Our current pandemic crisis has produced two fundamental failures of leadership as demonstrated by Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. While there has certainly been other highly publicized leadership failures during the pandemic these two leaders represent two particular types of failures whose shortcomings are simultaneously in the limelight and are treated by numerous news networks as morally equivalent, although they are not.
Upfront both Cuomo and Cruz are considered by many to be self-righteous moralizing prigs acting superior to others (but I repeat myself) and thus are unpopular by not only folks in the opposition parties but also by many in their own camps. Let’s examine each man and his failure in turn.
Governor Cuomo ordered nursing homes in his state to take in COVID-infected senior adults and as a result, thousands died. In defending himself, Cuomo has presented himself as cold and callous offering no public apologies to the families of the deceased. But that is not his primary problem. Other governors did the same, but they are not facing the intense scrutiny as is Cuomo.
Cuomo has two major problems- one criminal and the other personal hubris. The Cuomo administration allegedly hid the death statistics from the Federal government and if true, that’s a crime. Either way, his political career is probably dead. Cuomo’ s hubris stems from his self-congratulatory book and from his widely covered news briefings. This hubris together with the cover-up makes him appear a fraud. In addition, he has been accused by a former aide of sexual harassment.
Senator Cruz, on the other hand, did not cause anyone’s death nor was there a cover-up. However, his decision to go on a family vacation in Mexico while his state suffered from a severe winter storm and a lack of running water and heating fuel, demonstrated he was completely tone-deaf to the calamity in Texas. Granted, Cruz as a federal legislator was not in charge of relief efforts in his state but as a leader he needed to be with his fellow Texans amid their sufferings.
Cruz was also tone-deaf with his advisers and friends. Surely at least one of them told him his vacation at this time was perhaps not a good idea. And, if no one did, it is perhaps time for Cruz to seek out new advisers and friends. To his credit, he soon realized his error and came back to Texas the next day, apologized, and aided in the relief.
Both Cuomo and Cruz violated the trust people had placed in them. And trust is the glue that holds us together as a constitutional republic. But there is no moral equivalency between their actions. To make believe there is some kind of equivalency is intellectual laziness at best and moral cloudiness (or bankruptcy) at worst.