They don’t know what they are doing. That’s what President Barack Obama said about U.S. leaders in charge of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. He was giving online speeches at commencement events around the country with discomforting rhetoric, but was nicer than usual. He mentioned no names.
The suspicion is that he mostly had President Donald Trump in mind, but if he were instead indulging in actual analysis, he might have been focused on the multiple, disastrous goofs of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York. Here’s a guy who was outstandingly polished, articulate and forceful in daily TV briefings, what you’d expect from a movie star.
The neglected truth was that when things had started going wrong in New York, so did Cuomo. In early March, when other states began taking action, he didn’t. He did not even promote social-distancing, for instance, and later confessed he did not blow the bugle as soon as he should have. Some argue that his hesitancy cost countless lives as Cuomo maintains that The New York Times should have warned him of what was coming. It did, with a reported 450 stories between Jan. 9 and March 1, although they did not outline his duties.
Cuomo’s missteps were numerous, but here is the most unspeakable horror. Against protests that they were in no way capable of dealing with the influx, Cuomo insisted nursing homes let virus carriers in with especially vulnerable patients, and more than 5,000 have died. When publicity caught up with the death toll, he changed his mind, although insisting that the virus was always sure to take lives. In this case, it had an accomplice.
To be sure, dealing with this kind of once-in-a-century mega-crisis leaves just about everyone prone to mistakes, even including Obama, who, in another speech did mention Trump by name, saying he was “an absolute chaotic disaster.” An Obama theme has been the dangers of divisiveness, and surely he was sowing no discord in this utterance or when he said leaders were just “pretending to be in charge.”