Americans feel gloomy, almost desperate, about the future of the economy, and there is no one better able to express-or play to-those fears than Cuomo. Anguished in private, Cuomo at the podium speaks with the urgency of anxious times. “I have not seen an economy as menacing as this one,” he said last week. “Yet Washington sits there and says, ‘Everything is great. We won the war.’ I don’t think that the country understands how bad the economy is. The country is in trouble.” He is the shirt-sleeved man across the kitchen table, speaking to lost Democrats, evoking the hopeful magic of immigrant fable-of family, of neighborhood, of a time when government was not the enemy. “He can bring Democrats back to their party,” says Republican strategist Ed Rollins.
Those who yearn for Cuomo think the race now may be irresistible-even for him. “The Democrats need a prizefighter,” says Rep. Charles Schumer of Brooklyn. “Mario Cuomo is that champion.” He would instantly become the front runner, the man with the most money, the most emotional rhetoric and the heftiest persona. “I think he’d be the nominee,” said former Democratic House whip Tony Coelho.
Cuomo is alternately somber and relaxed, even a little giddy, as he tries out a new aria of schmaltzy campaign talk. Like other Democrats, he cites polls that show Americans doubt that their children will enjoy a richer life than their parents.’ “My father, when he dug sewer pipe, had faith that I would have a better life,” he told NEWSWEEK, warming to the theme. “And when I worked my way through law school, I knew that my children would have a better life.” But what about his son Andrew, he worries aloud. Andrew married a Kennedy, he is reminded. Pause. “You’re right,” he laughs. “That’s a bad example!”
Cuomo touched off the latest quadrennial mini-frenzy recently by telling supporters that he would now “think” about running. It’s hard to imagine that the notion hadn’t already crossed his mind. But to students of Cuomo speak it was significant. This time, they said to themselves, he might actually do it.
But many Democratic insiders are fed up with Cuomo’s shtick. “He’s truly becoming tiresome,” sighed one top party official. “It’s time for him to decide, once and for all.” Others challenge the notion that he would stroll to the nomination. New York’s economy is in bad shape-no advertisement for a Cuomo candidacy. Other candidates, now gathering commitments, won’t go away and could even gain stature by attacking him. “The guys in the field now are pretty good candidates,” says media consultant Robert Squier, friend to several. Cuomo’s legendary thin skin and penchant for sweeping statements could get him in trouble. And there are doubts that his emotional, government-as-friend message would sell in an age of acid skepticism toward Washington. A new Gallup poll shows George Bush whipping Cuomo by a 2-1 margin. “This is an outsider’s year for us, and he’s more of an insider than he realizes,” says Democratic polltaker Alan Secrest.
Cuomo issues polite compliments to other Democrats. He calls their new tax-cut proposals “nice” ideas, “virtuous but not adequate” to the monumental task of national renewal. When the recession ends, he says, the deeper problems will remain: debt, decay, the sinkholes of the cities. He then ticks off his own wideranging ideas: investment tax credits, jobs programs, health care, infrastructure rebuilding, even entitlement reform.
Does he hear any Democrat sounding such ambitious themes? “Not yet, but they will,” he says mysteriously.
Cuomo can sound weary about the burdens of his own long-presumed potential. It’s always external conditions, not his own free will, that drive him to these moments. He doesn’t mention his own heavily dropped hints or the lavish brochures that somehow find their way to New Hampshire or the friends who have told key Democrats to “hold off " while he makes up his mind. He suggests that the weak economy or the receding of the Persian Gulf crisis or disgust with Congress have brought him to the fore. “There was a long time when I was irrelevant,” he says, not quite wistfully. “Now, whether justified or not, I’m not irrelevant.”
Some longtime Cuomo watchers, diving into the deep waters of pop psychobiography, think he is so distrustful of his ambition that he would accept the nomination only if forced to do so. “He wants a brokered convention in New York and then coronation in Madison Square Garden with 18,000 people chanting ‘Mario!”’ says one observer of his ways. “Only then will he have trumped his ambition. Only then will he not have mocked his God.”
The irony is that Cuomo may be precisely what he says he is: an uncertain man in the spotlight. “There is no secret plan!” he declares. Rumors that he is on the verge of announcing are “not true. Nothing is true!” he says. “Nothing is true!” The task, the message, the campaign, will be taken up by other Democrats if he doesn’t run, he says. In the space of three days last week he begged off appearing on the Sunday talk shows, then said he wanted to do them, then decided he didn’t want to do them. “I am not significant!” he says, almost shouting. If he isn’t careful–and if he says no yet again–his own party may decide to believe him.
