Columbia University came down hard on Andrew Cuomo and Bill DeBlasio on Wednesday night. I only wonder what took them so long. Their report reveals that the Governor and the Mayor dithered in the face of the crisis, and suggests that if they’d acted sooner, they could have saved more than fifteen thousand lives. I was right here in the New York metro in early March, and I can confirm: dithering happened. I believe that Cuomo and DeBlasio feel worse about this than the President does about his own inaction. Right now, though, I’m not too concerned about anybody’s feelings. It’s all the same to me. They can take it up with their psychotherapists if they’d like to.
The Governor and Mayor have excuses at their disposal that the President doesn’t, and they’ve been availing themselves of them. Nothing they’re saying in their own defenses is inaccurate. The state of New York has no central intelligence agency (although I wouldn’t be surprised if one was getting put together right now) and no access to the sort of classified analysis that comes across the desk of the chief executive in Washington each morning. We don’t expect Albany to keep spies in Wuhan. New York received no guidance from the federal government until it was far too late, and even then, the official response was confused and flailing at best. A national crisis plan never came.
None of that gets Cuomo or DeBlasio off the hook. Risk assessment is the chief executive’s primary responsibility. He’s there to cushion the shocks and smooth the path so that the rest of society can function. That’s his main role as a public servant; everything else is secondary. Neither the governor nor the mayor anticipated or managed risks well, and yes, the incoherence of the administration in Washington was, and is, absolutely one of those risks. The governor of New York has had three years to study the Trump White House. He could not have seriously thought that help would be coming in a crisis. The moment he heard about a breakout in China — December 2019, surely — he needed to swing into action. That goes double for DeBlasio, because there are few places on earth as vulnerable to pandemics as the five boroughs. He had to make sure that New York City was supplied and ready.
When the mayor and the governor attempt to reassign blame to the President, they don’t sound all that different than the President does when he tries to reassign blame to the Chinese Communist Party. They’re looking to distract you from the gamble they made — a gamble that has blown up spectacularly in their faces. They knew that a lockdown would damage their popularity, and for a modern public figure, popularity is everything. We already know that the President is willing to chuck everything into the fire in order to ensure his re-election; that’s been established dozens of times over, and only a sucker or a cultist would have expected responsible behavior during a global health crisis. Cuomo and DeBlasio play the statesman better than Trump ever could, but neither passed the guts test. It would have been brutally difficult to put the squeeze on New York in February. We would have hated them for it. But that’s what we elected them for: they’re there to absorb that hate. They’re there to do the right thing, at all times, including times when the right thing is hard to do.
New York is the world’s capital of commerce, and those chosen to lead the city are representatives of the commercial sector as surely as they’re representatives of ordinary residents. I get it, and I understand that neither Cuomo nor DeBlasio wanted to piss off the captains of industry in Manhattan who were, and are, determined to stay open for business. But regardless of whether we measure the bottom line in dollars or human lives, inaction is going to prove much more costly than a heavy hand would have. Cuomo has been discouraging hindsight, as you might imagine he would, and as a chief executive in a time of crisis who is not actively encouraging his constituents to drink Clorox, he’s kept his approval rating high. Nevertheless, just as America leads the world in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, New York leads the nation. Those are rude facts, and they aren’t budging. Eventually, there’s going to have to be a reckoning.