Cuomo critic bashes governor for press conference tirade, book on COVID-19 leadership
An ex-aide to Gov. Cuomo tore into the governor’s fit of pique at a news conference earlier this month — calling him a “snarling attack dog” and mocking his popularity after TV news briefings in the spring when COVID-19 was ravaging New York.
In a biting rebuke posted by the Nation, Alexis Grenell, a Democratic political strategist who used to work for Cuomo when he was New York’s attorney general, said in the wake of a Cuomo’s Emmy award for his COVID-19 briefings that attracted viewers around the country, “St. Andrew, our savior of the spring, is now milking his 15 minutes of fame for an extra 30.”
Grenell lashed into Cuomo for calling a pair of journalists at a Nov. 18 news conference “obnoxious” for asking about New York City’s parents’ confusion about school closures as the coronavirus positivity rate was climbing.
The reporter pressed on: “I’m confused. Parents are still confused as well.”
“They’re not confused,” Cuomo replied, telling a Wall Street Journal writer, “You’re confused! Read the law, and they won’t be confused.” He then snapped at another reporter’s agreement that he too was confused with “I don’t really care what you think. Of course you agree with him, because you’re in the same business with him.”
The bitter exchange was “the Andrew Cuomo New Yorkers know and mostly tolerate, the snarling attack dog...,”Grenell wrote.
Cuomo “undeniably offered a vision of competent, humane government at the height of the crisis,” she wrote. but “this is who he is the rest of the time,” she wrote of the testy blast at reporters.
“Cuomo’s desperately curated image is more than half the reason he’s the dominant player over (Mayor de Blasio),” she wrote, adding Cuomo’s new book on his leadership during the spring wave, American Crisis, was akin to Winston Churchill writing his series about WWII before the war ended.
A spokesman for Cuomo, Rich Azzopardi, brushed aside Grenell’s swipe.
“We’re focused on our pandemic response — which an overwhelming majority of New Yorkers support — not the musings of brand-building political consultants,” he said. “Of course everyone has a right to an opinion as consistently wrong as they may be.”
