Today, Explained - A tale of two governors

Episode Date: February 24, 2021

Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom were hailed for their leadership early on in the pandemic. Now, the former is mired in scandal and the latter is facing a recall campaign. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. Around this time last year, we were starting to hear more about a novel coronavirus. Remember when we still called it the novel coronavirus? A lot of the focus was on Washington state, which had some of the first known cases, but also two of the most populous states in the union, New York and California. The governors of those two states, Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom, got a lot of praise for how they handled the pandemic early on. They both held daily press conferences. It was clear that they both wanted to be president,

but bummer for them, they are both now mired in scandal and facing a recall effort, respectively. On the show today, we're going to try and figure out how that happened, starting with Cuomo. A lot of New Yorkers were sort of enchanted with their governor in the months things got really bad there. He was sharing useful information at his press conferences. People don't know what to believe. And that's why just the facts, ma'am, as they used to say, just give me the facts. He was joking with his brother on CNN.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, I appreciate you coming on the show. I love you. I'm proud of what you're doing. I know you're working hard for your state, but no matter how hard you're working, there's always time to call mom. She wants to hear from you, just so you know. Yeah, I called mom. I called mom just before I came on this show. By the way, she said I was her favorite. Good news is, she said you were her second favorite.

Second favorite son, Christopher. He seemed like he had a handle on this. Andrew Cuomo very quickly becomes extraordinarily popular. His approval rating reaches almost 80%. Ross Barkin, he's a columnist at The Guardian, and Jacobin. He eventually ends up on the cover of national magazines like Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. People call themselves Cuomosexuals. People call themselves Cuomo-sexuals. People call themselves Cuomo-sexuals?

Yes, that was a thing. We're back with Governor Cuomo. Can I say that I am a Cuomo-sexual? I think Trevor Noah might have as well. Everyone should wear Cuomo-sexual in that way. You should love a leader who engages the people and remembers that they're serving the people. I do think a lot of it had to do with Donald Trump. Obviously, the federal response was an abject disaster. And many people were lost and confused and casting about for answers and for

foils. And Cuomo made a good foil to Donald Trump. And for many people in those disorienting early days, he was a source of comfort, appearing every day, spouting facts, even if all these facts did not line up, even if his fame increased in proportion to the amount of people dying in New York State. And you can almost chart the graph, Cuomo popularity to body count in New York. And very quickly, we had more deaths than anywhere else in America. And this was happening as Cuomo was becoming a famous and beloved national figure. How did Andrew Cuomo receive all this attention he was getting during this pandemic? He definitely enjoyed it. I think his staff enjoyed it. You know, his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, was on the cover of Harper's Bazaar.

She was an anonymous bureaucrat, and she was being profiled in the New York Times on the cover of a national magazine. He repeatedly declared, like George Bush, right after the beginning of the Iraq War, mission accomplished. He created a pandemic poster. It's a very strange poster inspired by 19th century political art, which is difficult to describe. And he was actually selling this through the state website. Was it a commemorative coronavirus poster? It was a mountain. It was the COVID mountain. And literally, the mountain is a mountain of death. It was to show how cases went up and then cases went down. So part of the Cuomo narrative was we tamed this

terrible thing, we pushed the cases down, and we saved people's lives. Well, cases were pushed down eventually. That did happen in New York State, but over 40,000 people died. So it was not really a solace to those who lost loved ones. And the other part of that was he published a memoir during the pandemic, American Crisis Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic. And it's going to look very strange in the years to come that a governor in the midst of a terrible crisis published a memoir of the crisis. So it was truly an act of hubris, to say the least. It sounds like it all went to his head a little bit. It absolutely went to his head. He does enjoy the spotlight and he does enjoy being in control. And for most of his tenure

as governor, he was not particularly famous or beloved. And that changed dramatically with the pandemic. And no politician rose from relative obscurity to fame like Andrew Cuomo, where almost everyone across America, if they follow politics in any way, has heard of Andrew Cuomo. That was not true in February of 2020. And there's no doubt he takes some satisfaction in that. When do things start to take a turn for this poster selling, memoir publishing, media basking New York governor? The turn really came with the nursing home scandal. So back in March, Andrew Cuomo had a directive requiring nursing homes to accept patients who'd been discharged from hospitals, even if they might have the coronavirus. Many believed it helped spread the virus in the nursing home facilities.

