Grading Cuomo's Pandemic Performance

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now that New York is emerging from the pandemic, hopefully for good though we don't know that yet as discussed in our last segment, a new book takes a critical look at how Governor Andrew Cuomo has handled it. The book is by journalist, journalism professor, and frequent Cuomo critic from the left Ross Barkan and attention Machiavelli fans, the book is called The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York.

Coincidentally, even as Ross Barkan was scheduled for this book release and interview, he was in the news himself on Primary Night last week for not being allowed into Eric Adams's campaign party after writing a string of very critical pieces from moral left perspective about him. We'll touch on that too. In addition to writing the book, Ross Barkan is a professor of journalism at NYU and St. Joseph's College in Brooklyn and a regular contributor to The Guardian and Jacobin, and sometimes to Gothamist. He even ran in the Democratic primary for State Senate in South Brooklyn in 2018 and lost a competitive race to current Senator Andrew Gounardes.

Ross thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ross Barkan: Thank you for having me very excited to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Let me start with a couple of clips of the governor that you referenced the context for from way back in March of last year. First, this one from March 8th, about a week before in New York seriously shut down.

Andrew Cuomo: The people understand the facts here, they shouldn't be alarmed. The fear and the anxiety is greatly outpacing the reality and we're fighting the fear even more than the virus, frankly.

Brian Lehrer: That was Cuomo talking to MSNBC's Alex Witt on March 8th, last year, one week after New York state recorded its first positive COVID-19 test result. He echoed FDRs fear itself there, obviously, but that tune changed of course by March 20th, with the virus outpacing most people's worst fears and the governor announcing the first stay-at-home orders.

Andrew Cuomo: Only essential businesses will be functioning. People can work at home, God bless you. Only essential businesses can workers commuting to the job or on the job.

Brian Lehrer: Ross let's start there. How critical are you of Cuomo for the period between March 8th and March 20th or 22nd?

Ross Barkan: I'm quite critical because if you go back and really look at the State's response to the virus it was quite slow and quite poor. It's important just to make the point that it's not Cuomo's fault that 50,000 people died in New York state. COVID was always going to kill people, but less people had to die, and certainly, Bill de Blasio's response was slow as well.

I always tell people it's important to remember power dynamics here. The governor of New York is much more powerful than mayor of New York and Andrew Cuomo had various emergency powers that gave him complete control over when businesses could shut down, schools could shut down. Really in my book, which is now out, I hone in on two key areas where Cuomo failed New York State.

The first is in the utter downplaying of the virus. You played those clips. As late as March 11th, Andrew Cuomo was saying COVID was not a real threat. He was comparing it to the flu, the common flu. He was comparing it to SARS, to Ebola. His rhetoric really was very similar to Donald Trump's when it comes to COVID though, we don't associate them together. In that context, each man was downplaying the threat repeatedly. When you do that, you give people a false sense of security and the virus was clearly spreading by March.

As you said, March 1st, the first case is recorded. Many smart people knew it was probably spreading in February. If you look at the actions taken in other States and other countries too, it was very obvious this was a threat. You start there Cuomo downplays the threat.

The second part of the failure was the slow shutdown order. In California and in San Francisco and the surrounding counties, a shutdown was done around March 16th or so an organized shutdown shelter in place order. The next day, Bill de Blasio, who had been downplaying COVID himself, went on the air and said, "New York must shelter in place." Andrew Cuomo because he dislikes Bill de Blasio to an almost sociopathic level says, "No, New York City will not have a shelter place order." Then he does it five days later around March 22nd, he calls it New York pause. Finally, we get that statewide shutdown.

If you look at studies done by Columbia and other places, each day you delayed with an exponential threat like COVID more people died. New York City, over 30,000 people die, New York state over 50,000. We have the second-highest raw death toll in America. Second highest death rate. The rate is only second to New Jersey. It is very clear that if we took action sooner, lives could've been saved, not all lives, but certainly, a large number of people could be with us today if we took COVID seriously at the very beginning of March.

Brian Lehrer: On this point, we are talking about just a few days, March 16th, I think you said. I had read March 19th. I think you said March 16th for California. The difference between either of those and March 22nd for New York, it's just a few days, New Jersey is the only state with a higher death rate than New York's. They shut down the day before New York did and there are so many States that shut down after New York that have had lower death rates. Is it fair to take strong issue with a few days of hesitation when so many governors waited even longer to close their States and had better outcomes?

