Emmy award-winning New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced last night that he will be adding the Edward M. Kennedy Institute Award for Inspired Leadership to his trophy case.
That Cuomo has been a caustic, ineffective, self-interested, and all-around dismal leader during the pandemic is well-established by this point, but bestowing upon him an honor named after Ted Kennedy is a bit on the nose if you ask me.
Some of the biographical parallels between Cuomo and Kennedy are obvious, and none of them are particularly flattering to either man. They both owe their respective careers to their last names, for example. And those who trusted either man — personally or politically — have been let down, usually as a result of their characteristic recklessness. For now, though, I’d like to zero in on their shared penchant for boosting conspiracy theories that they deem politically beneficial.
In perhaps the most shameful episode of Kennedy’s political career, he took to the Senate floor to smear Robert Bork, President Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court, suggesting that:
Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizen’s doors on midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the government, and the door of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens.
This falsehood-laden meltdown was overwrought and despicable, but ultimately proved effective, as the Democrats’ scorched-earth campaign against Bork succeeded.
Cuomo is no stranger to demagoguery himself. Recall that about a month ago, on November 9, Cuomo reacted to the news that Pfizer’s coronavirus vaccine had reached 90 percent efficacy in clinical trials (it now stands at around 95 percent) and would be ready for distribution soon rather strangely for a man who has presided over the worst response to the virus in the country. Calling it “bad news” that the vaccine would come to market prior to Joe Biden’s becoming president, Cuomo blasted the Trump administration’s distribution plan.
Even the stunning suggestion that he’d prefer the vaccine’s arrival be delayed by a couple months was a step up from prior Cuomo rhetoric, though. In mid-October, he declared that he was going “to put together our own group of doctors and medical experts to review the vaccine and the efficacy and the protocol, and if they say it’s safe, I’ll go to the people of New York and I will say it’s safe with that credibility” because he predicted that with Trump as president, “all across the country, you are going to need someone other than this FDA and this CDC saying it’s safe.”
He did this not because he had evidence that corners were being cut on safety standards — they weren’t — but because he wanted to kick dust up in the air and score points with his progressive base. Words have consequences, though, and if there is a cohort to blame for distrust in the vaccine, it’s Andrew Cuomo’s. Of course, now that the vaccine’s distribution is imminent, he has abandoned his politically motivated skepticism.
It’s been frustrating to watch Cuomo accumulate accolades and make a quick buck off his prematurely written book about the pandemic while his constituents continued to suffer, as they still do. But this latest one is at least fitting; Andrew Cuomo is indeed a student of the Ted Kennedy school of leadership.