27 November 2020: Former Aide Rakes Governor Cuomo's Character Over the Coals

Ex-aide Alexis Grenell rips Gov. Andrew Cuomo in blistering essay

The "ex-aide" in question is currently a media and political consultant, who worked for Andrew Cuomo when he served as New York's Attorney General prior to being elected Governor. This very much represents a "blue-on-blue" attack, following the governor's outburst at a press conference in the previous week. Here's a sample from her commentary that appeared in The Nation:

The Andrew Cuomo New Yorkers know and mostly tolerate, the snarling attack dog who gaslights fellow Democrats and deploys staff to call his female critics ‘f—-g idiots,’ dropped down to Earth last week. It was a hard landing after a long-distance love affair with a fanbase in a galaxy far, far away.

In the middle of one of his now Emmy Award–winning (apparently for using “television to inform and calm people around the world”) Red Room press conferences, the governor blew a gasket. The trouble started when Jimmy Vielkind from The Wall Street Journal asked the obvious question that every New York City public school parent wanted to know: Will schools be open tomorrow? Cuomo’s months (years, really) of pissing all over Mayor Bill de Blasio have naturally caused confusion over who owns this loser of a decision, compounded by the fact that the city (3 percent) and state’s (2.5 percent) data on infection rates don’t align. So rather than give a straight answer, the self-described “cool dude in a loose mood,” threw a Trump-style tantrum....

Cuomo undeniably offered a vision of competent, humane government at the height of the crisis, but this is who he is the rest of the time. It’s why he and his staff reflexively insult anyone who criticizes his handling of the pandemic or insists on returning to the normal system of democratic governance as Jefferson envisioned it. People like the relentlessly honest Bill Hammond from the Empire Center for Public Policy, who’s currently suing the administration to force it to disclose the real number of Covid-related nursing home deaths (“yet another publicity stunt from an arm of the far-right advocacy industrial complex”). Or Assembly member Ron Kim for suggesting that the governor acted against the public interest in letting his state be one of the two that grant hospitals and nursing homes broad corporate immunity (“politically motivated”). Or Democratic and Republican lawmakers who want to curtail the governor’s emergency powers after granting them in March, and return to their role as a co-equal branch of government (“stupid” and “completely political”).

Perhaps unsurprising given what Grennell describes of Andrew Cuomo's character, the Governor faces increasing pressure to own up to the negative elements of his administration's performance during the coronavirus pandemic. Politics abhors the vacuum created by blatant hypocrisy, and Governor Cuomo's pandemic book promotion and Emmy award have flooded New York's political atmosphere with it.