NEW YORK — Andrew Cuomo is pitching himself as the only New York City mayoral candidate competent enough to manage a sprawling bureaucracy. A series of campaign trail missteps, on top of serious questions about his handling of Covid and infrastructure projects, threaten to undermine his case.
In recent weeks, the frontrunner in the Democratic primary botched paperwork that cost him millions of dollars in public matching funds, misspelled the names of two labor leaders in a press release about their endorsements of Cuomo and issued a housing plan with typos that critics also seized on for its ChatGPT-fueled research . The former governor’s team blamed those mistakes on voice technology used by a staffer who is missing an arm.
The hiccups belie the competency Cuomo is trying to evince. And they compound blemishes in his much-touted Albany record — from his handling of Covid nursing home policies that critics blame for thousands of undercounted deaths , to an underfunded mass transit system that is in disrepair. Along with a close examination of his gubernatorial record, it all paints a picture of a candidate who — despite dominating the mayoral race — has a history of significant managerial gaps that contradict his self-styled leadership image. And it comes at a time when voters are thirsting for a strong executive in City Hall, following a period of chaos under Mayor Eric Adams…