Governor Kathy Hochul Is One Weird Duck

K athy Hochul is new to the job of being New York’s governor. When she became governor after Andrew Cuomo’s disgrace, several media outlets insisted: Do not underestimate Kathy Hochul! See here. And here. How did they know the temptation would be to underestimate her? Probably because every other media outlet, including those owned by other major New York political figures, was running stories titled, “Who is Kathy Hochul?”

That was my reaction, too. Who is this person? I live in the part of New York that gets taxed for the Metro Transit Authority, the part around New York City. And I naturally expect governors to be from downstate. Every previous governor of this state in my life was born in New York City or within a thinkable commute of it. Every governor for the past 100 years has been from downstate and the Hudson Valley. George Pataki grew up a short drive from where I live. The previous governor’s brother lived a few miles away from where I type this. Even John Jay’s house is a few stone’s throws away. But Kathy Hochul is from Buffalo. A great city, which is, by the reckoning of our neighbors, somewhere way out there, part of the Midwestern Rust Belt. I mean no offense. By all rights, upstate should secede from the city to become more fully what it is. But to me and to the majority of New Yorkers who live downstate, Hochul might as well be from Estonia.

Although when she speaks, she comes across as someone from much farther away than Tallinn. Maybe the Andromeda system. It’s as if she’s still trying to master the ways of Earthlings. While at a church in Brooklyn, she said, “Yes, I know you’re vaccinated. You’re the smart ones, but you know, there are people out there who aren’t listening to God and what God wants. You know this. You know who they are.” Then she said, “I need you to be my apostles.” She held up her necklace, which adverts her status as a person vaccinated against COVID-19. Because normal people routinely commemorate their immunizations with gold jewelry. Later she explained that the National Guard would take the place of the unvaccinated nurses who would be fired in a few hours.

You know, normal stuff for Earthlings. I’ve discharged your health-care workers and replaced them with the military.

If a red-stater such as Greg Abbott, Ron DeSantis, or Bill Lee had asked worshippers to be their apostles, and to make their neighbors listen to God, there wouldn’t be enough helicopters east of the Mississippi to carry in the lawyers from the ACLU, or the hysterical reporters from the Atlantic to talk about the dawn of theocratic fascism. But in New York, from a New York governor, the statement is illegible. Is this how Governor Hochul speaks? Or is this how she imagines religious people speak all the time, with a kind of breezily insistent form of overfamiliarity and personal authority?

In any case, I can’t imagine a creepier way of promoting vaccines than to portray resistance to them as defiance of what God is currently saying within earshot. Every single vax-skeptic I know has compared public-health prohibitions and commands to false religious duties. Hochul is just saying it out loud.

But then, Governor Hochul is always making things personal and weird. This week she also attended a business roundtable and talked up legal marijuana as the new industry that would save upstate New York. For some reason, upstate New York only ever gets offered the business of vice. After two decades of being teased about possible casinos, now there is the promise of pot.

“So count me in as an ally,” Hochul said — “someone who’s going to be there for you, who will fight for you to make sure that we do not lose out to any competition, whether it’s in the space of cannabis, where I believe there’s thousands and thousands of jobs and new industries to be created that were not even focused on.” With Hochul, a dank, hazy cloud rises over the Empire State. A cloud of hope! Where God is telling you to get the jab, and you aren’t going to believe how many jobs there are in the marijuana business. Because we can’t quite focus, for some reason.

New York’s supreme office has passed from an authoritarian bully and sex pest who focused on improving major infrastructure projects. Now we have a pseudo-religious guru who is making sure the hospitals are staffed by people trained to kill during the next wave of this pandemic. But it’s all right; everything is all right. I’ve won the victory over myself. I love New York.