Super Mario - performance of New York Governor Mario Cuomo - Cover Story

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by Richard Brookhiser

For all the high hopes, Mario Cuomo has never gone farther than governor of New York; and soon he may be less than that. But New Yorkers will have their problems and their taxes still.

Mario Cuomo, almost presidential candidate, almost Supreme Court Justice, almost intellectual, and three-term governor of New York, might well lose his last bid for re-election, and not to some real comer, but to a Republican state legislator named George Pataki, a homunculus grown in a retort by Senator Alfonse D'Amato.

This is not as big news as it seems, if you know the numbers. Mario Cuomo has rarely been an electoral powerhouse. In 1982, his first gubernatorial race, he got 51 per cent of the vote against a political tyro. In 1990, his third race, he got 53 per cent against two tyros who split the anti-Cuomo vote. Only in 1986 did he roll up a landslide (65 per cent). Yet he has seemed to bestride the political world like a colossus, while Pataki-men walk under his huge legs and peep about.

Cuomo's prominence is a testimony to the resonance of his rhetoric, at both the state and the national levels. Until recently, the two levels were mutually reinforcing. If he is vulnerable now, it is because he has lost one of his echo chambers.

Cuomo's verbal gift first showed itself when he beat New York City Mayor Ed Koch in the 1982 Democratic primary. Koch's loss was widely interpreted as self-destruction. "Have you ever lived in the suburbs?" Koch asked in a notorious pre-election interview. "It's sterile. It's nothing. It's wasting your life." But that wasn't the whole story. In their last debate, Cuomo went after Koch like a liberal buzz saw. Had Democrats done too much for the poor? "Hardly enough," said Cuomo. Koch's quasi-conservatism would "cut our throats." Cuomo used his summation to urge voters to take part in "the high holy day of our political process." It was corn, but it was sweet.

Governor Cuomo moved up to the big leagues two years later, with his keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. Cuomo assailed Ronald Reagan as a social Darwinian who believed only in "taking care of the strong," while Democrats "would rather have laws written by . . . the man called the 'world's most sincere Democrat,' St. Francis of Assisi." Two months later, he delivered a second major address, at Notre Dame, on the subject of abortion. He and his wife, he began disarmingly, believed that "life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine Justices of the Supreme Court disagree. . . . But not everyone in our society agrees with me and Matilda." The Catholic officeholder, he concluded, must bow to social consensus. The keynote speech was thunder and lightning; the Notre Dame speech was earnest and calm. It seemed there was nothing he could not do.

But Cuomo's texts had a way of shriveling the morning after. Taken together, the 1984 speeches are an intellectual shell game: in San Francisco he brought in saints to judge politicians, while in South Bend he counseled believers to follow the polls. Where is the pea? Yet the power of his delivery was real enough. He also took aim at targets that liberals really wanted to hit. At the height of Reaganism, Cuomo attacked the pernicious new orthodoxy far more effectively than Tip O'Neill or Walter Mondale. The media ganglia of Washington, D.C., and New York City took note.

Cuomo was rewarded by being considered a long-shot presidential candidate during the next two election cycles. In September 1987, he took a trip to Moscow; when he returned, he gave a show-and-tell speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. He's going global, we all said. In December 1991, a chartered plane waited at the Albany airport to take him to New Hampshire to make the filing deadline for the primary. He's going for it, we all said. But in the event, he stayed home.

Government as Usual

What did he do there? The Republicans attack him as a taxer and a spender. Cuomo denies their charges, and he is frequently correct, though only on points of detail that do not affect the total picture.

For instance, Cuomo says that the state government work force has lost more than 17,000 jobs since 1990, mostly through attrition. But there are still over 15,000 more state employees than there were when he took office in 1983. There is of course more for state employees to do in New York than in many other places. New York's state government spends 47 per cent more per capita than the national average. The state has one-tenth of the nation's welfare recipients and more than a sixth of the nation's Medicaid expenditures. New York's Medicaid program, more generous than other states', will pick up the bill for a vasectomy or a hair transplant; the state pays $5,600 per recipient, almost three times what California pays.

On tax policy, Cuomo can say, truthfully, that the top state-income-tax rate has dropped from 10 per cent to just under 7.9 per cent during his tenure. What he does not say is that each step was wrung out of him by the legislature; when he signed the last cut, in 1987, he remarked that "they would have gotten it anyway." Since 1990, he has postponed a scheduled cut that would have lowered the top rate still further, to 7 per cent. Cuomo also does not discuss the level at which the top rate kicks in - $26,000, as opposed to $150,000 in New Jersey. The budget he signed this spring had $253 million in miscellaneous tax cuts, but much of this was giving back with one hand what he had taken with the other, such as phasing out hotel and motor-oil taxes he had imposed in 1990. The budget also extended other taxes - a business tax surcharge, a hospital tax - which were due to expire.