Cuomo and Crozier: contrasts in leadership

Governor Andrew Cuomo

We returned from a shortened seven-week vacation last week.  Part of getting resettled in our home was reinstalling a Roku we’d taken with us.  It’s an easy task I’ve done many times before.  Nevertheless, I tested it to make sure it worked properly.  Coincidentally, I turned it on as Governor Andrew Cuomo was giving his daily press briefing.  I never watch TV news (see Stop Watching Cable News Now); so, I hadn’t seen our governor in action despite hearing wonderful things about his leadership during the current pandemic.  

Regular readers know I am not a fan.  Yet, I was struck dumb as I listened to him.  Who is this guy? I thought.  He is calm, rational and articulate.  Where is the arrogance to which we’ve become accustomed?  Even his tone of voice had changed.  He answered questions directly without evasion.  If he didn’t know the answer to a question, he said so.  If a member of his team couldn’t provide a good answer, he said they’d find out.

There is no doubt he will have to make some tough choices in the days and weeks ahead.  He’ll move equipment to where it is most needed, move patients to facilities better prepared to handle them and approve triage protocols that sacrifice some in favor of others (much like it’s done on a battlefield).  The trust he has engendered will give him the credibility to make those decisions on behalf of the citizens he serves.  

Contrast Cuomo’s leadership with that of Captain Brett Crozier who, this week, was relieved of the command of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, a nuclear-powered aircraft stationed in the western Pacific.  The whiners in the Twitterverse and the great grandson of the man for whom the ship is named have called him a hero.  I submit that not only is he not a hero, he has failed in his basic responsibilities as Commanding Officer.  

I must digress for a moment.  Americans take the security provided by the military for granted.  It took one hundred fifty years for the US Navy to achieve dominance of the seas.  In the post-Revolutionary War years, American ships were attacked routinely by the British Navy and the United States did not have the sea power to respond.  We have achieved our current status by virtue of the century-long pursuit of Manifest Destiny, our victories in World War II and the Spanish-American War (in which the aircraft carrier’s namesake was a central figure) and a deal made by FDR to take over the North Atlantic British naval bases prior to entering World War II.  Despite our diminished status (the US Navy has half the ships it had a decade ago), no foreign power would dare challenge the US Navy directly.  

 

Captain Brett Crozier (USNA '92)

What the military does to ensure our security is described as “readiness.” There is a lot of protocol or S.O.P. involved.  In battle, no one should have any doubts who’s giving the orders.  So, we observe a chain of command.  Since readiness is what we must achieve to go to war at the drop of a hat, we provide reports of our status up the change of command. Today, as has been the case since well before I received my officer’s commission, the movement of ships and their readiness to go to war are highly classified. 

An aircraft carrier is at the center of the Navy’s military capability and strategy.  To reveal its operational status on an unsecured communication channel is an egregious breach of a process meant to ensure the national security of our nation.  That’s why Crozier should have been and was properly relieved of his command.  

In his op-ed in the New York Times, Tweed Roosevelt describes Captain Crozier as a hero because he sacrificed his career to do what he thought was right.  Unfortunately, he wasn’t right.  The official statement of the Secretary of the Navy outlines the reasons why. 

As a midshipman at Crozier’s and my alma mater (U.S. Naval Academy), we were trained to say, “I’ll find out” rather than “I don’t know.”  We were trained to say “no excuse” when asked why we screwed something up.  The admiration heaped upon Cuomo has rightly resulted from his adoption of those kinds of responses.  He has exhibited true leadership where Crozier failed.

WHO WILL LEAD? 

Governor Cuomo, thanks for the big, fat favor

Welcome to New York… That’s what my property tax bill might have said when we moved back to our home state.  My taxes are higher than my mortgage payments.

I suppose that may or not be true for every resident of the state.  However, this much is true:  New York has the highest tax burden and the secondhighest amount of public debt per capita in the country.  So, despite taking more of my income than any other state, our government can’t seem to improve its balance sheet.

All of this was rolling around in the back of my mind while I was listening to one of my favorite talk shows on public radio.  At noon each weekday, Evan Dawson interrogates reality on WXXI, our local NPR affiliate.  He is incisive and upbeat.  Listening to his show is a great way to learn about our community – locally, nationally and globally.

Last Tuesday’s show featured University of Rochester President Joel Seligman and others leading an initiative to “win” one of three $500 Million economic development “prizes” being offered by the state government and touted by our governor, Andrew Cuomo, as part of his commitment to upstate New York. 

I came away impressed by Seligman and his colleagues and feeling that our endeavor was in good hands. 

But, here’s the question no one bothers to ask…  Why are competing to “win” back our own money?

The very idea that we should compete for the benefit of tax dollars is appalling. 

And, if we “win” (I can’t seem to stop myself from putting the word in quotes), the governor will no doubt show up in town and act like he is doing us a big, fat favor.

He’s done it before.  During his reelection campaign, he designated $3 Million to the environmental cleanup of a new commercial development in a nearby Finger Lakes community and then declared that it was the kind of “investment” the state would make “all day long”, as though he was doing us a big, fat favor. 

