Miranda Devine: Once-popular Andrew Cuomo is facing sex assault allegations
Andrew Cuomo rose to fame during the height of COVID-19 with colourful daily briefings, but now he has been exposed as a callous and incompetent lech, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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It’s harder to be an effective leader in modern times because we all seem to have lost sight of what’s important.
Instead of judging leadership by outcomes and results, by deeds not words, we focus on the superficial, the 30-second TV soundbite, the 280-character tweets.
Showboating and fakery is rewarded, as long as it bows to the woke narrative.
Thus it is that a callous, incompetent lech like New York governor Andrew Cuomo was held up as the paragon of pandemic leadership last year, an international superstar whose daily briefings won him an actual Emmy, a seven-figure book contract and a legion of swooning female fans, dubbed Cuomosexuals.
In reality, the three-term governor botched New York’s pandemic response from Day 1 and presided over the nation’s second highest death toll.
He refused to listen to health experts, and even the clownish Mayor Bill de Blasio, who were begging him to close down the city in the first weeks of March.
He forced ill-equipped nursing homes to accept COVID-infected patients at the height of the pandemic last March. The result was more than 15,000 deaths of elderly people at a time when beds were going empty in the temporary hospitals the Trump administration had provided for New York, the USNS Comfort hospital ship and the Army field hospital at the Javits Center.
Cuomo didn’t want Donald Trump to get any credit, of course.
What’s more, he profited from the very hospital industry organisations that had lobbied for his lethal nursing home policy and then bought TV ads whitewashing his culpability.
He covered up the numbers of nursing home deaths, refused to meet with grieving families and had his staffers lie to federal and state legislators who were looking for answers.
He also allegedly is a serial sexual harasser, according to five women who have emerged in the last two weeks complaining of unwanted touches, unsolicited kisses on the lips and humiliating sexual innuendo.
Some were staffers as young as 22.
This is the man President Joe Biden praised as the “gold standard” of leadership and who the Democratic party was grooming as a future president.
While Cuomo was a bungling fool in deed and action, he put on a good show of pretending to be on top of his brief.
Ratings were through the roof for his daily televised coronavirus briefings in which he pointed to charts, recited death tolls and shared his meatball recipes, with a thick GoodFellas accent.
He suddenly was catapulted by a sycophantic media into the most admired politician in the country, if not the world.
The newly single 63-year-old Cuomo became the unlikely sex symbol known as “the Luv Guv”.
While people were still dying like flies in New York’s second virus wave, he was promoting his memoir boasting about what a great job he had done handling the pandemic.
He was the same incompetent bully that he had always been, but the accolades went to his head.
All that mattered was that he made Donald Trump look bad by contrast at his White House rambling, combative coronavirus briefings which usually were aired a couple of hours after Cuomo finished.
The seeds for Trump’s election defeat were sown then, when the president’s loose language and jarring optimism failed to provide the reassurance many voters craved.
Yet, behind the scenes, Trump actually was following expert advice and making more good decisions than bad, especially with Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development of vaccines in record time.
There was wall-to-wall media coverage of Trump’s missteps, but barely a critical word about Cuomo.
The New York Post was one of the few outlets to report on the nursing home scandal back in April.
But, just as happened with the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and the appalling grift and alleged pedophile abuse of the Never-Trumper Lincoln Project, it took until after the election for the rest of the media to catch up.
It goes to prove that, if you rely on the New York Times or CNN for your news, you will always be the last to know.
The reality was that Cuomo was the opposite of a good leader.
He was an incompetent, autocratic bully with consistently bad judgment, who projected supreme self-assuredness.
He never showed remorse or regret for his deadly mistakes and still refuses to resign, even though members of his own party are condemning and investigating him.
The Cuomosexuals now admit they were suffering from Stockholm Syndrome when they fell in love with the “Luv Gov” fakery last year but it’s too late.
The damage is done. We get the leaders we deserve.
Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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