His father, Mario Cuomo, of course was Governor in his own right some years ago (1983-1994). Radio commentator Alan Chartock in 1995 called Andrew and Mario's relationship “one of closest father/son relationships and collaborations in all political history.” (Me and Mario Cuomo: Conversations in Candor, page 104.) Andrew's likely Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, has attempted to use this relationship against Andrew in a variety of ways. Andrew has attempted to use it in his own favor.
There's an aspect of this important father-son relationship that's unlikely to be seriously explored, and that's the way the political similarities between the men could play out in Andrew Cuomo's Governorship, if he wins. I suppose Lazio will try to address this issue sooner or later, but the issue deserves more serious consideration than it can possibly get in the context of a political campaign.
It's widely believed that Andrew and Mario have always been close, which is very near to, but not quite, the truth. According to Robert S. McElvaine's 1988 book Mario Cuomo: A Biography, Mario was working too much during Andrew's early years for the two to be close then. Mario did not, for example, know how well Andrew was doing in High School. When Andrew went to Albany Law School in the late 1970s and early 1980s (he graduated in 1982 and was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1984, according to the State Office of Court Administration), Mario was to be working in Albany as Lieutenant Governor of New York State, and he insisted that the two men live together in an apartment on State Street. They have been close ever since, and Mario has made a conscious effort to make up for his not being around much during Andrew's early years. (Mario Cuomo: A Biography, pages 157-159.)
Andrew was a close adviser to Mario throughout Mario's tenure as Governor, but especially during his first term, when Andrew had an actual job in the administration (for $1 a year). After that, Andrew left to work for the Manhattan District Attorney's office. (Mario Cuomo: A Biography, page 130; “About Andrew Cuomo” from the Cuomo campaign's Internet site.) When Andrew got married, Mario lamented to Alan Chartock about how he would lose the ability to consult his son during the early morning hours. (Me and Mario Cuomo: Conversations in Candor, pages 103-104.) Andrew book-ended Mario's tenure as Governor, by first encouraging him to run after perceiving then-Governor Hugh Carey's position as vulnerable (Diaries of Maruo M. Cuomo: The Campaign for Governor, pages 66-67), and then twelve years later by informing Mario of his loss to George Pataki in 1994 (Andrew Kitzman, Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City 2000, page 139).
The close relationship carried into Andrew Cuomo's 2002 attempt to run against George Pataki. In Andrew's own words:
My race was great political theater. I was running last year in a primary to challenge George Pataki, who had defeated my father, Mario Cuomo. The New York press had choreographed the campaign into an Italian opera in which the son was to avenge the father's death. Unfortunately, the conclusion did not support the premise. [Andrew lost the Democratic nomination to then-Comptroller H. Carl McCall.] There is no romance in the opera: father dies, and then son does. (Andrew Cuomo, Crossroads: The Future of American Politics 2003, page xi.)
Based on this passage, Andrew seems to be well aware of the political importance of his relationship with his father. Note that Andrew in no way implies that the way the press had “choreographed” the race was inaccurate or inappropriate.
The relationship continues into Andrew's current gubernatorial race, as do the potential comparisons. In calling his political program “The New NY Agenda,” Andrew Cuomo in effect invited the comparisons to continue, and intensify. Because, as public radio reporter Karen DeWitt remembered, this slogan was first used by Mario. Karen trotted out a license plate from early in Mario's 1994 campaign that bore the phrase.
Mario Cuomo's use of the slogan went much further than a license plate, however. It also graced the covers of the official printings of Mario's 1993 and 1994 Messages to the Legislature. (Copies were located in the New York State Legislative Library.) That means “New New York” was more than just a political slogan to Mario. It was an attempt at a governing strategy. Andrew appears to view it similarly. After all, the phrase isn't just on Andrew's bumper stickers and buttons; it's the title of his policy book.
In addition to the title, some of the content of Andrew's policy book is also echoed in his father's long-ago Messages to the Legislature. To pick just one example, the embryo of Andrew's proposal for locally-led consolidations of and service sharing among local governments (The New NY Agenda, pages 85-92, also a policy concern of his as Attorney General, see here) is found in Mario's 1994 Message to the Legislature (pages 119-121). The proposals are not identical, but there are more similarities than differences.
The two men also appear to share similar overall political philosophies. In a 1999 speech to the National Press Club, then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Andrew Cuomo argued for a positive role for government, spoke of how part of his role as a government official was to convince the people that government could be a positive solution to a given problem. He had a well-conceived, supportable analysis of why government-based solutions to social problems had or had not worked in the past. His analysis reflected eloquence, intelligence, and (and this is critical) a bureaucrat's appreciation of the necessity for competent public administration. (Andrew Cuomo, “Remarks at the National Press Club,” 28 April 1999, pages 7-9.)
Mario Cuomo has long-held to a similar pro-government philosophy, and by pro-government I mean a firm, anti-Reagenite belief that government can be a positive good. Many of Mario's written works, including 1995's Reason to Believe, 1994's The New York Idea, and 1974's Forest Hills Diary are nothing if not impassioned defenses of that philosophy. If it sounds a bit obvious to say that government “can” be a force for good, it must be remembered that Mario Cuomo's tenure as Governor overlapped with the Reagen era, wherein America's top government official, the President of the United States, paradoxically proclaimed “government is the problem.” Merely to defend the idea that government could do good for people, as Mario did, was to swim against the political tide, and risk drowning.
