Politico says New York Gov. Cuomo's 'coronavirus halo begins to fade'

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Politico took aim at Democrat New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a report Friday, saying his "coronavirus halo" has begun to "fade."

"Two and a half months into the crisis, Cuomo’s take-charge attitude has begun to soften," Politico reporters Anna Gronewold and Erin Durkin wrote. "The governor, who gained legions of fans for his briefings that blended an authoritative tone with a personal touch, is increasingly on the defensive -- and casting blame on the federal government and its guidance."

Cuomo has been under increasing scrutiny for the controversial nursing home policy implemented in March that critics say is responsible for thousands of deaths among senior citizens in the state.

"Gone is the split-screen Cuomo often shared with President Donald Trump early in the outbreak," the Politico piece continued. "Now, Cuomo is still briefing daily, though in not as big of a national spotlight, while Trump has shied away from the podium."

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Democrat state Assemblyman Ron Kim slammed the governor, who said in the early weeks of the pandemic that the "buck" stops with him.

“It’s ludicrous. You can’t one day say you can blame me and the buck stops with me, and the next day pass the buck to anyone besides yourself," Kim told Politico, while Cuomo's secretary Melissa DeRosa said: "We will take our responsibility; we embrace it."

Cuomo's March 25 order required nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients. Then, on May 10, Cuomo issued a new directive stating that hospitals cannot send patients back to nursing homes in the state unless they tested negative for the virus. The move appeared to largely invalidate the March 25 directive.

However, senior Cuomo communications director Peter Ajemian has insisted in an email to Fox News that it was "not accurate" to state that Cuomo had "reversed" the March 25 order. "He didn't reverse or rescind anything," Ajemian wrote at the time. "The order is still in effect," adding that Cuomo "did add a directive."

When confronted about the nursing home policy, Cuomo placed blame on the Trump administration, saying: "The state followed President Trump's CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidance."

"New York followed the president's agencies' guidance," Cuomo said during a press conference Saturday. "... What New York did was follow what the Republican Administration said to do. That's not my attempt to politicize it. It's my attempt to depoliticize it. So don't criticize the state for following the president's policy."

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However, New York State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Democrat from Manhattan who has called for an independent investigation into the more than 5,700 nursing home deaths, isn't buying it.

“The federal government never told New York to tolerate low staffing levels in nursing homes or to have a lax or understaffed enforcement of health and safety safeguards in nursing homes,” Gottfried told Politico. “The executive branch -- going back decades — has done that all by itself.”

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Earlier this month, Politico had some choice words for the naysayers in the mainstream media who blasted Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for reopening his state.

In its coronavirus newsletter, Politico reporters Marc Caputo and Renuka Rayasam said Florida was "not a post-apocalyptic hellscape of coronavirus infection and cadavers stacked like cordwood," and that the media's treatment of DeSantis was much harsher than its treatment of Cuomo.

"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," they wrote. "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."

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Caputo and Rayasam said "DeSantis looks more right than those who criticized" his decision to slowly reopen the state, pointing to the fewer than 2,000 dead and the roughly 43,000 statewide cases, which was "a fraction of the dire predictions" that were previously made, also noting that Florida's coronavirus numbers are "dwarfed" by New York's and that "more people reportedly died in New York nursing homes than in all of Florida."

"DeSantis is actually polling worse than Cuomo in their respective states, and the Florida press is wondering why," the newsletter continued. "Part of that is style. Cuomo has a smooth delivery, a deep and calming voice and an attitude that projects he can answer any question. DeSantis sometimes comes across as peevish and defensive, has made a misstatement or two and was mocked for struggling to put on a mask. But most of the difference between DeSantis and Cuomo is due to politics. DeSantis governs a politically divided state. Cuomo is a scion of Democratic royalty in a deeply Democratic state."

The Politico reporters acknowledged that "media bias" is a major factor, noting how Cuomo has a press that "defers to him" and "preferred to cover 'Florida Morons' at the beach."

"Maybe things would be different if DeSantis had a brother who worked in cable news and interviewed him for a 'sweet moment' in primetime," the reporters wrote in an apparent swipe at CNN anchor Chris Cuomo's softball interviews with his governor-brother.

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However, they said DeSantis "can't quite take a victory lap" since he "deferred to local leaders early on" and how "more than 1.4 million unique unemployment claims have been submitted, but only half have received compensation."

"DeSantis is trying to get 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," the newsletter concluded.

Fox News' Gregg Re contributed to this report.