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

National Review, Oct 10, 1994 by Richard Brookhiser

Our President-in-Waiting

If Cuomo has been business as usual, why have New Yorkers thought of him as something more? This is the irony of his double-decker reputation. Even as New York gave him his platform as a national figure, his national reputation made him dazzling to New Yorkers. He was our poet, our President-in-waiting. Didn't the McLaughlin Group tell us so? Interestingly, Cuomo's in-state approval ratings, as measured by the Marist poll, began to slide at the moment he was no longer needed as a foil to Ronald Reagan. They peaked at 77 per cent in January 1988, on the eve of Bushism. By the time he decided not to file in New Hampshire four years later, they had sunk to 50 per cent. They hit 36 per cent in March of this year and have rebounded some, though they are still under 40 per cent.

Of course, he never would have left us. All the talk of the White House and the Supreme Court was self-infatuation - ours and his. For Cuomo nurses at his core a profound sense of self-doubt. It shows in the way he governs, trusting only a few old-shoe cronies and his son Andrew. It shows in the late-night and early-morning calls to critical journalists. It showed in a baseball scouting report when he was playing for a Pittsburgh Pirates farm club in 1951. "Sometimes," wrote the scout, "I think he has a slight inferiority complex and needs to be told frequently that he has the goods. Like all bright fellows, he is sometimes moody and different than the ordinary person."

Cuomo's inferiority complex seems to be connected with his ethnicity. Italian jokes of the most frivolous kind send him through the roof; in The New York Idea, he is still chewing over a slight to his mother from fifty years ago. When the Cuomos moved to Holliswood, a Queens neighborhood "then inhabited mostly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants," three "distinguished-looking women" came to greet Mrs. Cuomo. "You must be the Italian woman," they said. "Well, we want you to know you are welcome here, but please keep the tops on your garbage pails." Solemnly, her son adds: "Unchecked, magnified, and sanctioned by the state," such behavior "is what eventually produced the malignancy of the Holocaust and the 'ethnic cleansing' we now see in the former Yugoslavia."

In The Italians, Luigi Barzini argued that the historical Italian antidote to feelings of depression and anxiety was the Baroque. That is certainly Mario Cuomo's antidote. But it is not only Italians who feel anxiety, or who resort to rhetoric as an anodyne. Unwilling to address our real problems, New Yorkers have resorted to Cuomo as a quack cure. We have slipped behind Texas to be the third largest state in the country, as Bill Murchison gleefully reminded us in these pages. We have a few huge lovely parks, a lot of dairy farms, a handful of decaying small cities like measle spots, and Gotham - the Omphalos, the Wen. It has been pleasant to think that the state that produced Alexander Hamilton and the Roosevelts could still produce a titan. Now that titanhood has finally passed Cuomo by, we may abandon him. It will be harder to abandon the bad habits that have led us to our shrunken state.