No doubt the project will create some construction jobs for the duration of the project.  And, no doubt the resulting development will provide some retail and service jobs for the longer term.  However, the $3 Million goes into the pockets of the already wealthy real estate owners and developers driving the project.

Thanks for the big, fat favor, Andy.

This paradigm is so ingrained in the public mind that no one even questions it anymore. 

The mentality also affects our thinking in other endeavors.  The state takes some of our tax dollars and gives it back to the school districts that educate our children.  Now, the governor – in an apparent effort to make scapegoats of teachers – is specifying how they should be evaluated.

Whether you agree with his ideas on how to evaluate teachers of not, you have to wonder why our money has to go to Albany so that some group of bureaucrats can decide how our school systems should be managed. 

There is a financial cost to sending money to a central government (economists call it ‘agency cost’).  And, there is a non-financial cost to our community to placing our future in the hands of people who don’t live here and are subject to political and social agendas that don’t necessarily serve our local interests.

It’s time to place these events in perspective.  Our high taxes and bureaucracy have cost us jobs and endangered the future of the (once) Empire State.  Local employers who have the resources often invest in projects to expand their businesses in other states.  Others have left the state completely.  Meanwhile, a recent study has judged New York to be one of the hardest states in the nation to start a small business. 

If the governor wants to do us a big, fat favor, he could start by eliminating a bloated state bureaucracy and lowering our tax bill so we don’t have to compete to “win” back something that was ours to begin with.

Then he can stop doing us big, fat favors.

WHO WILL LEAD?

Frack-tured Fairy Tales

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People of a certain age will remember the Rocky & Bullwinkle Show.  It was a prime time satirical cartoon that was popular decades before The Simpsons and Family Guy.  A regular feature of the show was ‘Fractured Fairy Tales’ which played on malapropisms to get you to chuckle.  They were kind of ‘punny’ in their day.

Now, the governor of New York is promoting his own fairy tale.  This one is over fracking, the controversial practice of bringing vast newly discovered reserves of natural gas to the surface. New York is sitting on the Marcellus Shale, the second largest known reserve of natural gas in the world at 95,000 square miles ranging in depth from 4,000 to 8,000 feet.  If it had been discovered in Texas, every pickup truck in the state would be on autopilot to the nearest wellhead.  Money would have been invested, drilling would have commenced, a new source of energy would be available to the public and guys wearing boots and ten-gallon hats would be lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills.

But, not in New York.  Many a pickup truck can be seen with a ‘No Fracking’ bumper sticker and the environmental lobby holds a lot of sway in Albany.  This is no small matter.  Studies done by economists at Citigroup project that natural gas coupled with improvements in alternative energy sources and efficiency of power plants, factories and autos have the potential of making the US energy independent within a decade. 

Fracking will attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), which has been on the decline since the start of the Great Recession.  Energy independence will reduce our net trade deficit by approximately $433 Billion per year. Energy independence will mitigate our national security concerns in the Middle East, reduce our carbon footprint and create domestic jobs.

I do not mean to diminish the environmental concerns.  Anyone who has seen the documentary Gasland knows that fracking, if done improperly can ruin the water supply.  But, it’s being done safely in places like Texas and North Dakota.

To stir the pot a bit, President Obama has nominated Ernest Moniz to head the Energy Department.  Moniz comes from the MIT Energy initiative, financed by the industry.  He has expressed support for nuclear power and has declared the risks of fracking to be “manageable”.  Perhaps the President really intends to follow through on the policies he outlined in his State of the Union speech:  “this country needs an all-out, all-of-the-above strategy that develops every available source of American energy.”

That isn’t to say that there won’t be incidents.  These activities are prone to human error, as Three Mile Island, the Exxon Valdez and the BP Gulf oil spill have shown us.  But, the opportunity is too great to ignore.  The question isn’t should we or should we not frack.  The question is how can we do it as safely as possible. 

Moreover, we must be view fracking and natural gas in the proper context.  It is not the final answer.  It is a bridge solution.  In the near term, it will reduce greenhouse gases and reduce imports of foreign oil.  However, it’s equally important that we support the research and development initiatives of government agencies like the Advance Research Projects Administration – Energy (ARPA-E) that will provide long term solutions that will enable us to be energy independent while emitting fewer greenhouse gases.  None of the alternative energy options are economically or technologically viable today.  But, they will be some day.  Just not some day soon.

For New York, there’s a broader issue.  Governor Andrew Cuomo has declared his state “Open for Business” and is backing it up with an impressive public relations campaign.  But, such declarations must be backed up by facts.  Businesses are driven by dollars not slogans.  And, New York continues to lose jobs and people to other states. 

In a recent TV ad, the governor makes a big deal about his new policies not increasing taxes.  But, if he wants his slogan to be true, he needs to come to grips with the lack of competitiveness from which New York suffers compared to other states.  Businesses set up shop in low tax, low cost states.  New York is at the opposite end of the spectrum.

The governor must address the structural problems that cause New York to be lagging the nation in job growth and unemployment.  Otherwise the ‘Open for Business’ campaign is just another Fractured Fairy Tale.

WHO WILL LEAD?