Image Credits: AP.
For someone who graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in history, Washington Post columnist James Hohmann sure has an… interesting sense of history when it comes to liberals and New York governor Andrew Cuomo:
But in the grip of the pandemic Democrats needed a hero who seemed to combine the caring and competence that Trump was incapable of providing.
Cuomo was not their first false god. In a quest for anti-Trump heroes over the past four years, liberals embraced an array of other characters, vastly different in nature but none ideally suited to the task of serving as national savior from Trump. For a while, they pinned their hopes on the buttoned-up special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Stormy Daniels’s attorney Michael Avenatti, Mueller’s high-flying antithesis, was, incredibly, talked about seriously as a potential presidential candidate for a few months. They were searching for someone to fill the void.
Then came the pandemic, and with it, Cuomo.
When I read this column, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh out loud or drink bleach. So let’s get one thing straight: Hohmann is re-writing history, and doing so badly.
Hohmann wants us to believe that, before Covid-19, Cuomo was just BELOVED by progressives (and not-so-progressive) Democrats. He was always so RESPONSIVE and SUPPORTIVE of Democratic priorities. He NEVER EVER stabbed his own party in the back (and frequently right in the guts) to the benefit of Republicans. We just loved him.
Oh, wait. That’s in the Upside Down.
Hohmann is either the world’s worst fact checker, or he’s a liar with an axe to grind. In the reality-based community, before Covid-19 randy-Andy was roundly despised and loathed by Democrats for the very reasons Hohmann lists—he just pretends that this wasn’t an issue for NY Democrats, liberals, and progressives at the time. Cuomo has a LONG history of screwing his own party over in Albany. My understanding is he played a big role in the MTA fiasco, although that is not my expertise. He’s been known as a bully for the longest time, and before Covid activists at Daily Kos identified him as “the single biggest obstacle to moving New York in a more progressive direction”.
Now, will I give Cuomo credit for being a reassuring presence during his Covid-19 press conferences? You bet I will—but that was largely because he was a foil to a flailing maniac that told preposterous lies, and suggested people inject bleach or shove UV lights up their butts to cure a deadly disease. Also, too, that wasn’t just liberals: as the election demonstrated, plenty of 2016 Trump voters turned their backs on him in 2020, because of how badly the Orange Menace handled the Covid pandemic. I suppose those Independent and Republican voters were secretly liberals and progressives, James?
Hohmann claims to be “a historian by training.” What was his specialty, whitewashing the past?
