Wells: Why do you choose to focus on San Francisco?

Berman: There’s a lot of focus on the political leaders on the East Coast. You have a ton of focus on Andrew Cuomo in New York. He’s been drawing a lot of praise for the way that he’s conducted the public messaging around social distancing. This was an effort to say, Let’s look at the cities that are doing this well and spotlight a leader who is not getting the attention that the leaders in New York arguably are getting without maybe earning it as much. Even though Cuomo is doing a good job in front of the cameras, he didn’t act early enough. Mayor de Blasio didn’t act early enough. But it appears that London Breed in San Francisco did act early enough to prevent a wholesale outbreak on the scale of New York that would overwhelm their health system.

Wells: Cuomo is interesting to me. For several weeks, there were kind of these dueling press conferences. Trump was inflammatory, and Cuomo had all these PowerPoints that people were kind of fawning over. He seemed competent, from at least a performative standpoint. Can you tell me what to make of Cuomo becoming sort of a corona-lebrity?

Berman: A big part of public leadership is the public part of it. Everybody is stuck inside. Everybody is watching TV. Everybody is scared and anxious. They have no other choice but to look to their leaders for crucial information and a sense of where we are and where we are going. Cuomo has been successful in that. He’s met that need. He’s clearly striking a balance where it doesn’t seem overly rosy, but he’s also saying “We can do this. We will get through this.” People want to hear that from their leaders. People do not want to despair 24 hours a day.

Wells: Public communication and the performance of competence is part of any leader’s staff. But it also seems like maybe there are leaders that are not putting on entertaining press conferences, and so I haven’t heard anything about the great competence of their response.

Berman: That is a big part of it, and part of it is just simply the media environment. The national media is centered in New York, and New York has always gotten disproportionate attention from the media nationally.

Wells: What’s the lesson of all of this?

Berman: Leaders need to do two things. They need to make the right decisions at the right time to the best [ability] they can, and then they need to communicate those decisions and communicate about the situation in a competent, accessible way. Governor Cuomo certainly has gotten the second half of that right over the last month or so. But the question is, did he get the first part right? Did he make those correct decisions at the right time?

Part of the story in comparison with people like Mayor Breed and Jay Inslee in Washington State and Governor Gavin Newsom in California and others, is that, whether or not they’ve been communicating well, they made better decisions earlier and probably saved more lives than Andrew Cuomo or Bill de Blasio.