Ross Barkan: Yes, because it was clear New York was going to be one of the epicenters. California, Washington State was an epicenter as well. You look at the response from Jay Inslee, from King County, it was very organized--

Brian Lehrer: In Seattle, governor of Washington.

Ross Barkan: Yes. You had early school shutdowns and you had public health officials speaking very early about the threat of COVID. You can go back to February and find press conferences to that effect. It is fair to talk about days because A, New York had a problem that other States did not have. We are an international hub like cities in California, like Washington, the virus was very clearly spreading at a rapid clip. Anyone could see that and each day you delay more people die.

If you do it one day sooner, you save lives. You do it one day later, you don't save lives. Columbia University did a very good modeling of this. Tom Frieden, the former head of the CDC has said something to the same effect. We had no time to spare and the longer we spent, particularly in that first week of March downplaying COVID, that was so disastrous from a public messaging standpoint and sent such conflicting and confusing signals.

Cuomo is the governor of the State, along with the mayor was really leading the charge there and creating this false sense of security. Couple that with a late shutdown order, and you have a recipe for what we had, which was the worst catastrophe in new York's history bar none.

Brian Lehrer: My guest, if you're just joining us, is journalist and journalism professor Ross Barkan whose new book is The Prince: Andrew Cuomo Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York. These days, Ross, obviously some of Cuomo's actions around the virus from later looks scandalous, but early on, despite New York State's 50,000 plus deaths, Cuomo's daily news conferences gave many people a feeling of being comforted and spoken to candidly certainly in contrast with Donald Trump.

His TV-style even won him an Emmy nomination, as you know, and now controversial $4 million book deal which did produce a two-week New York Times bestseller. How early were you critical of pandemic TV Cuomo?

Ross Barkan: My first critical article about Cuomo appeared, I want to say around March 16th, 2020. I'd have to go back and check the exact date. It was in that-- May have been sooner, March 15th, but I'd have to look. Then I wrote a piece for Columbia Journalism Review at the end of March of 2020, which was actually evaluating what you just discussed. This phenomenon of Cuomo, a hero of the media, hero of prestige press, hero of the cable TV stations.

I won't say Cuomo was entirely a media phenomenon, that would give too much credence to the media. What I will say is that there was a lot of uncritical coverage from prestige outlets, particularly from television, from national magazines, from newspapers that really did not look critically at Cuomo and did not ask the question of why this person was being celebrated as in real-time, thousands of people were getting sick and dying.

It's not to say that it's all Cuomo's fault. I never say that, I don't say it in the book. It's to say, "What deserves praise here if we are dealing with the worst death toll in America, which we had for many months until California, a state twice as large finally caught up in successive waves." What are we celebrating here? There's nothing to celebrate. It was the worst period in the state's history that includes 9/11, that includes the draft riots, that includes Hurricane Sandy. It really was a horrific time for everyone who had to live here.

Brian Lehrer: Is it fair to say Cuomo played a nationally constructive role, though, as the most effective elected official counterweight to President Trump's lies and denial, who got a lot of media exposure around the country as well as in New York? Because Cuomo was seen as serious and credible as he took actions that the President and Republican governors resisted and asked the rest of the country for help when New York was uniquely hit, and Trump wanted to dismiss it or blame New York.

Ross Barkan: The funny thing is about actions taken is that New York was not really ahead of other governors, even though that's what the popular narrative suggests. You had many other states that were closing schools statewide before New York did. Obviously, closing schools was a very difficult decision to make, and truthfully, they should have reopened sooner than they did. When you go back to that moment, and you look at what public health experts were saying, they were saying, "You must shock the populace into believing this is real. The way you do that is through school closures."

Ohio, Michigan, other states were actually doing it before New York did statewide, by several days, though, the threat of COVID there was not as severe. I would start there in saying New York's actions were not even early from a pure temporal sense putting aside the threat of COVID.

Second of all did it matter if Cuomo was a voice for reason? Maybe. It was nice to see, once the shutdown occurred, Donald Trump was so incendiary. He was lying. He was talking about things that were not true. People needed someone to go to.

