Andrew Cuomo's leadership in the face of the coronavirus has earned national attention—the culmination of a life in the political spotlight. New York’s governor takes V.F. into his pandemic playbook, which must also contend with an unpredictable president.
As Andrew Cuomo was apprenticing with Clinton in Washington, his father’s political career was ebbing in Albany. Mario Cuomo had become a liberal hero and a national political star in 1984, delivering a Democratic National Convention speech that was a searing indictment of President Ronald Reagan wrapped in soaring, poetic rhetoric.
Cuomo and the new governor, Eliot Spitzer, quickly clashed. A Cuomo investigation concluded the Spitzer administration had tried to smear a top Republican legislator. Then, after Spitzer resigned in a prostitution scandal, Cuomo pursued ethics investigations of his replacement, David Paterson. A Paterson aide once told me that the governor felt as if Cuomo was lurking beneath the floorboards of the executive mansion, holding a saw.
“I believe Andrew has done about as good a job as any one individual who was cast into a leadership role in a time of crisis has done in the past 100 years,” says Ben Barnes, a Texas Democrat and well-connected fundraiser for the national party. Lately Barnes has been lobbying Biden’s team to bring in Cuomo as campaign chairman.
Cara Kennedy Cuomo, Michaela Kennedy Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, and Mariah Kennedy Cuomo on Thanksgiving in Puerto Rico 2019.This Thursday morning in March he wakes up in the same bedroom where his father slept for 12 years as governor. Cuomo walks out of the mansion and sits behind the wheel of his blue 1968 Pontiac GTO convertible, a car he meticulously rebuilt, and drives himself through the pre-dawn darkness to the state capitol.
Cuomo’s case for his choice of timing involves the art of politics just as much as the science of epidemiology. “You cannot move until people understand they have to move. You can’t proclaim anything here. All I have is moral suasion. That is hard on a mass basis,” he tells me. “You know, it’s an unsophisticated analysis: ‘If you proclaim it is so, they will do it.’ No, that’s not how any democracy works. There is no king. And it’s especially not how New York works.
From left, Mario and Andrew Cuomo at Andrew's birthday party in New York City, December 19, 1994; Cuomo and his wife Kerry holding their newborn twins Mariah and Cara in their Washington home; Cuomo urges passage of sensible gun legislation in Washington D.C., September 5, 2000. For all his attempts to influence Trump quietly, Cuomo surely understands that appearing on television is the best way to truly get through to the president. He has walked a tricky line—knocking Trump one day for stalling on invoking the Defense Production Act to manufacture more ventilators, thanking him the next for sending the USNSto supplement the city’s supply of hospital beds.
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