This is a time for leaders to think big or to think small. That is what the election is about. That, and about what leadership means.

The task of the leader is to get people from where they are to where they have not been.  Leadership is the art of giving people a platform for spreading ideas that work. A good leader leads the people from above.

A great leader leads the people from their hearts within them.

“For everything in this journey of life we are on, there is a right-wing, and a left-wing writes the author C. Joy Bell. “But I see that a bird with one wing is imperfect. An angel with one wing is imperfect. A butterfly with one wing is dead. So this generation of people strive to always cut off the other wing in the hopes of embodying their ideal of perfection, and in doing so, have created a crippled race.”

To me, that is the story of the coronavirus in America. We are a crippled country now. We’re trying to fly with one wing.

I’ve chosen in my writing to focus on the remarkable dialogue between New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Trump, which is now clearly about leadership, and what it means as the country and the world struggle with a new reality.

The media is content to tell us what they said and parrot the eternal arguments. But they don’t ever seem willing to tell us what they mean, even what they know.

I see this story as a personal one; I use my own experience to try to connect with other people. We are, in fact, all in this together.

As a result of this pandemic, the American people have a profoundly important choice to make on November 3rd.

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of one of our largest and most influential states, has been hailed all over the world for his leadership during the coronavirus pandemic.

Even his most loyal supporters recognize that President Trump – our presumptive leader – has failed to lead during this crisis.

This is what the election is about now.

It’s time for big thinking, and time for us to understand who can think big and who can think small. Cuomo is not on the ballot, but his idea of leadership is..

The scope, range, significance, and danger of this virus are becoming more and more evident by the day.

So many things are already changing – medicine, politics, culture and the arts, business, leisure time, public space, the economy as an entity, globalization.

I wasn’t paying much attention to politics until the virus came this year. I certainly paid little to local politics or Andrew Cuomo, my governor. New York State is a big state, and the governor and I didn’t have much to do with one another.

When the dimensions of the virus began to be clear; the collapse of our economy, the radical changes in our lives and lifestyles,  the sudden plunge into fear and confusion for almost everyone, the end of nearly every kind of “normal” life, from going out to eat to get to the dentist, abruptly and with little warning, change – so did the need for big thinkers.

Where will we go from here? Do we sit on our hands waiting for that vaccine, or do we find hope and be creative and begin the hard work of change and acceptance?

Leaders could no longer just collect taxes and cut ribbons, leading took on a life-and-death dimension. When there is no leader at the top, Disraeli said, there is chaos at the bottom.

The coronavirus was the shock of a lifetime, and the need for leadership was never more urgent or evident.

In good and peaceful times, most people can get by without a leader. In troubled times, as Winston Churchill, and now Cuomo and Trump show us, leadership is everything.

Americans are used to instant and efficient responses to catastrophes; we handle floods, hurricanes. Wildfires, earthquakes, and volcanoes.

When we need help, we get it, when we call for help, help comes.

Not everyone gets help, and not everyone gets equal help – our country is very much about money – but the federal bureaucracy in crisis has always been a model for the whole world. We presume the people we pay to work for us will tell us the truth.

The response is far from perfect, but it seems to be better than almost any other place in the world, at least in the past.

We need guidance. The implications of the virus are staggering for us.

Designers, architects, doctors, psychologists, legislators, filmmakers, schools,  museum directors, elections, and political campaigns,  restaurants will have to change, and for some time, and perhaps for good.

There is almost desperate talk and reassure of vaccines, tests, miracle cures that will bring is back to normal.

But I am beginning to see that there will not be a return to normal, we are heading for a different space and a different kind of life than the one we have known.

Leadership is personal to me now.

When I first found myself (I’m an OMAR, an old man at risk) “sheltered in place” in my home, I began watching those White House press conferences, the Coronavirus Task Force.

I was intrigued but not concerned. Up in the country, this looked like another urban tragedy; it seemed far from us.

The President spoke more than anyone, but he never told me what I needed to know.  I found myself alternatively confused, frightened, and then angry.

He said there would be testing everywhere. There wasn’t. He said the virus would fade away on its own. It didn’t.  He said his government had done a fantastic job preparing for it. Even the farmer up the road knew this wasn’t true.

I understood then how important it is for leaders to be honest. We weren’t hearing the truth.

Again and again, I was told this wasn’t a big deal; it would pass shortly, all kinds of medicines would control it and cure it, the government was on top of it, had it in hand.

