American Crisis

by Andrew Cuomo

  JUNE 2 | 1,329 NEW CASES | 3,121 HOSPITALIZED | 58 DEATHS

  “Rightful outrage.”

  I LOVE TO BE ON THE water, the ocean in particular. Its vastness and power simultaneously relax and excite me. I’ve taken small boats from Washington, D.C., to New York and around Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard. Some of my adventures have been quite foolhardy. There is nothing quite as intimidating as being in a storm at night in a small boat and looking at a wave you know could crush you in an instant.

  That morning, after being briefed by my team on the violence and mass looting that occurred the night before in New York City, I was reminded of a scene from The Perfect Storm. In that movie, George Clooney plays the captain of a fishing boat. No, I do not think I am George Clooney; I am a realist. The captain decides to try to sail through a terrible storm to get back to dock to sell his fish. After fighting the storm for what seems like an eternity, the captain decides that he can’t make it through and turns around to head out to calmer water on the other side. There comes a point where he has to concede he’s in trouble. “She’s not going to let us out,” he says of the storm. In that moment on that day, that’s how I felt.

  Just weeks earlier, New York City was the global hot spot for COVID. Now, after so much progress controlling the virus and days before the reopening started, the city was descending into chaos. It started with people throwing bricks at NYPD cars. The next day the looting began. I supported the protests, but these were not protesters; they were criminals. The looting was nakedly opportunistic. The streets were empty, and while the police worked to manage the protests, looters smashed glass doors and ransacked businesses small and large, from mom-and-pop stores in the Bronx to the iconic Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square. Watching the criminal activity and chaos was like a kick in the stomach. I feared what it meant for our economic reopening and our work to control COVID—just as we’d started to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

  While New York City had it the worst, the violence and rioting spread to other cities in the state: Buffalo, Rochester, and Albany, where people burned down the Capital City Rescue Mission, which provides food and services to the homeless.

  The looting could not go unanswered. We had been through too much and made so much progress, I would not let these criminals threaten all that we had accomplished. Mayor de Blasio didn’t have enough of his police force deployed to control what was happening. Mayors in other cities around the state had requested assistance from the state police, but Mayor de Blasio did not. And the violence and destruction continued. I issued an ultimatum: Either he had to empower the police force to do their job, deploying all available personnel, or, I said, “my option is to displace the mayor of New York City and bring in the National Guard as the governor in a state of emergency and basically take over.” That night, the full NYPD was out in full force. Peaceful protests continued, and looting began to dramatically subside.

  JUNE 12 | 822 NEW CASES | 1,898 HOSPITALIZED | 42 DEATHS

  “We’ve gotten to a place where people think talking is enough. Talking is not enough. Being angry is not enough. Being emotional is not enough. How do you transition that to action and change and results? And that’s what we’re doing here today.”

  AT THE BRIEFING WITH ME that day I had several extra-special guests: Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr; Sean Bell’s mother, Valerie Bell; my second mother for many years and president of the NAACP, Hazel Dukes; and the Reverend Al Sharpton. I was also joined by senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and assembly Speaker Carl Heastie. Gwen Carr and Valerie Bell were two women who had lost their sons to police violence. Because of COVID, we had to limit who could be present in the room, so these two mothers were there representing every mother who lost her child to police violence.

  From the start, I said I stand with the Black Lives Matter protesters, who continued to march since the death of George Floyd. But I had been unequivocal that we needed to translate protests into meaningful action. And New York acted most quickly, with the legislature enacting a nation-leading police reform law that I had proposed: the “Say Their Name” Reform agenda. It included a choke-hold ban, transparency measures, and other important law enforcement reforms. In addition, I signed an executive order that put forward a clear plan to fundamentally restructure the police-community relationship across New York State. It required all five hundred police departments in New York State to work with local governments to come up with a restructuring plan by April 1, 2021, or they would lose state funding. It was the most aggressive legal action taken in the nation, and l was proud to sign this package of bills into law with the legislative leaders, Al Sharpton, Hazel Dukes, and the two mothers by my side.

  As the Reverend Al Sharpton has said, we need demonstration, legislation, and reconciliation. You hold demonstrations to generate public support; you pass legislation to make change; and only then can you proceed to reconciliation. At the end of the day, the politicians don’t lead; the people do. New York State had seen and heard the people, and it was a moment for fundamental change to the system.

  When it was Reverend Sharpton’s turn to speak that day, he said, “Twenty years ago, when I called a march in Washington on the anniversary of the March on Washington and Coretta Scott King presided over that march—the widow of Martin Luther King—the only member of President Clinton’s cabinet that would come to the march was Andrew Cuomo, and he stood with me when I was much fatter and much more controversial.”

  I have known Al Sharpton all of my adult life.

  We first met when the legendary columnist Jack Newfield at The Village Voice (back when the Voice was really something) took Sharpton and me out to lunch at this little Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan. He said, “You guys are going to be around for a long time; you should get to know each other.”

