Questions of Leadership

The Andrew Cuomo Daily Show has become the high ground of coronavirus talk: all kinds of numbers, trend lines, and family feeling, too. The Donald Trump Show has typically been a carnival of rage, boasting, and misinformation: some of his own people want to shut it down. Where else for light and truth? The Congress, you’d expect. But the people’s branch of government has turned its own lights out for the duration. The members have gone home. Joe Biden has a TV studio at home, but the lustre has faded some around the last Democrat standing in the presidential race when it got rained out, virused out, after Super Tuesday.

What’s made the difference from the beginning of Andrew Cuomo’s daily briefings on the Coronavirus has been his relatively calm and competent air with the vast landscape of hospitals, beds, masks, the needs of New York; and then there’s been something extra: the human touch.