“I’ve done a great job,” he said, again and again, so often it became a joke on social media. And he didn’t look right to me. He seemed angry, disjointed as if he couldn’t or wouldn’t focus on COVID-19. And I was right,  he never did.

Yet I believed his assurances in a way, even if he was a blowhard.  He was the President. The best doctors in the world were standing alongside him. He had access to the best information on our planet. I couldn’t imagine why he wouldn’t listen to it or share it.

I realized I was frightened.  How could I make good decisions about myself if no one would tell me the truth?

As someone at risk, I needed to know what to do, how to protect myself.

I needed to know how to protect my wife and others, what would happen to my daughter and granddaughter, living in New York City, how I might make a living, do my work, help the refugees and the elderly with whom I had been working.

All of the doctors and department heads began their talks, not informing me but praising him, what a good job he had done, what a great leader he was. This gave me the creeps; it felt more like North Korea than America.

In the coming weeks, I lost faith in these people. I lost confidence in their leadership.

They promised things that were never delivered; they contradicted themselves, they slavishly bowed to the President, the person in the room who knew the least about pandemics and seemed even then, in almost complete denial.

What I saw on TV was utterly dissonant with what I saw in my own life, community, state, and from friends and family around the country.

The people who knew the most were dismissed, ignored, pushed to the side. The lackeys and ignoramuses had free rein.

Maria, my wife, was increasingly upset with my attitude. It wasn’t serious, I said, it will soon be over. It isn’t much worst than the flu. As uneasy as I was, I started parroted what I heard and read from the people closest to it, the people in charge, the leaders.

I had that male disease of not listening, of following my testosterone more than my brain. And I am one of the wussy men. The others grabbed their machine guns and headed to the State Houses to protest.

One night, Maria sat across the table and cried. She was worried about me.  This was my turning point.

She wanted me to wake up, to wear masks, to stay inside, to stop shopping and driving around to do my chores, to stop going to the post office. To take it seriously. She didn’t want me to die. I had diabetes and also open-heart surgery.

According to the doctors, I was probably a dead man if I caught the virus, especially then.

I was shocked by this; I thought she was overreacting; I wasn’t understanding the need for this from what I had been told. If the virus was no big deal, why did I have to stay locked up in my house for weeks or months?

But I also saw how upset she was about me, and I couldn’t bear causing her the kind of pain I saw in her face that night.

She got to me, nobody talking at the White House had. It was wrong of me to make her frightened.

Looking back on it, I thought the problem with the President was that he was a small thinker. He couldn’t get his head around the complexity and reach of the virus.

I thought the virus was too big for him; he just couldn’t get it. And the impossible was true. He only seemed to care about his re-election. Every word out of his mouth seemed to be spoken with that in mind, and that is true to this day.

He just started planning grand spectacles, so he could hear those cheers again.

The most curious thing about those Washington press conferences, I thought, was that there were no facts, only warnings on the one hand, and platitudes on the other. And a lot of praise for one another.

A friend e-mailed me and said I had to watch Governor Cuomo’s daily press conferences from New York. He lived in California, and everybody there was watching Cuomo, not the briefings out of Washington. “He’s keeping me sane,” he said “everybody here is watching him.

A journalist, he said that people were watching Cuomo all over the country to understand what was happening. He told the truth, he trafficked in facts, he offered reality and hope at the same time.

I sniffed around, and what my friend told me was true.

Cuomo’s press conferences were breaking all records for digital and social media viewing.

He had become a cult figure to people desperate for information they could trust. The truth made them feel safer and more hopeful.

New York City had become the epicenter of the pandemic; thousands of people were already sick, hundreds were dying. I found Cuomo on cable, live every day just before noon. I started watching and am still watching.

Cuomo surprised me. I just hadn’t paid much attention to him. In upstate New York, where I lived, he was seen as a politician who favored New York City, whose votes kept him in power. He was resented for pushing through some of the most stringent gun control legislation in the country.

He was said to be ruthless and difficult.

I was struck by the contrast between him and President Trump.

For one thing, he was almost shockingly honest. He didn’t spin or sugar coat anything. There was bad news and good news, he said, he wouldn’t lie about either. He had a Dragnet, just-the-facts persona that was almost impossible to argue with or doubt.

In just a few minutes, he explained to me that I needed to know to take the virus seriously.

He made me understand why I had to stay home. He made me understand that the mask was not about me, but about protecting other people. He reminded me that this was up to me, ultimately, not to him. He challenged me to take responsibility rather than whine and protest and blame everyone else.

He showed me that the virus was manageable if only our leaders would manage it.