  As we’re taking our seats, Newfield said, “This is the restaurant that inspired Billy Joel’s ‘A bottle of red, a bottle of white.’ ”

  Sharpton and I were both in our twenties, and to us Newfield seemed like an old man. He was probably forty. Sharpton thought he was a wise guy, and I thought I was a wise guy. We looked at each other like “Sure it is. What a line of crap.” This couldn’t possibly be the restaurant.

  Thirty years later, Billy Joel invited me to his birthday party. It was in the back room of a little Italian restaurant called Il Cortile. When I walked in, I said, “This place looks familiar. I don’t know why.” The owner comes up to me and says, “You were here before, with Al Sharpton and Jack Newfield.”

  I had a great laugh with Sharpton about it when I told him. And Newfield was right when he introduced us; we’d been around a long time.

  Thinking back on the forty years since Sharpton and I met at the restaurant that day, I felt it was fitting that we were together on this historic occasion when New York took a giant step toward addressing racial injustice.

  JUNE 15 | 620 NEW CASES | 1,608 HOSPITALIZED | 25 DEATHS

  “When we were talking about a curve—I never saw a curve. I saw a mountain. That’s what I saw. I saw a mountain that we had to scale and we didn’t know where the top was.”

  IT SEEMS THAT EVERY DAY I tell people not to get cocky about this pandemic, and every day they get cockier. Sometimes I had the same level of success communicating in the briefings that I have communicating at home with my daughters: Everyone thinks they know better. The growing accomplishments in our war against COVID were causing people to get more confident. After months of home quarantine, people were desperate to get out of the house. The warm weather and small apartments increased their desire for freedom. There were scenes from across New York of large congregations in front of bars, in parks, and on street corners. The prime responsibility of local governments during the pandemic was to enforce compliance of the reopening rules. The state workforce did not have enough police or health officials to cover the entire state if the local governmen
ts did not do their job.

  Upstate had just moved into phase 3, while downstate areas outside New York City were in phase 2. Restaurants and bars were supposed to allow takeout alcohol and outdoor dining, but it was clear from pictures and videos that the rules were being violated across the state. I had dozens of conversations with local officials pushing them to enforce the rules, but they just yessed me to death on the phone and then did nothing. Why did they cave to the fear of local politics when they knew the consequences? I said to them: If the virus spread goes up, we will have to roll back the reopening in your region, and then people will blame the local politicians as well as me and that is a worse situation than making them comply with the law.

  But they either didn’t want to get it or couldn’t get it. They were being “politicians.” I remember an incident when I was a teenager and my father was serving as the secretary of state in Governor Hugh Carey’s administration. We were in a delicatessen picking up some food and chatting with some people in the store when someone referred to my father as a “politician.” My father really got his back up, as if the man had called him a son of a bitch. When we got back in the car, I made the mistake of pushing the point.

  “Dad, you are a politician.”

  He got crazed again.

  “How can you be a part of a system that you despise?”

  It’s not logical and it is counterintuitive, but I understand it now. I am part of the system because I want to change the system; you need to be part of the system to be most effective in changing it. But don’t ever suggest that I am part of the failure in the system. In my father’s worldview, “politicians” are responsible for the failure in the system. “Politicians” are politically motivated individuals without professionalism or integrity. They say what people want to hear without doing what needs to be done. I consider myself a counter-politician. That may sound like a nuanced difference, but to me it’s all the difference in the world.

  JUNE 18 | 618 NEW CASES | 1,358 HOSPITALIZED | 29 DEATHS

  “Wake up, America!”

  IN THIS CRISIS I THOUGHT we had seen it all and faced every possible issue imaginable, but in New York City the problems were compounding rapidly. In addition to continuing protests and tensions with the NYPD, the city was experiencing a rising crime rate. The decline of the city was palpable.

  We had a similar situation post-9/11. Many people felt being in the city itself was dangerous. The fear was that the city would always be a terrorist target. It took months for people to return to downtown Manhattan, the site of the former twin towers. But this was even worse. People who had alternatives left the city. We had closed down businesses, and large congregations would not be allowed for some time. The assets of living in the city include the great restaurants, museums, Broadway shows, events, and conventions. Without them, many people decided they would move out to Long Island or up to the Hudson valley or east to Connecticut and wait to see what happened. Depending on how the situation develops, they might never return.

  We had seen people with means flee disaster areas before. In Hurricane Katrina, the people who could have fled New Orleans were gone by the time the hurricane hit. The people who were left behind were largely people without alternatives or resources. Often the people who needed to be rescued from rooftops were people in public housing. During COVID, the New Yorkers who fled were wealthy. They had second homes or had the disposable income to rent them now. Getting them back post-COVID would be one challenge. Getting them back post-COVID with no restaurants and no theater or other entertainment, and with increased crime and widespread dysfunction, would be an even more difficult proposition.

  This was a dangerous situation. Wealthy New Yorkers are the overwhelming majority of the city’s tax base. About 1 percent of people pay nearly 50 percent of the taxes. If they did not move back, there would be serious economic consequences. If they adapted to working from home, the residential and commercial real estate markets would suffer. If they did not frequent the retail stores, the business environment would continue to suffer.

