Mario Cuomo (1932-2015)

by Ken

Some of these passings are really hard, and this is a really hard one. Because Mario Cuomo was a politician and a genuinely decent human being. He respected people and understood the role government had to play in improving their lives. There aren't a lot of pols, especially not those who rise to a station like three-term governor of New York State, who by example can make a person feel better about the human race.

Of course Mario (it just seems like he'd want us to think of him as Mario) was also incredibly smart and hard-working. And for all of that, his record as governor was hardly a whirlwind of accomplishment. Which for me goes to show the limits of what one decent, smart, hard-working person can do surrounded by, well, other kinds of people.


Yes, Mario did old-style retail politics. Here he is campaigning for a fourth term as governor in 1994, that famous Republican landslide year. He lost to a giant slab of useless protoplasm called George Pataki, 45.4 percent to 48.8.

Here's some of what the NYT's Adam Nagourney has to say in his obit (whose headline refers to its subject as "liberal beacon"):

Mario Cuomo led New York during a turbulent time, 1983 through 1994. His ambitions for an activist government were thwarted by recession. He found himself struggling with the State Legislature not over what the government should do but over what programs should be cut, and what taxes should be raised, simply to balance the budget.

Still, no matter the problems he found in Albany, Mr. Cuomo burst beyond the state’s boundaries to personify the liberal wing of his national party and become a source of unending fascination and, ultimately, frustration for Democrats, whose leaders twice pressed him to run for president, in 1988 and 1992, to no avail.

In an era when liberal thought was increasingly discredited, Mr. Cuomo, a man of large intellect and often unrestrained personality, celebrated it, challenging Ronald Reagan at the height of his presidency with an expansive and affirmative view of government and a message of compassion, tinged by the Roman Catholicism that was central to Mr. Cuomo’s identity.

A man of contradictions who enjoyed Socratic arguments with himself, Mr. Cuomo seemed to disdain politics even as he embraced it. “What an ugly business this is,” he liked to say. Yet he reveled in it, proving himself an uncommonly skilled politician and sometimes a ruthless one.

He was a tenacious debater and a spellbinding speaker at a time when political oratory seemed to be shrinking to the size of the television set. Delivering the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he eclipsed his party’s nominee, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, seizing on Reagan’s description of America as “a shining city on a hill” to portray the president as unaware of impoverished Americans. “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

At this remove, looking back on Mario's career, what astonishes me most is how many people back in the day wanted him to run for president, meaning that they thought he could actually win. Just now I'm having a terribly hard time wrapping my head around the idea of a serious national candidate who looks and sounds like him. I guess Bernie Sanders comes to mind, and much as I wish it were otherwise, I don't have a much easier time envisioning Bernie as a serious national candidate.

Certainly Mario's son Andrew could never be it. Andrew was intimately involved in all of his father's campaigns, and as I understand it functioned as a sort of his father's chief political operative. The son certainly learned a whole lot about the nitty-gritty of politics, but if he ever had any of his father's spirit, which I really wonder about, he learned to subordinate it to that nitty-gritty -- that politics isn't about the needs of the powerless but about the desires of the powerful.

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