Sunday, May 17, 2020

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.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

At one of his updates Cuomo had the chutzpah to claim NY averted a tragedy. Apparently what happened in NY nursing homes does not rise to the level of tragedy.

what's a blue S? said...

All of which explains why Florida surpassed New York in population in 2015. As a resident of both places (but NY for voting purposes right now) I hope to follow President Trump's lead in changing that as well.

Sam L. said...

Grammar, Stuart! Not "Best"; "Better".

Cuomo vs, DeSantis: Of COURSE the media supports Cuomo.
As I keep saying, I don't know whether the media is/are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the
Dem Party, or it's the other way round, but regardless, the both of them are CLEARLY in cahoots.

Fredrick said...

DeSantis beat Andrew Gillum, who, earlier this year, was found passed out in a hotel room with copious amounts of drugs and two other males not related. The implication is obvious, the press coverage ceased to exist after the first couple of days. Thank goodness for the prior election results. The unemployement system software was contracted out by his predecessor, Rick Scott, now Senator Scott. Florida would have far fewer cases and deaths if New Yorkers, Bostonians, Chicagoans and others from heavily impacted regions not fled down to Florida's South East seabord. I believe the term "#okboomer" made a resurgence down there, along with the ever popular "yankee go home".

DeSantis has been far more effective as governor, certainly much better than the former mayor of Tallahassee, Gillum, would have been. I think a number of local officials - county comissioners, mayors, etc, are going to get a lot more blame for unemployement next election as they are the ones following the left's middle-class destruction playbook and extending beach closures, resauraunt closures and the rest. For example the Keys, locked down (due mostly to fear people from the Miami area would drive down), though there are only 100 cases and 3 deaths YTD. It's destroying quite a few of the local owned small businesses, especially the tourist based ones.

For those interested in details here's a much better link to Florida updates for the curious. There's a second link on that page to an interactive map showing data by county.
https://floridahealthcovid19.gov