Who Was the Best Leader: Andrew Cuomo or Ron De Santis?

And now, a few words from Politico, comparing and contrasting the leadership offered by the governors of New York and California. (Via Hot Air, via Maggie’s Farm)

Given the media bias, Cuomo is presented as a great leader, a man who commands his brief and who happily sent coronoavirus patients to nursing homes, the better to reduce New York’s elderly population. As for Gov. De Santis in Florida, the media has portrayed him as a mass murderer, for failing to lock down his state and for opening it prematurely.

Now, Politico reports from Miami:

Good evening, and greetings from Florida, where we feel the need to inform you that it’s not a post-apocalyptic hellscape of coronavirus infection and cadavers stacked like cordwood. That is, Florida just doesn’t look nearly as bad as the national news media and sky-is-falling critics have been predicting for about two months now. But then, the national news media is mostly based in New York and loves to love its Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, about as much as it loves to hate on Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Now, we go to the statistics:

DeSantis looks more right than those who criticized the Sunshine State’s coronavirus response. According to the latest Florida figures, fewer than 2,000 have died, and around 43,000 have been infected. That’s a fraction of the dire predictions made for Florida when spring breakers swarmed the beaches, and those numbers are dwarfed by similarly sized New York, which has seen 12 times more deaths and nearly eight times more infections. (Check out POLITICO’s coronavirus tracker for more.) More people reportedly died in New York nursing homes than in all of Florida.

Thank you, Governor Cuomo!

What does it show? It shows the impact of media propaganda. In today’s divisive media environment anything a Republican does is bad. Anything a Democrat does is good. It’s as simple and as simple-minded as that:

Cuomo also has something else DeSantis doesn’t: a press that defers to him, one that preferred to cover “Florida Morons” at the beach (where it’s relatively hard to get infected) over New Yorkers riding cramped subway cars (where it’s easy to get infected). In fact, people can still ride the subways for most hours of the day in New York, but Miami Beach’s sands remain closed. Maybe things would be different if DeSantis had a brother who worked in cable news and interviewed him for a “sweet moment” in primetime.

It doesn’t mean that Florida has no problems. It doesn’t mean that Trump will easily garner Florida’s electoral votes in the upcoming election.

Florida’s horrendous unemployment compensation system, which can’t handle the volume of claims and, critics charge, was designed to discourage people from getting government help. According to the state’s figures, more than 1.4 million unique unemployment claims have been submitted, but only half have received compensation. DeSantis is trying to get it fixed quickly. He knows that in a state he won by less than half a point two years ago, and one that President Donald Trump won by slightly more than a point in 2016, it’s a political time bomb to have potentially hundreds of thousands of people blaming the party in power for their woes in an election year.