What Goes Up

 Remember when Rudy Giuliani was "America's Mayor?" He rode that wave of popularity straight into a gig as the "president's" personal attorney. Well, not exactly straight, but things seemed to be on an upward tick after a career of getting tough on crime. Which may be how he became so familiar with it. Crime, that is. He cleaned up Times Square and made it family friendly. Unless your family was a group of pickpockets or panhandlers. Removal of these folks paved the way for the opening of a Disney Store. And it was the brave face that he showed after the September 11 terrorist attacks on his city that brought him Time's Man of the Year award, and an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. 

Which is a long way from holding a press conference at The Four Seasons Landscaping firm, or inciting a riot days, then weeks after an election lost by his client. My mind turns to the image of Kong falling from the Empire State Building in the original 1933 version, bouncing and careening as he plummeted to his eventual final resting place. 

It wasn't the airplanes that got him. It was the gravity. Which is what all that  "the mighty have fallen" talk is about. What goes up must come down. 

Which brings us to Andrew Cuomo. The governor of the Empire State is currently facing a lot of scrutiny for his actions over the past several months. Those past several months have seen Governor Andrew rise to the height of COVID-19 popularity, with his press conferences evoking memories of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia reading comics to his city's kids way back when. Way back when New York City's newspaper delivery folks were on strike. In hindsight, it's a little difficult to separate the politics from the person. But the optics were great. And so were Cuomo's daily news conferences. A bit of fresh air in a world stifled by masks and shelter in place. 

But it turns out that all the news that came out during those sessions wasn't really all the news. Apparently, there are plenty of questions about how nursing homes were handled during the initial surge of the virus, and that deaths may have been under-reported or simply covered up. This was after his call for elderly patients to be sent initially to nursing homes rather than hospitals. Not exactly the Sunday funnies. 

Then go ahead and drop the allegations of sexual harassment by Governor Cuomo and you have the perfect scandal salad. Now damage control is focused not on the crisis at hand as much as how the person in charge handles himself. Initial impressions aside, it appears that this once mighty hero of New York politics is on his way down. I suppose the good news is that scandals don't appear to be a partisan issue. As the Police once sang, "The truth hits everybody." Especially once gravity takes hold.