The controversial March order was quietly deleted from the state's website in May. But the bigger controversy that grew out of that was, how is New York counting nursing home deaths? So New York did something very strange that almost no other state did. I'm not aware of another state that did it this way. Some states not count nursing home deaths at all. New York did. But the way New York did it is if you're a resident of a nursing home, you live there, you got sick with COVID, and then you were very ill, and they called for an ambulance, took you to the hospital, You died the next day at the hospital. Your death was counted as a hospital death, not a nursing home death.

So by counting deaths this way, the nursing home death toll was decreased dramatically in New York. There was a time where there were 40,000 deaths. There were 6,000 deaths in nursing homes. If you looked at those numbers, you went, wow, unlike other states, New York really handled the nursing home issue well. Well, it did not. New York might have undercounted COVID deaths in the state's nursing homes by as much as 50%. Immediately after months of withholding data from state legislators, the Cuomo administration revised the death toll much higher. More than 15,000 people have died in those

facilities during the pandemic. But just a few weeks ago, Cuomo's administration reported only about 8,500 of them, meaning thousands of nursing home residents who died in hospitals were not included in that nursing home tally. And the real crux of the controversy came when Melissa DeRosa, if you remember her, she was on the cover of Harper's Bazaar. She's Cuomo's most powerful aide. She told Democratic members of the state legislature the reason she didn't give the true nursing home death toll was because she was afraid Trump's Department of Justice would investigate her. And in fact, there was a Department of Justice probe. Now, just to confuse you even more, it was reported very recently there is a new

Department of Justice probe out of the Eastern District of New York probing Andrew Cuomo in nursing homes that is unrelated to the probe from last year, as far as we know. Just to be clear here, is there evidence that Andrew Cuomo covered up how many elderly people were dying in nursing homes? There is no direct evidence. What it is, it's circumstantial. And it's based on the fact that there were hearings in August where state legislators were asking very directly, can you tell us how many people died? What is the true death toll? Can you give us those who are transferred from nursing homes to hospitals? tell us the information. The administration said repeatedly, Cuomo's health commissioner, we can't do that. We're tabulating the numbers. We can't do

that. We can't tell you. We can't tell you. Privately, they were conferring with the Department of Justice at the same time, maybe not telling state legislators that was the reason. And this was only revealed very recently that this Department of Justice probe from the summer was allegedly keeping them from giving out the numbers. So I would say there isn't hard, direct evidence of what there is, is there are more questions and answers. Well, Governor Cuomo loves talking to the media, right? Has anyone just asked him about this? Yes, he's been asked about this many times now. He denies there any cover-up. He simply says, like his aide said, well, we kept the numbers back because of Trump's Department of Justice, then we released the numbers. Cuomo has also downplayed the issue entirely by saying,

a third of all deaths in this nation are from nursing homes. New York State, we're only about 28% only, but we're below the national average in number of deaths in nursing homes. But who cares? 33, 28 died in a hospital, died in a nursing home. They died. My answer to that is we need accurate data in order to know for the future, for God forbid, the next pandemic, what happened in order to learn from our mistakes, we need to know how many people died in nursing homes, how many people died in hospitals, how many people died elsewhere. If we don't have good data, we can't draw good conclusions, and we can't prepare for the future.

In my opinion, there is no doubt that the Cuomo administration used data in such a way that created a very misleading picture about what happens in nursing homes. And that is the crux of the problem. Beyond COVID preparedness, what does this say about his leadership? It's not just a premature victory lap with a memoir or downplaying data. Now they're allegations of real bullying and sexual harassment, right? There definitely is a reckoning happening. It's a slow reckoning. It's taken many months. Just by the sheer fact that a lot of governors struggled with containing the pandemic. The federal response was very poor. We know all this. There was never a reason to elevate

any one particular governor over another. There was never a reason to elevate any one particular governor over another. There was never a reason to make Andrew Cuomo a superstar when New York had the second highest death rate in America. Now it has the second highest death toll in America. The numbers don't add up. So I do think a lot of people are just looking at the raw numbers of this. Why is this person celebrated and popular if so many people in his state died? And it's very clear that decisions could have been made to prevent some of this death. So the tenor of the coverage has changed

dramatically. Cuomo was the punchline of a recent SNL skit. Andrew Cuomo, who looks like all three goodfellas at once, said he hopes to legalize marijuana next month. Cuomo is hoping marijuana will provide New Yorkers a safe, effective way to forget about the nursing home stuff. You see CNN and MSNBC are covering the controversy much more. A state assembly member, Ron Kim, went public very recently about the fact that Cuomo threatened to destroy him and his career because he had been very critical in pushing for investigations into the nursing home issue. And Ron Kim went on The View. Cuomo is an abuser.

