Remarks at a dinner honoring Governor Mario Cuomo in New York City

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 24, 1994

October 19, 1994

You've still got it, Mario. [Laughter]

Among the many things I admire about Governor Cuomo is his remarkable family. And here was his wife saying you should vote for him because he's strong and slim. Can you imagine what would happen to anybody else if someone got up and said, "You should vote for this person because he's got a good body?" [Laughter] I mean, it was great. [Laughter]

His son tells him today, Andrew says in the economic conference, "Don't speak very long, Dad." So Mario gets up and announces it and then gives his speech at twice the normal speed. [Laughter]

I watched him tonight, and I was thinking, why is this a race? Why is it even close?

I don't know how many of you saw my friend Ken Burns' magnificent series on baseball, but Mario was in it, and he hasn't seen it because he's been out campaigning. I'm not up, so I stay home and watch baseball. [Laughter] The only baseball we have right now.

One of the things that is in this series is the scouting report from the Pittsburgh Pirates on the promising young center fielder from St. Johns. This is what the scout said about Mario Cuomo: "Potentially the best prospect on the club, could go all the way if he improves his hitting to the point of a respectable batting average. He's aggressive; he plays hard; he's intelligent, not easy to get to know but very well-liked by those who succeed in penetrating his shell." Let me tell you something, he's still the best prospect on the club, and he ought to be sent back to the playing field. And his batting average is very, very good.

You know, when Mario was talking about how all of his immigrant roots and doing all that, I just was virtually transported. I never get tired of thinking about that sort of thing, about our country. In a much more blunt and less eloquent way, Boris Yeltsin said the same thing to me the other day when he was here--really was the time before last, we were together. Yeltsin grew in a house literally where the farm animals shared the living room with the children. He was in a very difficult way as a child, and he had read somewhere that I had once lived in a house without indoor plumbing.

So about halfway through this banquet he looked at me one night and he said, you know, guys like us don't get to be President very often. [Laughter] The truth is, guys like us do get to be President, or Governor, or other things in this country because this is a very great country, because we've had leaders like Mario Cuomo.

I've had a lot of time to think about this Governor's race in New York. You know, I admire your Governor so much, I like him so much, I feel that he is my real partner. I think that he has given you strong and disciplined and responsible leadership, and he's still full of new ideas and energy. But I also understand what the issues are.

You know, I was the Governor of my State for a good, long while, and I loved it better than anything. And my State was smaller, but it was the same sort of deal. My people had been there since about the time of the Civil War. I knew every country crossroads. I could still walk into counties and remember the percentage of the vote I got in 1974. Some people thought that was a character flaw, but I thought it showed I was good at math. [Laughter] And I want to tell you this story because it was told on me, but it's something every New Yorker ought to think about before this election.

You know, in rural States--and New York, by the way, is a big rural State with a huge agricultural sector--the State fair is about the biggest thing that happens. I'll tell you how big it is, the guy who was my chief cabinet officer left my administration and--well, he worked for my successor a while--and he left to become the head of the State fair. He got a promotion. [Laughter] It's a huge deal in a country place. And so I used to go out to the State fair every year and have a Governor's Day, and I'd just sit there. And people would come up and talk to me and say whatever was on their mind, which often burned my ears. And after I had completed my fourth term about--I had served three 2-year terms and one 4-year term--and I was trying to make up my mind whether I would run for 14 years and would serve longer than anybody ever had in my State. At the end of the Governor's Day, when I had heard all this stuff, this old fellow in overalls came up to me, clearly in about his seventies, he looked at me and he said, "Bill, are you going to run for Governor, again?" I said, "I don't know. If I do, will you vote for me?" He said, "Yes, I guess I will. I always have." I said, "Well, aren't you sick of me after all these years?" He said, "No, but everybody else I know is." [Laughter] And I looked--I swear he did. And he said, but, he said, "What do you expect? All you do is nag us to do better. You're on us day and night, talking about what we've got to do to get jobs, talking about what we've got to do to get schools, just nag, nag, nag." He said, "Nobody could live with that all the time." He said, "It just wears us out." But, he said, "You know something? I think it's beginning to work." That's what I want to tell you. It's beginning to work. Don't walk away from it when it is beginning to work.