Appreciation: For reporters, Cuomo was brilliant, frustrating
David Colton, USA TODAYPublished 11:44 p.m. ET Jan. 1, 2015 | Updated 6:58 a.m. ET Jan. 2, 2015
Mario Cuomo, the three-term New York governor and father of the current governor Andrew Cuomo, died Thursday at the age of 82. VPC
(Photo: AP)
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Former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who died Thursday at the age of 82, was a lawyer, a father, almost a major league ballplayer and one of the most spellbinding politicians the nation has ever seen.
Reporters who covered the Democrat from Queens in the 1980s treated him with almost rock star reverence, recalling his speeches the way others remember concerts. They'd swap stories on how the power of his oratory could sway even the most hostile audiences.
The death penalty, which he blocked as governor in New York for 12 years, was a "stain on our conscience," he'd tell skeptical audiences of district attorneys, even as Son of Sam and fear ran rampant on New York streets.
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Mario Cuomo dead at 82
Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo kisses his father, Mario Cuomo, as he celebrates after defeating Republican challenger Rob Astorino at Democratic election headquarters in New York on Nov. 4, 2014. Kathy Willens, AP
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Mario Cuomo dead at 82
Former N.Y. governor Mario Cuomo dies at 82
"The death penalty is wrong because it lowers us all," he wrote in The Daily News. "It is a surrender to the worst that is in us. (It) has never elevated a society, never brought back a life, never inspired anything but hate."
It was that appeal to conscience and morality that raised him above other politicians, and enabled him to challenge popular incumbent President Reagan in a memorable keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention.
"There is despair, Mr. President," Cuomo said defiantly, "in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit, in your shining city."
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Cuomo never made a presidential run himself. His hesitations in 1988 and especially 1992 earned him the mocking nickname, "Hamlet on the Hudson,'' and there is a generation of reporters who still debate why, in the end, he didn't make a try.
"I said I didn't want to run for president,'' Cuomo told the unsatisfied reporters. "I didn't ask you to believe me.''
Words mattered to Cuomo. He would call reporters to complain that his position had not been explained in print quite precisely enough to satisfy his "trial lawyer'' precision. His wife Matilda, he joked, "says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.''
And when explaining why, as a Roman Catholic, he opposed abortion but would not try to change laws in New York, he said, "The price of seeking to force my beliefs on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.''
The smarter-than-thou wordplay could be frustrating — "I talk and talk and talk,'' he acknowledged —- and his record in New York never quite lived up to his soaring rhetoric.
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But for a generation he was the ultimate Democrat, a progenitor of fertile communicators Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and a fierce liberal who nonetheless earned the respect of his political opponents, then and now.
"My father is in this room. He is in the heart and mind of every person who is here," his son, current New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during his inaugural address, the same day his father died.
It's probably true that many, maybe most Americans, aren't in that political room and never agreed with Mario Cuomo's compassionate vision of morality and state. But when he spoke, his voice filling every corner of the hall, the nation at least stopped and listened.