With the defeat of Andrew Cuomo and the probable end of his political career, much of the media are in the process of expressing how much they really detest him. However, this is in very strong contrast to the early days of Covid in 2020 when much of the very same media expressed their absolute love for Cuomo in large part because he opposed President Donald Trump. One notable example of the current media antipathy towards Cuomo is the Intelligencer section of New York magazine in which on Wednesday Ross Barkan proclaimed “The End of the Bully.”
A certain kind of politics died with Andrew Cuomo’s political career on Tuesday night.
He was, at his peak, the consummate Machiavellian macher. For him, it was always better to be feared than loved. During his 11 years as governor, he wielded the machinery of the government to unsettle and punish his rivals like few in the history of New York, and he was known, above all, as an executive who was never to be crossed. He was a bruiser, a bully, and as a mayoral candidate he hoped to export that cutthroat style to the streets of New York City. Courting voters was an afterthought. He would intimidate enough of the old power players in the shadows, collect his chits, and rumble to victory.
Brutal. And quite a strong contrast from the hype that much of the media was giving Andrew Cuomo in the early days of Covid including this love, love, LOVE from Molly Jong-Fast of Vogue in March 2020 in which she gushed “Why We Are Crushing on Andrew Cuomo Right Now.”
…what a difference a pandemic makes. All of a sudden, I love Governor Cuomo, his soothing Queens accent, his stories about his dad Mario (himself a three-time governor of New York) and his 88-year-old mother Matilda. And then there’s Andrew the dad, embarrassing his kids with stories of their upbringing after his divorce, when he was a single father, and bringing his 22-year-old daughter Michaela to one of his coronavirus press briefings, suggesting it was “cooler” to be with him there than to be on the spring break vacation she had just wisely cancelled.
One big theme for all the media love for Cuomo back in 2020 was that he wasn’t Trump and the media portrayed Cuomo as efficiently managing the Covid pandemic in contrast to Trump as you can see in the October 12, 2020 New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten, “Andrew Cuomo, the King of New York.”
For seven weeks, he had been delivering daily briefings, to widespread and in some circles ardent acclaim. The repetitiveness of these performances, the almost liturgical demonstrations of what seemed like good sense, was itself calming, especially in contrast with whatever fresh craziness came out of the White House each night. Cuomo, by leaning on data, brandishing logic, speaking in paragraphs, and expressing something like human feeling, had stepped into the void left by the federal government’s cynical and capricious response. In the land of the incoherent, the silver-tongued man is king.
Of course, all this media love for Andrew Cuomo quickly dissipated in the wake of his sexual harassment and nursing home Covid scandals. Even this could have been overlooked (think Jay Jones the Virginia AG candidate) if he had not dared to oppose a socialist media approved candidate for mayor of New York City. The moral of the Cuomo tale is that the media might call one (especially if he opposes Trump) a hero today but a dirtbag tomorrow if that person dares to veer from the media approved narrative as we already see happening with Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.