The question is, though, why are we in the media in the business of inventing narratives? We're not novelists here. Why can't we say that Trump's federal response was a failure and New York's response was also quite lousy, and maybe a little bit better once we realized that it was a threat and shut down? For me, performance can only mean so much against the body count. I know people who died of COVID. I have friends and family who had people die of COVID. It's no consolation for them that Andrew Cuomo look good on MSNBC for a few months.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few phone calls for Ross Barkan, if you want to get in on this 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280 or tweet a question or comment @BrianLehrer. By now most of our listeners know the layers of scandal around Cuomo the transfer of COVID positive hospital patients back to their nursing homes, the apparent cover-up of the nursing home death count, counting thousands at the hospitals that they died in, rather than the facilities at which the virus spread. Then his attempts to intimidate Assemblyman Ron Kim for calling him out strongly on these things. If you agree with that basic sequence of events, how do you see that story is related to your larger critique of Cuomo's governing style and people's acquiescence to him?

Ross Barkan: It's an excellent question. In my book, I look at the year of COVID but I also look at almost political history and how he's governed the state. I think it's very important for listeners to keep in mind that the most powerful figure in New York is not Chuck Schumer, it's not AOC, it's not Bill de Blasio, it's Andrew Cuomo and it's not even close.

Andrew Cuomo has effectively, through the legal means of the governor's office and also through his own cunning and ambition, consolidated power in the state like no one, I would say since Robert Moses. At this point, being governor for a decade that would be fair to say. It's important to start right there. Andrew Cuomo is more powerful than anyone else.

Once COVID hit he was making unilateral decisions. The state legislature had given him enormous emergency powers. He had the ability to override the mayor on literally anything including school closings, though schools are local issues. He was entirely in charge. If you look at certain decisions made, for example, giving sweeping immunity to the nursing homes and the hospitals where even if someone had a medical malpractice case in March of 2020, they could not sue.

That was Cuomo and the hospital lobby deciding we're going to put this into the budget at the very last minute. Over and over again, you see these unilateral decisions being made with very little pushback. In other states, public health officials had a large role in determining the response to the COVID. Something you see, the more you read and study how New York handled this, Howard Zucker, the health officials around Andrew Cuomo, they did not really have any say over what would be done.

This was Andrew Cuomo. This is Melissa DeRosa, his top aide. This was men like Larry Schwartz who have no public health background at all. They're the ones making these decisions. I think when that happens, you get stuff like the nursing home issue, which I'm sure the listeners and the readers know by now, which is that we were undercounting nursing home deaths to a catastrophic degree. There was no reason why other than we wanted to make it look like less people died in nursing homes. Perhaps Andrew Cuomo wanted his book to look a little bit better, the one he got that [unintelligible 00:16:05] for.

Brian Lehrer: Is this a case in your opinion, where the cover-up is worse than the crime? As they said about Watergate, there are defenders of the so-called original sin transferring hospitalized COVID patients back to nursing homes when they were well enough on the grounds that the state had a hospital bed shortage crisis or thought it was heading for one. They saw the images from Italy, people dying or barely living in hospital hallways, and things like that.

Cuomo made a bet on what he thought would be the least horrible of only horrible options, a bet on freeing up more hospital beds, and that the nursing homes could practice COVID hygiene with known positive residents who were recovering. That version would say good intent, bad outcome. Do you accept that at all and in that light is this a case of a cover-up is worse than the crime?

Ross Barkan: I will surprise people and say I'm sympathetic to that view. I don't think Andrew Cuomo created the COVID crisis in nursing homes. You look at states around the country, COVID was a huge issue in nursing homes, and no one really handled it that well, or very few people that. We'll start right there. I understood the state's view that you had to get people back into nursing homes to free up hospital space. I do think they could have used those temporary hospitals that ended up barely being used at the Javits Center at Billie Jean King and other places but I understand that could have been a challenge.

I do recognize that. There was a fear of the shortages, certain hospitals, particularly in Queens were entirely overrun and lacked capacity. That is entirely understandable. The issue is, why were we not counting these transfers as deaths. It would have been very simple to say, if you're a nursing home resident, you get sick with COVID, you die in a hospital, you're a nursing home death. That's how other states did it. We could tabulate the numbers that way and have a very accurate view of what happened in our healthcare facilities because in order to learn from the past and to do better in the future, we need accurate data.

