I never much cared for Andrew Cuomo. Even though, like most New Yorkers, I voted for him three times to be governor of New York, I just didn’t fall in love with the guy. He wasn’t anyone’s dream politician, from his ham-handed, tone-deaf #MeToo joke made on the day when the first female majority leader in New York's state Senate was sworn in to his habit of referring to himself as a “big tough Italian guy.”

One of his Albany supporters said of him in New York Magazine in 2014, “Is he a son of a bitch at times? Yeah. He is a mechanic; he works on cars as a hobby, fixes engines. And in politics he moves the process forward. You don’t love Andrew Cuomo. But there hasn’t been a better governor, not in the last 50 years.”

I wanted to like Cuomo, but I was troubled by his work with the sketchy IDC, a group of supposed Democrats who helped the Republicans control the New York State Senate for many years. Cuomo just didn’t speak to me, or rather, he spoke to me in a gruff, gravelly, overly emphatic and slightly obnoxious way about obscure bureaucratic infighting. He felt joyless, not exciting. I liked him but I didn’t like him like him. He was no Sherrod Brown, no Chris Murphy, no Val Deming, no Tammy Duckworth.

But what a difference a pandemic makes. All of a sudden, I love Governor Cuomo, his soothing Queens accent, his stories about his dad Mario (himself a three-time governor of New York) and his 88-year-old mother Matilda. And then there’s Andrew the dad, embarrassing his kids with stories of their upbringing after his divorce, when he was a single father, and bringing his 22-year-old daughter Michaela to one of his coronavirus press briefings, suggesting it was "cooler" to be with him there than to be on the spring break vacation she had just wisely cancelled.

She deadpanned, “So cool.” You know, it’s kind of comforting to watch a normal father-daughter relationship and not the weird, slightly North Korea-seeming stuff between Ivanka Trump and her dad.

And then there’s Andrew bantering with his brother Chris on CNN about which son wasn't calling their mother enough right now or which one was held in higher standing back home. "I just called Mom, right before coming on this show," Andrew informed Chris, "and by the way, she told me I was her favorite. The good news is, she said you were her second-favorite, her second-favorite son." (Chris's response: "She never said that.") Andrew’s stories about dealing with his elderly mother Matilda and sibling rivalry between two men decades removed from their childhood are both relatable and delightfully normal, and in a time like this normal is good, normal is comforting. Those of us who are trapped in our apartments for the foreseeable future need normal.