Cuomo's Two Troubles

 Governor Andrew Cuomo is in political trouble this week for a couple of reasons. He sent people with active cases  of Covid back to nursing homes leading  to the infection and deaths of thousands of people, lied about the number of people who died, and got caught in his lie. He also has been accused by several women of groping or sexually harassing them. Some organizations are covering both stories, but many people in the traditional media are reporting on the second story and ignoring the first. Almost all Democrat Party politicians are doing the same.

At first that must seem odd. Boorish remarks toward women and a case or two of unwanted grabbing are bad things, but they are so far less bad than negligently killing people and lying about it as to make them almost irrelevant in judging the man and his fitness to stay in office.  Yet Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media are behaving as though the reverse were true.

I can think of a couple of reasons why. One is the desire to maintain and stick to the theme that Democrat governors and officials uniformly handled the epidemic wisely and effectively while Republicans did not.  Telling the truth about Cuomo’s failure would be implicitly admitting  the story was false and might lead to having to face doubts about the behavior of Newsom, Whitmer, and various others and even to questions about whether some of the decrees and power grabs were necessary or even productive.

Another reason might be simple embarrassment. Throughout the first months of the epidemic Democrat politicians and people in the traditional media treated Cuomo as a hero and near genius for his handling of it. They gave him awards and touted him as the obvious relief pitcher to be held ready to step in as their candidate for president in case Biden’s mental decline became too obvious to hide.   One can see how it might be a little deflating to have to admit what he was and did. It also might make cynical people wonder whether they can trusted to be accurate about anything political.  

Of course both of those guesses make the charitable assumption that they are suppressing the story only for reasons of expediency and not because they  really believe the killing of to them insignificant old people is less an offence than rudely  inconveniencing a few women of a quality and type similar to their own.  There are some cases in which that assumption would be very charitable indeed.