Much is made of Anderw Cuomo's current anti-tax and “rightsizing government” rhetoric. In this interview with Alan Chartock, for example, Andrew comes out staunchly against both new taxes and new government borrowing. Further, point 3 of Andrew's “New New York” agenda is the following:
Rightsizing Government. Government in New York is too big, ineffective and expensive. We must enlist the best private sector minds to help overhaul our more than 1,000 state agencies, authorities and commissions and reduce their number by 20 percent. We must make it easier to consolidate or share services among our more than 10,000 local governments. (The New NY Agenda, unnumbered page.)
7 out of 10 of the “10 Troubling Facts” described in his policy book relate to government being too big and expensive, and/or to New Yorkers' tax burden. (The New NY Agenda, pages 1-2.)
Some have said that Andrew Cuomo is trying to sound like a Republican, but I think he'd disagree. I think he might suggest nothing in his agenda is specifically Republican, or specifically conservative, and nothing is necessarily inconsistent with a pro-government, liberal philosophy. I can see no evidence that Andrew has ever, or likely will ever, pretend to be anything other than some kind of liberal, along very similar lines to his father.
Mario and Andrew have also both cast themselves as defenders of the downtrodden in society, those usually ignored by the political system and by politicians, those left behind by economic prosperity, progress, and growth.
None of Mario Cuomo's expressions of this are better-known than his 1984 “A Tale of Two Cities” speech.
Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn't understand that fear. He said, "Why, this country is a shining city on a hill." And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.
But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city's splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another city; there's another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one; where students can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.
In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn't show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city.
In 1999 remarks to the National Press Club, which were also cited earlier, Andrew Cuomo made the following eerily similar statement:
The new American paradigm is the great American paradox.
President Clinton says this is not a story of success and that this nation can do better and that it's not truly a success until the economy is working for everyone, everywhere, and that now is the time to take this great economy, use it as a tool, use the resources to make the economy work everywhere. And he is right.
I have been to the other America, if you will. I have seen the dual reality of the time that we live in. And I can tell you the sense of hopelessness is just as bad as it has ever been. For all the progress we've made, Lord knows we have longer to go.
I also believe that if the American people saw the reality, the other reality, the other America, they would do something about it. If they saw the conditions of poverty that still exist in this nation, they would not allow it to continue. It's not about the America we know. We have to expose that reality, show them the other America, and they won't stand for it.
We also have to show them that we can actually solve it and that government can be an instrument in that solution.
And, finally, one similarity between the two men needs no citation: Their voices. No one could reasonably disagree that Andrew likely learned how to make a speech in large part by listening to his father. Sometimes even the minor differences vanish or lessen, and then the similarities are eerie.
There can be little doubt that Mario Cuomo and Andrew Cuomo have many commonalities that are potentially of great political importance.
New Yorkers have reason to both fear, and look forward to, another Cuomo administration.
Mario Cuomo had many gifts, but also many faults, and his twelve-year administration appears to be regarded by many New Yorkers as a failure. His 1994 defeat at the hands of the then-comparatively unknown George Pataki is surely enough proof that he was seen as a failure at least at the time. Hy Rosen and Peter Slocum's account of the Cuomo Administration in their great 1998 book From Rocky to Pataki paints a complex picture of a gifted Governor constrained by several factors some of which were beyond, and some within, his control. I'll outline three of these factors I saw at work, based on Rosen and Slocum's account.
Firstly, Mario was a liberal Democrat, explicitly in the FDR vein, in a decidedly conservative Republican era, personified by Ronald Reagen. Mario had to spend twelve years straddling the long divide between the FDR and Reagen archetypes. While he may have straddled it well for the most part, he couldn't do it forever. He appears to have in response adapted an incrementalism that he doesn't appear to have been comfortable with, and which had paradoxical effects. Secondly, Mario's tenure coincided with two recessions, and Mario managed to create the perception he, and by extension New York State, were generally anti-business. And thus, it was easy, and in-part true, to blame New York State's economic woes on Mario. From Rosen and Slocum's account, Mario doesn't appear to have ever realized the degree to which he'd helped to create the negative perception. (Andrew has certainly made attempts to paint himself with a pro-business brush.)
Thirdly, and most importantly for our present purposes, is that Mario appears to have just not been that good of a manager. He was part inspirational speaker and part policy wonk, but he failed on translating his principles into policy, into making government match his vision. Lacking that skill, complexity too-often became incoherence. (From Rocky to Pataki, pages 94-136.) It is this third factor that I think of as Mario Cuomo's primary political sin, the one his son needs most to not duplicate. Mario Cuomo could show New York where he wanted us to go, could even convince people, in the abstract, to go there. But, for whatever reason, he had difficulties finding the path, or following it once he found it, or in getting others to follow it. Or all three. Always not quite.
