Backed by the New York state flag and Old Glory, Cuomo sounded an inspirational note about the need to transcend politics as usual during this unprecedented crisis. “I’m not going to engage in politics,” he said. “I think it’s counterproductive, and I think it’s anti-American. Forget the politics. Forget the politics. We have a national crisis. We are at war. There is no politics.”
For anyone that has a passing familiarity with Cuomo, however, his call to move past politics for the greater good was worth at least a grim, wheezing chuckle. Cuomo forswearing politics is like a shark loftily intoning against swimming through water. Zero-sum, power-broker politics is what Andrew Cuomo does — indeed, what he excels at — and no pandemic is going to change that.
What Cuomo wanted, he got. Gutting health care, protecting the rich, making it easier to put his constituents in pestilential jails, gaining czar-like powers to unilaterally determine funding — he got it. By threats, by arm-twisting, by brilliant manipulation of the legislature’s disarray, he got it. If it all sounds like an incredibly cynical, anti-democratic exploitation of a crisis to accumulate and exert power, well — that’s politics.
“There is no politics,” Cuomo insisted to his new national audience. Speaking at an online press conference Tuesday night, Assembly Member Latrice Walker, who sponsored the criminal justice reform last year and fought a losing battle to keep in intact, knew better. “The greatest trick that the devil ever pulled,” she said on the legislature floor in the early morning hours, “was to prove to the world that he doesn’t exist.”
