We Shouldn't Have To Say This, but Andrew Cuomo is Absolutely Nothing Like FDR

Sneak Peak: Episode 12 with Matt Taibbi

Liberals spent much of last year pointing to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the COVID-19 emergency as a success story. Following the onset of COVID restrictions across the country, media sites filled with confessions of Cuomo crushes. At the core of Cuomo’s appeal as a hero, their arguments suggested, were things having little to do with fighting material threats to New Yorkers’ lives. Vogue ran an opinion piece “Why We Are Crushing on Andrew Cuomo Right Now,” that singles out the governor as “the closest thing we have to an FDR for our time”:

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 […] I’m comforted by Andrew Cuomo’s 11 a.m. press conferences, which both the local news and national networks are showing. It’s nice to know that someone is governing, that someone is keeping track of the hospital beds and the ventilators and the masks, and keeping the pressure on the federal government.

We know now that Cuomo’s soothing voice and manner on television really belied his gross mishandling of the pandemic. His administration submitted undercounts of nursing home deaths caused by COVID-19, downplaying the pandemic’s severity and placing constituents at risk. Moreover, testimony from six different women shows that the governor abused his power through repeated sexual harassment. Comparing him to FDR brings up face-value similarities between 2020 emergency press conferences and the famous Fireside Chats, but the resemblance stops there. Cuomo’s support of a gutting austerity budget during the early months of the pandemic shows that the only leadership he’s willing to provide to his working-class constituents is performative. Meanwhile, outside of his press conferences, he’s actively working against the interests of New Yorkers, making it harder, not easier, for them to survive this crisis. We can’t believe we have to say this, but Andrew Cuomo is not your friend, and he’s absolutely nothing like FDR.

We’ll have Matt Taibbi on this Friday to talk about Cuomo’s last year in office — how he’s failed his constituents during the pandemic year, how the media has covered his so-called leadership during the pandemic, and what we should learn from the liberal fawning over him. Join us Friday for the video release of our conversation, or Saturday for the audio release on Substack, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.