Instead, the administration lies and stonewalls for months and months and months. Last summer, a year ago now, you had journalists, you had think tanks, you had activists, you had legislators demanding, "Give us the full accounting of what happened in these nursing homes." The Cuomo administration refuses is only giving accurate numbers when the state attorney general gets involved and releases the report earlier this year and the death toll is revised dramatically upwards which didn't really surprise a lot of us.

Yes, to an extent the cover-up is worse than the crime because transferring people on their own is not terrible than returning people to nursing homes. Also, Cuomo did not give nursing homes proper PPE and the proper guidance to deal with these people. That's another discussion, but yes, I would say hiding the data is the real issue here and it's what's gotten the federal government involved and the US Attorney in Eastern District. We'll see what that investigation goes

Brian Lehrer: Lucia a physician in Huntington, you're on WNYC with Ross Barkan. Hi, Lucea.

Lucia: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I just wanted to say because I'm a physician, my son's a physician who had COVID and I can't say exactly what my job was because we had strict rules, but I did work in something that was involved with contact tracing peripherally. I feel very strongly that Governor Cuomo, who is not a saint, I was never a fan of his but I think he did a really good job with COVID. Perfect job? No, but really good in terms of educating the public.

I'm just going to jump into the thing about nursing homes because I didn't find anybody reporting this and I read and listened to everything I could. The whole brouhaha of people going back and forth from hospitals to nursing homes has been a hot mess for at least 20 years. It has to do with money and rules and insurance companies and you don't want to lose your bed and blah blah blah blah blah, and I'm not going to get into that.

What I will say is, a lot of the criticism that I don't think it's fair is that people were discharged from hospitals, who've tested positive for COVID because they had had COVID. They were found by doctors who were taking care of them, not to be infectious at the time that they were discharged from the hospitals because if any doctors or nurses or discharge planners, we're not in the business of discharging dangerous people out into the streets or out into nursing homes.

There were new people with new cases of COVID who really needed to be in the hospital. Some of the people who were discharged from hospitals, they were sent to nursing homes, whether they came from nursing homes or not before they got COVID. They were sent to nursing homes because they couldn't be sent to their families homes or if their families lived out of state and we couldn't--

Brian Lehrer: Lucia I'm going to jump in here for time, but you get her point so that we don't take a lot of callers saying similar things in our limited remaining time, I will say, there's a lot of pushback on the phones from people saying one version or another of, "Come on, Cuomo was largely constructive. Cuomo was dealing in very bad circumstances. Cuomo was helpful to my psychological state." All those calls are coming in. What would you say to Lucia, specifically about her comment, and are you getting this reaction to your book in the early going?

Ross Barkan: I would say on the hospital transfer issue, it's definitely complicated. I agree that there wasn't really a clear-cut way to handle it, especially if you're worried about capacity. What I would say is that the real issue is not counting those as nursing home deaths and creating the impression, which was a lie, that not a lot of people died in nursing homes.

If you speak to people, families of those who lost people in nursing homes, you find they have a very different perspective. They feel that they were lied to by the government, they were lied to by Cuomo. I spoke to many family members for my book and for articles where they say, "We were fans of Cuomo and fans of his response to the pandemic and the way he talked on television, but my father, my mother, my sister died in the nursing home. We can't get answers, there's legal immunity, so we can't sue, and those deaths aren't even being counted in a nursing home tally." It's creating this propaganda stick impression that the nursing homes are fine and they were not fine, like other states, they were not fine. That would be my response to that particular call.

Brian Lehrer: In fairness to you, I've gotten those calls too, what you just described from nursing home residents, from survivors of nursing home residents who felt extremely betrayed. Vincent in Nassau County, you're on WNYC with Ross Barkan. Vincent, we've got about 30 seconds for your call. Hi.

Vincent: Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I agree with the guest that President Trump did not handle the issue very well. Governor Cuomo also did not. My daughter is a resident doctor in a city hospital in Brooklyn. When the issue came up of PPE, they were told to wear masks and gloves for days together. I had to scramble all over the country from Texas to California to Philadelphia to get PPE so she could share it with the doctors. It was really handled very badly by him. I think he does get some blame for mishandling it as did President Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Vincent, thank you for your call. Ross, before you go, a couple of minutes on you and Eric Adams, whose work you are clearly critical of as well. Some of your recent article headlines, Eric Adams the Machine Mayor. Eric Adams has no Principles. Why New York City Progressive Should Fear in Eric Adams Mayoralty. Eric Adams and the Weapon of Identity, and Is New York Really Going to Elect Eric Adams. After all that, you and one other journalist who had written critically were denied admission to his primary night party. We just have a couple of minutes, where do you start on a policy level with why you don't like the prospect of Adams as mayor?

