Andrew Cuomo Is the Control Freak We Need Right Now
Quotes from article:
“A crisis shows you a person’s soul,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo mused during a conference call with reporters on Sunday. “It shows you what they’re made of. The weaknesses explode and the strengths are, uh, emboldened.”
He paused. He’d forgotten, perhaps, whom he was talking about and seemed to have strayed to talking about himself. Then, he returned to the subject at hand, introducing the Westchester County executive: “And, uh, George Latimer has really stepped up.”
Mr. Cuomo has governed New York for more than nine years without inspiring much love. He wins elections by grinding opponents into dust before they can make it to the ballot box. He governs by transaction, not inspiration, as a dispenser of favors and destroyer of insurgents’ dreams, the purest master of the machine since Lyndon Johnson in his prime.
He has passed marriage equality, cut deals with Republicans, meddled incessantly in the running of the subway system. The people most passionate about politics these days — the New Left and the Trump-led right — dislike him because he governs as both a social liberal and a friend of business. Many moderate and liberal politicians, who ought in theory to like Mr. Cuomo, simply fear him.
And yet Mr. Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis, as President Trump flails and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio wrestles haltingly with a crucial decision and then heads to the gym.
The governor has been the clearest and most decisive of the three, relentless behind the scenes and open about the risks. He has publicly worried over his daughters and his 88-year-old mother, and put state prisoners to work making hand sanitizer. He’s alternated between sweetness and
confrontation with Mr. Trump, as he would with a wayward upstate legislator.
Even many of his critics say the very qualities that make him abrasive in ordinary interactions are serving him well now.
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“In other times, when you had to go through the messiness of listening to others and trying to bring people together, that was not his forte,” said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, a union that spent last week fighting to close the New York State’s public schools. “This was a moment that he was really built for.”
Nicole Malliotakis, a Staten Island Republican who is running for Congress, said, “I have really big differences with the governor on policy, but I do believe that during an emergency situation he is at his best.”
The hallmarks of crisis management are clear communication and utter decisiveness. And Mr. Cuomo seems to be one of handful of governors, including Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, and Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, a Democrat, who have stepped into a vacuum to demonstrate those qualities.
Mr. Cuomo holds news conferences filled with facts and (accurate) numbers almost every day. He explains systems and challenges and decision-making with a command that Mr. Trump lacks. He even models social distancing by having speakers stay six feet apart from one another.
But the governor’s great strength has always been his capacity to bend the bureaucracy to his will, and he has done that in recent days: pushing to get tests running in state labs, nudging the mayor to shut schools, coordinating a tristate shutdown of most commerce.
He is drawing on skills that are, more typically, seen pejoratively: The New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher
described Mr. Cuomo in 2018 as “a political tactician of almost limitless ambition and extraordinary ability, a leader with jagged edges and little regard for rules, especially if they are standing in the way of the results he wants.”
It’s a sharp contrast to the central figures of the federal response so far: a bureaucratic caution that slowed down early testing in Seattle, and the lack of a centralized, decisive response.
Mr. Cuomo’s aides cite his long experience managing crises as a federal and state official; his first was the floods in northern Minnesota in the early 1990s. Many of the people who have worked with him, and against him, say his sense of command has more to do with his personality.
“His quick spurts of decision making and his ‘my way’ approach can be maddening on a lazy Sunday, but ideal when the world is cooking on a Friday night,” said a political insider who has spoken to the governor in recent days.
Mr. Cuomo’s relentlessness has long been an irritation to members of the press. He can be impossible to get off the phone. The Times once went so far as to bar its journalists from talking to him off the record. Now, over-communication is the order of the day.
