Back in November Governor Cuomo was asked point blank about a rumor making the rounds. The rumor was that the state’s official death count was being under counted by half. Cuomo’s response? “I hear people say there’s life on Mars… I hear people say a lot of things, but no, it’s not accurate.” So how could the Governor be so confident, dare I say ‘cocky’, in his denial back in November? Two reasons. One: hubris; cocky is his nature. Two, I think he thought that a Democrat Attorney General would not gut like a fish a fellow Democrat Governor. But gut she did, and the way she did it makes that abundantly clear. It’s not just the WHAT of the report, it’s also the WHEN and the HOW that makes it all so devastating. Consider the following three things:
- She released the report Thursday at 11:00. If she was going to be nice to the Gov and try and cushion the blow a little, wouldn’t she have released it the next day, Friday, at say 3:00? Or if she was being really nice she could’ve waited a week and released it as Super Bowl hype was building. Instead, she made sure that people were paying attention when she put it out, before the noon news on Thursday.
- She didn’t give the Governor a heads up as to what was in the report. Again, if AG James wanted to be nice to Gov Cuomo, she could have given him a heads up as to what she was going to go public with, thereby giving him a chance to get ahead of the story. Instead, the Gov was caught off guard by the report’s release, which left his office scrambling. Hence, the lame response from the Health Commissioner and NO RESPONSE from the Governor that day.
- She didn’t sugar-coat any of this. If James liked Cuomo, she could have very easily presented this info in a more favorable way. “While mistakes were made at many levels, it was the nursing homes who…” or “While some decisions had detrimental results, they were made in good faith…”
Bottom line, the Attorney General had an opportunity to release this report in a very different way. And the Governor’s cockiness and arrogance gives us reason to believe he was expecting that she would do just that. On this he was sorely mistaken however, and she crushed him. You might say the AG’s report was tough on him, dare I say “New York Tough.”
And by the way, on behalf of all New Yorkers not named Andrew Cuomo, let me just say, “thank you Attorney General Letitia James” for doing it the way you did.