Ross Barkan: I don't want to say I don't like the prospect. I've just been writing critically about his political history and what he would mean for the left in particular if he became mayor. What I will say is from a standpoint of my own political views, and what I articulate in my columns is that I worry about Eric Adams's stance toward rent stabilization, in particular at tenant issues. He is very close to the real estate industry, to landlords. He's a landlord himself.

I asked him if he would support future rent freezes at the rent guidelines board. This is the place where a mayor really has the most power to set an agenda. He said quite frankly that, freezing rents on rent-stabilized tenants would be an attack on Black wealth. To me, this was a very cynical use of identity politics to attack the tenant movement, which is largely made up of people of color.

Working-class tenants in the city are Black, they're Latino, they're Asian. These landlords in the city, particularly the big wealthy ones, tend to be white. I worry about him in the sense that I think he is very attuned to issues of race and identity, which is great. He was a voice for police reform for a very long time. I do think he can also cynically weaponize identity to attack pro-tenant progressive movements, and really act as cover for the real estate industry for Wall Street, which will probably be very happy to have a mayor Adams in charge.

Brian Lehrer: Now we have this election where at least on first place in-person votes among Black and brown New Yorkers. According to the results map made by CUNY, Adams won by a lot. Now a variety of articles are being written that say things like there's a certain out of touchiness among some white progressives who think they're acting on behalf of poor and working-class Black and Latino interests in the name of racial justice but aren't actually aligned with what a majority of them want. I'm sure you've seen these. What's your thoughts about that?

Ross Barkan: I myself have actually argued a version of that. I've written skeptically to some extent about the defund movement, though I am sympathetic to it, in the sense that I do believe that working-class Black and Latino people and Asian people want better policing, not no policing. They don't want the police headcount to decrease drastically. I think the Adams people and the campaign itself has a right to say, their views of policing and more in line with what working-class residents in outer borough of New York City want.

That being said, very few working-class residents are calling for weaker tenant protections or a calling for the real estate industry to have a greater say in deciding housing policy in New York City, but that's not really the type of candidate that they were seeing in Eric Adams. Eric Adams, in his defense, was running a very disciplined campaign on public safety on crimes. He didn't talk about housing a whole lot, and not a lot of people are probably familiar with his housing policy.

I think to an extent people who say certain elements of the progressive movement are out of touch, on public safety and policing, yes, because very few of the people who are victims of gun violence or know people who are victims of gun violence, want police to disappear. They want crimes to be solved. I do understand that critique.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly, what's your version of what happened on Primary Night? I think the Adams campaign now says it was a mistake not allowing you and David Freedlander from New York Magazine in. What's your version of what happened and do you think after the publicity it's received that you will have problems with access in the future?

Ross Barkan: The Eric Adams campaign has never contacted me personally to tell me it was a mistake. I think they did that to David Freelander and I like David a lot. Never did that for me, never reached out to me, never apologized. I showed up there on election night. I'd RSVPed. I'm told I'm not on the list. I've been covering election nights now for almost a decade. I have been to not one but two Donald Trump's election night parties in my capacity as a journalist, and each time I was allowed in. Even the president who calls the press the enemy of the people has allowed me to cover an election night party.

I don't know what it pretends quite frankly. I covered the end of Bloomberg. I covered de Blasio, I've covered Cuomo. I would assume I'll be allowed into City Hall. It's a public venue. They have to. Will I be barred from interview opportunities? Maybe. My journalism doesn't rely on access. Whether Eric Adams wants to talk to me or not, has no bearing on how I report. Andrew Cuomo did not talk to me for my book, it did not change how I reported on my book. My attitude is, access is nice, but access is also overrated, and a good journalist can do the job regardless.

Brian Lehrer: Ross Barkan's book is called The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and The Fall of New York. Thank you so much for coming on.

Ross Barkan: Thank you for having me.

 

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