  There’s no silver bullet. I said we were going to accelerate the Reimagine New York Commission to revitalize the economy. We’ll start with some large public works that show a different future, a brighter future for New York, to give the private sector some confidence that New York City has a long-term survivability and viability.

  * * *

  —

  MY RELATIONSHIP WITH the New York City mayor had always been problematic, to use a word. The New York City tabloids loved the drama and never really covered the substance of our relationship. First, there’s always a tension between the mayor and the governor. It goes back to Rockefeller and Mayor Lindsay, my father and Ed Koch, Pataki and Mayor Giuliani. It is almost inherent in the relationship. It is like the natural distrust with in-laws. New York City mayors have always bristled at their lack of authority and autonomy. Almost all major actions require state approval. The state is responsible for all major financial decisions: public transportation, tax increases, education. The city is the creature of state law, and state law governs. The mayor really has exclusive control only of fire, sanitation, and police. This is true with every city in the state, but New York City mayors have always found it more annoying because New York City is an enormous international city. I understand the tension because I, as governor, am subject to the federal government and its superseding jurisdiction, as well as the political whims of President Trump, and that is truly infuriating.

  My relationship with Mayor Bill de Blasio is even more complicated. I’ve known him for many years, and we were personal friends. One of de Blasio’s first jobs was working for me at the Department of Housing and Urban Development when I was secretary and he was a regional representative for New York. But now there are real issues between us. It isn’t personal; it’s philosophical, as they say.

  At sixty-two years old, I am watching the clock, and I know that Democrats have to score more points, more quickly, if we are to win the game, and I am more convinced that we must win the game if America is to survive. After a lifetime in the crusade and frustrated with our lack of progress and the insanity and pain of a Trump administration, I am out of patience. And I think this country is out of patience. So for me, the philosophical question now is, how do we win?

  My priority is to make sure Democrats are doing everything we need to do to be successful and to minimize our own vulnerabilities. My philosophical issue is with Democrats who make promises and too often fail to perform and set back our progress. We need a dramatic reboot, and it must start with blunt honesty and a clear philosophy. I now call myself a progressive Democrat. That’s because nobody uses the word “liberal” anymore, because “liberal” became a dirty word, so the Democratic Party chose a new label.

  But what does the term “progressive” mean? “Progressive” is not a new label. It goes back to the early 1900s. FDR and Al Smith ran as progressives. In modern usage, the term “progressive” is vague and also overused. So I distinguish between “real progressives” and “faux progressives.” A real progressive advocates, achieves, and implements intelligent change on an expedited basis. Real progressives advocate for principles that are feasible, constructive, and intelligent. To be a successful real progressive official, you need to actually achieve progress: accomplishments matter. You can’t just say you are a black belt in karate. You have to achieve it. My definition of “faux progressives” is officials who believe being a progressive is merely a function of advocacy and posturing. Faux-progressive officials advocate but never accomplish. Faux progressives frustrate the public by raising false expectations and by failing to improve matters. Faux progressives actually hinder the progressive movement and aid the conservative movement by reinforcing public cynicism that government change never happens and positive results are never the outcome. Conservatives win when government fails to make positive change.

  Let me explai
n. Most Americans would agree with progressive aspirations. They agreed with FDR’s and JFK’s and Mario Cuomo’s visions. But they would also agree with the conservatives’ emphasis on reality, feasibility, and practicality. This tension leaves the American people essentially saying, “Yes, I would like to do these good things, but I have doubts about whether government can actually achieve them.”

  My model of real progressivism is to affirm the aspiration and prove it can be achieved—to show government can work to realize the aspirational goals we seek:

  Government can pass a law allowing same-sex couples to marry without interfering with anyone else’s individual rights.

  Government can raise the minimum wage without hurting the economy for anyone else.

  Government can build affordable housing without destroying the neighborhood.

  Government can take on large construction projects and complete them on time and on budget.

  Government can build bridges and airports and roads and convention centers.

  Government can achieve our aspirations both in theory and in practice.

  I believe once progressives demonstrate that capacity, they will vindicate the optimism of the American people, and the potential to do good will be unlimited. But they must address the skepticism that conservatives have firmly planted in the American psyche. Progressives must show government can work to improve their lives.

  Every day conservatives say, “No we can’t,” and every day I say, “Yes we can.”

  On a principled level I resent people who enter government without either the intention or the capacity to make it work and do good things. For me, people who affirm the conservatives’ argument are aiding the opposition. I have little patience for people who disrespect the profession. It’s much the same way that a professional ballplayer disrespects another player who gets caught gambling on his own game. Or a police officer disrespects a cop who violates someone’s civil rights. Or a finance professional disrespects a broker who is found to do insider trading. Or a clergy member disrespects another clergy member who abuses his position. When government officials disrespect their office, it affirms the negative stereotype that I and so many others have been working to overcome.