He has abused his powers. And abusers are cowards. So what I'm saying is the prestige media that once upheld Cuomo and upheld the myth is now beginning to tear it down. I do think that is a big difference, that the CNNs, the MSNBCs of the world, the New York Times,

they're collectively puncturing the Cuomo myth. Cuomo is no longer doing interviews with his brother on CNN. These were interviews that broke every conventional rule journalism, a family member interviewing a family member. And CNN has prohibited him again from interviewing his brother. There had been this prohibition. They took it away because it was such great TV and

theater for Chris Cuomo to interview his brother. That is not happening anymore. So there is a broad reckoning. You're seeing a slow decline in his approval rating and his popularity numbers. I do think that will continue. He was not a very popular governor before the pandemic. And I do expect a slow, gradual return to the place he used to be. And as I recall, Governor Cuomo was just reelected a few years ago. But is there a chance all this could grow to the point where there's an effort to give him the boot like we're seeing in California? There are two ways to hold Cuomo accountable. One is to run a candidate against him and try to beat him. Two is to pressure state

legislators to impeach Cuomo and perhaps convict him and force his removal from office. Both are incredibly challenging. At least one member of the state assembly, Ron Kim, has called for an impeachment. Some state senators have said they would like to see Cuomo impeached. So these numbers have to grow a lot. But the fact that it's even being discussed is such a radical departure from where we were a few weeks ago, where impeachment wasn't a possibility. Ross Barkin is writing a book about Governor Andrew Cuomo. It's called The Prince, Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York. It'll be published this spring. Quick break, and we go to California. California, here we come. you save time and put money back in your pocket.

Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Today explained, Sean Rahm's firm, a tale of two governors. Next up, Governor Gavin Newsom. Political reporter Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times. Well, I think if we take it back to this time a year ago, I think there was so much uncertainty

and there was so much lack of trust generally in what the federal government was telling us that I think state leaders like Gavin Newsom really saw an opportunity to step into the void. Thank you, everybody. I have long believed that the future is not just something to experience. It's something to manifest, that our fate and future is inside of us. It's decisions at the end of the day, not conditions that determine that fate and future. We're not victims of circumstance. We can make decisions to meet moments. This is a moment we need to make

tough decisions. This is a moment where we need some straight talk and we need to tell people the truth. We need to bend the curve in the state of California. And so you had these very regular television briefings that kind of became must-see television for folks here in California because they felt like they needed some reassurance that some government official knew what they were talking about. And I think Newsom really leaned into this idea of, I'm talking to the public health experts. I'm talking to the scientists. We are letting science sort of guide our decision-making. And Newsom has a tendency to sort of talk in jargon. But at the very early stages of this pandemic, I think it actually worked in his favor because I think people heard that and thought, oh, okay, I think this guy knows what he's talking about.

I think he's talking to experts. He seems to be sort of up to date with this very scary, very uncertain situation. And his support across the state, at least in one poll, reaches as high as 64%, which I believe hadn't been seen in California for something like half a century. How does it go from there to a movement to recall him? Well, I think there are a couple of factors here. The first is there was always bubbling beneath the surface a movement to fire him. In fact, there were people who were seeking a recall as soon as he came into office in 2019, but it didn't really go anywhere. And a lot of their messaging had nothing to do with the pandemic, which of course didn't exist at that time. It was things like high housing costs or high rates of homelessness or just sort of general, we don't like this liberal guy. But what you had maybe starting in the summer of 2020

and then really speeding up into the fall and winter was this sense of a pandemic that was dragging on a state that was fairly tough in its restrictions compared to other states in the country. And so therefore, there were a lot of economic repercussions to that. And some real missteps by Newsom himself that sort of exacerbated this frustration among the population. And all of that combined to this real shift in public opinion about him. It felt like the moment the scene started to show was Memorial Day weekend. Is that right? I think that that is a pretty key moment. There was a lot of public back and forth between Newsom and conservative members of the state, conservative politicians,