As a result, after twelve years of not quite, in 1994, George Pataki defeated Mario Cuomo with what amounted to one argument alone: That he was not Mario Cuomo.
Andrew Cuomo is likely New York State's next Governor.
There are many political similarities between Andrew Cuomo and Mario Cuomo, but there are also differences. Mario Cuomo earned the nickname “Hamlet on the Hudson” for giving off what were popularly perceived as perpetually-mixed signals on whether or not he would run for the Presidency. But Hamlet wasn't quite indecisive. He knew what he had to do. Where he failed was translating thought into action. The Hamlet analogy is thus appropriate to Mario Cuomo, but not quite in the way it was popularly used.
A picture on Andrew Cuomo's campaign Internet site illustrates what I think Andrew Cuomo hopes will be a difference between himself and his father. In that photo, Andrew is seen with Bill Clinton and Al Gore. The Clinton administration is firmly associated in the American mind, especially in the New York mind, with competent administration, and with good reason. Among other accomplishments, Clinton turned the Reagen-era federal budget deficits into a surplus.
Andrew Cuomo is likely the next Governor of New York. Rick Lazio has thus far been as unable to find campaign traction as he has a convincing argument. Anything can happen in politics, and 4 months is over 120 news cycles and several lifetimes, but at the moment the chief danger to Andrew Cuomo appears to be if starts to take victory for granted, and he shows no sign of doing so.
There are some signs that Andrew might be better than his father at translating thought into action, at overcoming Hamlet's dilemma. Andrew appears to have more of a bureaucrat's sensibility, which goes beyond having an idea of what's doable, into the realm of figuring out exactly how to do it.
Chris Smith wrote the following in late May:
Spitzer was ahead of the curve in his embodiment of voter anger, and fighting consumed him. Cuomo is no Mr. Nice Guy—many pols who know him well fear him—and he arrives as public rage with government soars. Yet his success in Albany will likely hinge on whether he can stroke people at the same time as he’s pushing them around: Manipulation we can believe in.
Absolutely true. But there's another, related but separate, issue upon which Andrew Cuomo's success, and hence New York's, will in-part depend: Andrew's ability to translate principle into politics and policy, and thought into action. His ability to neither water-down the analysis nor remain paralyzed by it.
Andrew's ability to duplicate his father's gifts, but not his father's sins.
Works Consulted or Cited
“About Andrew Cuomo.” http://www.andrewcuomo.com/about
Alan Chartock. “Interview with Andrew Cuomo.” 3 July 2010. http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1670295
Alan Chartock. Me and Mario Cuomo: Conversations in Candor. 1995.
Andrew Cuomo. Crossroads: The Future of American Politics. 2003.
Andrew Cuomo. “Remarks to the National Press Club.” 28 April 1999.
Andrew Cuomo. “The Empire Strikes Back.” Undated Speech at University of Buffalo. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWAZTtTYC9M
Andrew Cuomo. The New NY Agenda: A Plan for Action. 2010.
Andrew Kitzman. Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City. 2000
Bob Herbert. “Unmasking Poverty.” The New York Times. 29 April 1999.
Casey Seiler. “Everything New is Old Again.” Capitol Confidential (blog). 28 May 2010. http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/27494/everything-new-is-old-again/
Chris Smith. “The Silver Surfer.” New York Magazine, online edition, 28 May 2020. http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/66300/
Elizabeth Benjamin. “Settling The ‘Status Cuomo’ Score.” Capital Tonight (blog). 4 June 2010. http://capitaltonight.com/2010/06/settling-the-status-cuomo-score/
Hy Rosen and Peter Slocum. From Rocky to Pataki: Character and Carictures in New York Politics. 1998.
Lars-Erik Nelson. “A New and Better Vision For Cities.” New York Daily News. 30 April 1999.
Mario Cuomo. 1993 Message to the Legislature.
Mario Cuomo. 1994 Message to the Legislature.
Mario Cuomo. “A Tale of Two Cities” (speech). 1984. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mariocuomo1984dnc.htm
Mario Cuomo. Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo: The Campaign for Governor. 1984.
Mario Cuomo. Forest Hills Diary: The Crisis of Low-Income Housing. 1974.
Mario Cuomo. More Than Words: The Speeches of Mario Cuomo. 1993.
Mario Cuomo. The New York Idea: An Experiment in Democracy. 1994.
Mario Cuomo. Reason to Believe. 1995.
Michael Gormley. “Democratic Nominee Cuomo Seeks 'New' New York.” Associated Press. 28 May 2010. Found many places, accessed most recently here: http://pressrepublican.com/0100_news/x433574646/Dem-nominee-Cuomo-seeks-new-New-York
“President Clinton Announces Another Record Budget Surplus.” CNN.com. 27 September 2010. http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/09/27/clinton.surplus/
Rick Lazio. Various documents on lazio.com.
Robert S. McElvaine. Mario Cuomo: A Biography. 1988.
Star-Ledger Editorial Board. “NY Democrat Andrew Cuomo sounding a lot like NJ Gov. Chris Christie.” Star-Ledger, online edition. 30 May 2010. http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2010/05/ny_democrat_andrew_cuomo_sound.html
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