaphorical coronavirus mountain, said Cuomo, and so he will now hold briefings on an as-needed basis.
“That was a long journey,” he said during his Wednesday briefing in Albany. “It was about 42 days up the mountain and about 66 days up the mountain. Who’s counting? I was counting every day. We’ve climbed the mountain and we’re on the other side.”
The briefings, which usually took place in the New York state Capitol’s Red Room, transformed Cuomo’s image as a pure political technician with a standoffish personality. By the end of March, as the pandemic began to claim hundreds of lives every day and hospitals in his native borough of Queens were filled beyond capacity, Cuomo’s candor, transparency and unexpected empathy made him a media star. Cable news networks interrupted regular programming for his briefings. Pundits practically swooned when he said he took full responsibility for unpopular decisions, contrasting his words with those of President Donald Trump, who said early on in the pandemic that he took „no responsibility at all“ for problems with testing.
There was speculation that Cuomo could somehow elbow Joe Biden aside and take the Democratic presidential nomination by acclamation, much as William Jennings Bryan did with his „Cross of Gold“ speech in 1896. (Cuomo has a facsimile of a poster from Bryan’s presidential campaign in his Albany office.) And in perhaps the most-unexpected development of all, the 62-year-old divorced dad of three daughters became a sex symbol.
All of this was the result not so much of what he did — his actions at various stages of the crisis are being reexamined — but of what he said. He spoke movingly of not being able to see his 88-year-old mother, Matilda. He shared the frustrations of his audience when he talked about being cooped up inside. And he reminded people that the terrible numbers he posted each day — number of new infections, number of hospitalizations, number of deaths — represented a human tragedy. He lashed out when he believed his state was being shortchanged of ventilators and personal protective equipment. He thanked those, including Trump, who responded to the state’s needs.
Andrew Cuomo’s father and predecessor, Mario Cuomo, burst onto the political scene in New York — and eventually the country — because he was one of the great public speakers of the late 20th century, a man of words who once said that „you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.“ Mario was always the poet. His son, it was widely thought, was more prosaic.
The daily briefings changed all that.
„His father was an orator — probably the finest Democratic orator since Adlai Stevenson,“ said Democratic consultant Bruce Gyory, referring to the Illinois senator and two-time Democratic candidate against Dwight Eisenhower. „Andrew is not an orator, but here he found his own voice, and his own voice was not the grand eloquence of an orator but the commonsense eloquence of somebody who’s a hands-on manager.
“If you tried to make grand eloquent speeches about the pandemic, I think people would reject that.They wanted a little bit of ‘just the facts’ and a little bit of honest assurance, and I think he gave them that.”
Longtime lobbyists and legislative staffers, some of whom had clashed with the administration for years, privately confessed that they developed “Cuomo crushes” watching the governor’s briefings during their weeks of isolation. With lawmakers, staff members and lobbyists gone from Albany since early April, Cuomo’s briefings offered a way to gather information, as well as collect talking points for conversations with other admirers, grudging or otherwise. And it wasn’t just political insiders — their families and apolitical friends began to tune in as well, especially when cases began to jump dramatically.
While Trump meandered through his own daily briefings, Cuomo’s consistency — down to his PowerPoint slides and occasional flashes of dark humor — offered a sense that at least somebody was informed and in charge. (He regularly started off the first of his weekend briefings by saying, “today is Saturday,” because most Americans had lost track of time.)
People were watching, for sure, and not just on cable TV. The day Cuomo announced New York’s statewide shutdown, for instance, his briefing logged 645,648 views on Facebook, 511,385 views on Twitter’s Periscope and 57,789 through the governor’s website, according to the administration. Cuomo’s social media following soared and fans created additional online means of following along: bingo cards for Cuomoisms, parody skits of his familial anecdotes and operatic odes to a man who had been famous for most of his adult life but had finally entered the pop culture lexicon. Reporters in California keeping tabs on their blue coastal counterpart began referring to the 11 a.m. to noon events as “Coffee with Cuomo.“
The administration capitalized on the audience, using briefings to distribute information to other officials around the state. Not everybody, though, was as enamored with this approach as his more general audience. County officials have complained that they received no communication from Cuomo’s office other than the briefings when the governor issued executive orders that had a direct impact on their jurisdictions.. With the briefings coming to an end, they are concerned they will have no means of understanding the administration’s trajectory as New York continues to gradually reopen.
Cuomo largely kept a promise to keep the briefings nonpartisan, with his criticisms of Congress and Trump focused on a lack of funding for states or specific barbs that had been thrown at him. Few other governors gave in-person updates every day of the week, and many turned to remote briefings as infection rates peaked in their states. But Cuomo continued to invite limited numbers of reporters into the state Capitol and was never accompanied by fewer than two top aides, one of whom was always Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa, the most powerful unelected official in Albany. She, too, became a figure in the daily drama.
Interest in the briefings has dwindled as the state has begin to reopen and the pandemic has eased. Cuomo has taken more pointed questioning about his handling of the initial stay-home order, his communication with New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the state’s oversight of outbreaks in nursing homes. The administration tracked a new spike in viewers on Facebook, Twitter and the website on June 2, during widespread protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. But Cuomo’s approach to the unrest has been less dynamic than his handling of the pandemic, perhaps understandably given the very different crisis.
Cuomo said on Wednesday that New York had recorded 17 coronavirus deaths the previous day, and performed nearly 60,000 tests with a positive rate of less than 1 percent, one of the lowest in the country. That’s in comparison with 20 states that are seeing their infection rates rise because they have reopened too quickly, he said.
So the time has come to scrap the daily briefing, said Cuomo.
The final chapter of the crisis won’t be written for years, said Gyory, but right now, Cuomo’s slower, phased-in approach to reopening — criticized by some upstate leaders as too cautious — looks better by the numbers than those of his counterparts in Florida or Georgia. And that’s a strategic time to stop the briefings while he’s ahead.
“He put a coda on everything he’s done, and he’s ending it where the numbers are sustaining his overall approach,” said Gyory.
Administration officials stress that Cuomo’s not disappearing — he will likely hold a couple of briefings a week in the immediate future — but he said on Wednesday that it’s time to “turn the page on the immediacy of this crisis.”
“We did what we had to do, my friends, and we did it together, and we did it every day,” he said. “Now we will move onto other things. These daily briefings, while fun, take a lot of time.“
In the end, for Andrew Cuomo, it was time well-spent.
Source: politico.com
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