over two things. The first was outdoor space and specifically beaches. Tens of thousands enjoyed Orange County beaches over the weekend, but today they got an earful from Governor Gavin Newsom, who warned the beach crowds could extend the statewide stay-at-home order for weeks. I cannot impress upon you more to those Californians watching that we can't see the images like we saw, particularly on Saturday in Newport Beach and elsewhere. The second issue was around religious services. And so you saw people who were churchgoers really chafing against the restrictions on

indoor services. Meanwhile, three churches filed a lawsuit against California Governor Gavin Newsom claiming a ban on singing in places of worship to stop the spread of coronavirus violates their First Amendment rights. Other churches are upset over the governor's ban on indoor church services in 30 counties. The U.S. Constitution in the First Amendment, the first of the First Amendment, the first of the Bill of Rights is the free exercise of religion. And that is an inviolable right. Inviolable means there are no exceptions to this, no exceptions whatsoever. And you contrast that with perhaps not speaking out against the mass demonstrations in the wake of George Floyd's death and Black Lives Matter.

And I think some people thought maybe there was a double standard and maybe some mixed messaging there. And the other thing is that Newsom himself has shot himself in the foot a couple of times, I think most famously when he went and had dinner at French Laundry, which is a very fancy restaurant in Napa Valley. New fallout this evening over two photos obtained exclusively by Fox 11 Tuesday night. They showed Governor Gavin Newsom dining at the luxurious French Laundry restaurant in Napa. It was for the birthday dinner of well-known lobbyist Jason Kinney. No masks, no distancing, just hot water. The photos now picked up by media outlets all over. The New York Times, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, Politico, and many others others in a story that has become a national symbol of do as I say, not as I do.

And technically, he wasn't breaking any rules. It was in sort of an outdoor enclosed space that wasn't in violation of what the county's rules. I mean, kinda. You look at the pictures and you're like, it's basically inside. It's real dicey. But here's the problem. Anytime you're a politician and you're saying, technically, I wasn't in violation of the rules, you're already losing. Anytime you're explaining. And so it was the it's the I didn't inhale of of oat restaurant dining. Exactly. It just reinforced the sense that he was putting restrictions on the rest of the state and he wasn't abiding by those own restrictions. And to top it all off,

he's at this wildly expensive dinner. It's not like, oh, they caught him inside a McDonald's. And is this when this recall Gavin Newsom movement sort of kicks off in earnest and has a little more momentum or is it even later? I think that it kicks off in earnest a couple of months before that in the summer is when you saw this current recall

sort of start to gather steam. But I think it had for a while been seen first as a real fringe movement, something that was among grassroots Republican activists and even some folks far to the right of that. People who are perhaps aligned with far right militias. My colleagues at the L.A. Times have reported that there's some sort of anti-vax contingent. At the state capitol today, Oren Heatley is putting up this banner, telling Governor Gavin Newsom he is not welcome here. California is in desperate need of a course correction. Heatley, a retired sheriff's deputy from Yolo County, is trying to remove Newsom from office, blaming him for restricting gun owners' rights and overturning the death penalty.

But first, you saw two things happen at once. You first saw the Republican establishment see this as an opportunity and that kind of moved this more into the mainstream. You started seeing more money, more ability to actually go and set up sites at grocery stores or public locations and so that upped its visibility. Governor Gavin Newsom's foes are lining up to replace him. And even in deep blue California, these Republicans think they can win. They're getting closer.

The recall Newsom campaign says it only needs 200,000 more signatures to get the recall on the ballot this fall. And then you had, I think, frustration among people in Newsom's base, either Democrats or independents. And so it wasn't just a sentiment of Republicans who weren't going to like Newsom anyway, trying to take him down. It felt like it was tapping into more widespread discontent. And I think that that aligned with, honestly, pandemic fatigue. I think that that is just really how you can boil down what a lot of the frustration with Newsom comes down to. This is our dictator in chief right now. This is Gavin Newsom. He thinks he can run this state into the ground and keep kids from learning.

We're here to protest the tyrannical rules that Governor Gavin Newsom has placed on us. He said that we cannot go back to school. He said that we cannot open up the states. He said that we cannot open up the states. He shut down hair salons. He shut down restaurants. And it's just absolutely insane. OK, so Californians across the board are unhappy with Newsom. And unlike in New York, where you'd have to impeach, Californians have this recall tool. How does it work? It's got some quirk. The basic threshold is you need signatures from 12 percent of the voters who voted in the last election. And there needs to be voters from at least five counties in the state.

