Cuomophobia

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, while Trump and his administrators were preening before the cameras daily, downplaying the threat when they weren't out and out exacerbating it, our liberal media was pushing forward Andrew Cuomo, New York's governor as an alternate savior.  Cuomo too was giving daily conferences while COVID ravaged his state and especially its namesake city, not just showing up Trump but leaving some left over for New York Mayor Bill DiBlasio with whom Cuomo publicly sparred, pulled rank, grandstanded while New Yorkers died in frighteningly large numbers. 

The Democratic primary was sputtering to its end-- as soon as Bernie Sanders had begun pulling away from the pack in the early states, the rest of the field aligned behind the theretofore underperforming "front runner" former Vice President Joseph Biden.  With the novel coronavirus bearing down and more than half of the primaries still to go, the schedule paused as states struggled to figure out how to conduct voting in the midst of a pandemic.  While Biden continued to betray a decline in cognitive functioning at every reluctant appearance, there was serious talk for a moment there about making a switcheroo to Cuomo at the democratic convention in August.  Cuomosexuality became a thing-- the suggestion of nipple studs beneath the governor's polo shirt its paraphernalia.  Breathless liberals were treated periodically to comical humanizing displays of sibling rivalry between the governor and his heartthrob younger brother (and COVID survivor), CNN host Chris Cuomo on the younger Cuomo's nightly news program.  The governor didn't get the 2020 nomination but he did swing a lucrative book deal to write a chronicle of his management of the pandemic and an international Emmy in November for COVID leadership.  As reported in the New Yorker:

For the better part of a year, Cuomo revelled in the role of America’s stern, steady stepfather, in contrast to Trump’s deadbeat-dad act. In October, he published a book titled “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the covid-19 Pandemic.” That month, in a Profile in The New Yorker about his handling of the pandemic, Cuomo said, “If you don’t believe that the truth wins, you can’t do the job. You have to believe that the right thing gets appreciated in the long run. Only the long run matters.”

 But as usual, the part of the story to which we were privy by grace of our media gatekeepers was incomplete, and as has been revealed recently, misleading.  While the unafflicted liberal segment of the country was falling in love, Cuomo was cheating-- taking $2M in contributions from the Greater NewYork Hospital Association and its executives and members, and having his team insert language into legislation to exempt the corporations providing care to older New Yorkers in nursing homes from liability for cost cutting decisions made to maximize profits -- legislation emulated if not cut and pasted into similar statutes in 26 other states--even though according to information collected by New York state representative Ron Kim the protection in those states demonstrably resulted (as anyone who bothered to think it through could have predicted) in a larger number of nursing home deaths of COVID than in states without it.  Furthermore, the Cuomo administration has recently admitted to fudging numbers to understate those deaths by nearly half by excluding patients who contracted COVID in their nursing home if they subsequently died in a hospital-- a measure taken they explain as a means of protecting themselves from prosecution by Trump's Justice department.  Under fire, Cuomo reportedly personally phoned his most effective critic Kim at home in order to threaten him with destruction.

Cuomo, a scion of former New York Democratic governor  Mario Cuomo is merely exceptionally entitled.  But this is why it takes a global financial crisis or a pandemic that occurs under republicans' watch to get a democrat elected.  Republicans are masters of messaging and they have to be because the impacts of their policies are devastating to the people who elect them. Democrats meanwhile are content to be the fallback party for when Republican policy implodes.  They have decided good government is for chumps.  The grownups would like you to know we're beyond protecting the little guy, even though the little guy is 99% of the electorate.