He said he would make mistakes. “Blame me,” he said, “I am  responsible.” How could anyone fail to remember the President saying he wasn’t responsible for anything.

Cuomo was sober, but not humorless. He was grave but never hopeless.

He appealed not to his greatness but the greatness of the people – to me – and said this was bad, but that we could and would through it.

He is not a humble man, but the virus and all of the deaths it brought to his state seemed to have humbled him.

Up the road, the virus had had just the opposite impact on the President.

He seemed angrier and more self-absorbed than ever; it was almost as if he had taken the virus as a personal insult and a creation of his enemies.

He took the deaths of other people as an insult to him. He could not bring himself to mention the dead.

I remembered Ronald Reagin saying the greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things. I remembered a quote from Douglas MacArthur’s biography: “A true leader has the confidence to stand alone, the courage to make tough decisions, and the compassion to listen to the needs of others. ”

I appreciated Cuomo’s integrity and his very natural empathy.

I know politicians specialize in telling people what they want to hear. Cuomo told people what they needed to hear, and the empathy he showed is very hard to fake.

That’s probably why the President doesn’t even try to do it.

Cuomo nearly cried when he talked about the dying. He acknowledged them every day, showing them on graphic charts he loved to display.

The President was always the victim. There was no room for others.

There was never a moment too grave or sad for him to stop attacking his enemies. A forum for healing became a forum for self-pity and in this, he gravely wounded himself and is almost certain to become the victim he sees himself as being.

Cuomo never presented himself as a hero or a victim; he simply offered the facts of the day and told us what they mean.

The President’s equivocating and selfishness could have cost me my life and did cost others their lives.

As the days wore on, every single thing Cuomo told me turned out to be true. As the days wore on, every single thing the President told me turned out to be false.

Lying simply did not matter to him; it was his nature, like the frog and the scorpion. Neither did the death of so many people he swore to defend and protect.

But that fearful time is then; we are in a new one now.

The pandemic is not only not gone; it is roaring back and biting the people who dismissed it. Sometimes, I think it has a mind all of its own.

As Cuomo wrestled and agonized successfully to bring the pandemic under control, the crowd did follow him. He made decisions he knew people would hate him for, and he invited them to come after him.

Lots of people did and are.

People wore masks; they stayed at home, businesses, and offices closed.  People suffered and struggled to feed their families. Somehow, his leadership worked.

New York City now has one of the lowest infection rates in the country. President Trump scoffed at Cuomo, ridiculed him, and made fun of him and almost every Democratic governor.

But the thing that most surprised me about Cuomo, a politician who cared about winning, not just the left or the right. From the first, he rose to the moment, which is what the great leaders do.

He is now thinking big about the pandemic and its aftermath, offering hope and inspiration.

It is the doctor’s job to warn us and cure us; they aren’t supposed to step back and think big. That is what leaders are supposed to do. Journalists capture the moment; they don’t even like to think big.

Move us forward, prepare us, guide us.

Cuomo is now challenging us. This, he says,  is an opportunity to be better, and think about the change that is good.

There are opportunities here, not just suffering. Watching him calms me gave me hope.

He spoke a lot of truth, but without drama and emotion. He also showed what a skilled politician could do.

He evoked his mother, Matilda. He talked about his daughters and their boyfriends.

It was shameless; it was fun. He made people feel it was their choice, their idea to stay home. He always praised the people suffering more than he congratulated himself. He let other people praise him – and many did – he made it a point never to glorify himself.

Cuomo talked about his dog and kidded on TV with his brother Chris, a CNN anchor. When Chris came down with the virus, it was Cuomo’s turn to be shameless. They joked and kidded and worried about one another. Cuomo knew how to produce a reality show too.

Trump had no dogs or moms or brothers to haul out.

I can see how the leadership hole in our country is both devastating and disturbing.  It does matter who the President is; it does matter how the government works.

So here we are with one wing, a country running on one wing, a whole generation of people striving to always cut off the other wing in the hopes of winning and dominating the other.

This is their idea of perfection, and in doing so, they are creating a crippled country.

Eleanor Roosevelt said that leaders (like writers) should do what they feel in their hearts to be right because they will be criticized anyway.

The country is paying a high price right now for the failure of leadership, and the craven self-interest of so many politicians.

The election is about whether they will pay the price for it also, and lose the right to govern. The good thing about a democracy is that everything leads to voting, one way or the other.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I am eager to see whether a leader can emerge from the wreckage to bring us together and fly with both wings.