So the magic number for this recall is just under one and a half million signatures. And collecting those signatures can be pretty costly. But because there was this infusion of cash from big dollar donors, from the Republican Party, that helped efforts quite a bit. And also the pandemic, which sort of ironically is the reason why people are galvanizing around this, also sort of helped their cause because a judge actually extended the deadline to collect those signatures. So proponents now have until March 17th to turn in all of their signatures. They have already turned in a big tranche of those signatures, and we've seen that they have an extremely high validity rate, around 83%. And so that indicates that they are likely on track to meet this threshold. And of course, the last time there was a recall election in California, they ended up with Arnold Schwarzenegger as their governor?

Yeah. 2003, Governor Gray Davis faces this mass discontent mainly around an energy crisis. We had rolling blackouts in the state and it turned into a total circus, right? Because you had not only Gray Davis being recalled, but more than 130 people who ran to replace him. And, you know, you had porn stars, you had child actors, and then you had Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hello, good morning. Arnold, good morning. Hello.

Hi, how are you? I'm here for the papers. Okay. For the recall election on October 7th. Okay. And you know who I am, right? Yes. Yes.

Let's see if you can pronounce my name. Schwarzenegger. Very good. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, of course, had the name recognition. He had some cred in politics already, and he sort of swoops in and takes what is a circus and sort of rides all of this attention to this very unlikely governorship. I will reach out to Republicans, to Democrats and independents, to those who supported the recall and those who did not, those who supported me today and those who did not. I want to reach out to everybody, to young and old, rich and poor,

people of all religions, all colors and all nationalities. I want to be the governor for the people. I want to represent everybody. Is there a chance this could happen again, that Governor Gavin Newsom could get recalled and, I don't know, The Rock is going to be the governor of California now? Look, anything can happen because we're talking about a process that led to Arnold Schwarzenegger being governor 17, 18 years ago. So I'm not going to discount anything. I will say that I think political observers were pretty skeptical of this movement a couple of months ago. I heard a lot of people throwing cold water

on the idea that this was going to go anywhere. They're not saying that anymore. And what we haven't seen yet is a prominent Democrat say, I want to be the Democrat you could choose should Newsom be recalled. If that becomes the case, then I think we're really in a whole new ballgame. How do you think it compares to what we're seeing in New York with Andrew Cuomo? I mean, we talked to Ross about how Cuomo would need to be impeached. They don't have a recall tool out there in New York State. But California does have this tool, and it doesn't even take that many voters to sort of activate this thing that can throw the entire government into flux in the middle of a pandemic.

I think that part of the dynamic you're seeing when you're comparing these two governors is they do have very different public personas. And Cuomo appears, at least from 3,000 miles away, to be a little bit more unapologetic in his stance. He just seems to be a bit more brash. I mean, the guy wrote a book about pandemic management while the pandemic was still going on. And so in some ways, I think he was sort of an obvious target then for criticisms. Newsom hasn't done anything perhaps quite so bold that would open him up to those criticisms. It's not like you could say Newsom took a victory lap before he should have. I don't think anybody can point to that. He just went to dinner. He just had some very fancy wine. My colleague and I wrote a story actually comparing Cuomo and

Newsom back in March 2020, right when this was all starting. And they were sort of, we've had all of their allies calling them America's governors and, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're going great. And, uh, my colleague talked to, to former governor Gray Davis and he, I think pretty presciently said, you know, the inning is not over yet. Um, we are not done with this pandemic. In fact, we had no idea how not done we were. And so it really is a cautionary tale, I think, for any political figure that in a crisis as far reaching and as complicated as this, you can't bank on early approval ratings to carry you all the way through. I think the upside for him, though, is that there's also a possibility for redemption.

If he starts getting the vaccines rolling out quicker, if people feel like economic activity is picking up, perhaps by the time this question really comes to the voters, if it comes to that, people will feel like, oh, I mean, I know we were frustrated, but is it really that bad? Did we really need to recall him? And perhaps people will have a slightly rosier view of his governorship. So nothing is permanent in politics, I think, is the big takeaway. Melanie Mason is the national political correspondent at the Los Angeles Times.

You can find and support her work at latimes.com. you