"Mario Cuomo, 3-Term Governor, Father and Eloquent Liberal Beacon, Dies at 82"
"Mario Cuomo, 3-Term Governor, Father and Eloquent Liberal Beacon, Dies at 82"
Can you tell which newspaper wrote that hagiographic headline?
"In the end, two images of Mr. Cuomo endure. The first is of him, as governor, commanding the lectern at the 1984 Democratic convention, stilling a sea of delegates with his oratory. The second is of two chartered airplanes on the tarmac at the Albany airport in December 1991, waiting to fly him to New Hampshire to pay the $1,000 filing fee that would put his name on the state’s Democratic primary ballot for president.
Mr. Cuomo, whose tortuous deliberations over whether to seek the White House had led pundits to call him 'Hamlet on the Hudson,' put the decision off until 90 minutes before the 5 p.m. filing deadline. Then he emerged from the Executive Mansion to announce to a news conference at the Capitol that he would not run. The demands of negotiating a stalled state budget, he said, prevented him entering the race."
Did you remember that he was a centerfielder who started playing minor league baseball was he was just 19? He sucked at it compared to the genuine prospects, but he was good enough to get into the pro ranks for one youthful summer, showing talent that many of us would have traded ten years of our lives for, and he might have done much better if he hadn't been beaned with a fastball that damaged his optic nerve.
I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but Cuomo was the perfect example of the "Progressive" left's fatal weakness for cults of personality and the power of rhetoric over accomplishment and qualifications. Just as with Obama, a lot of people wanted to make him the freakin' President just because he delivered a speech that left their seats damp. Also just as with Obama, if you go back and read those speeches off the page without the dramatic delivery, you'll be stunned at how utterly empty they are, just clouds of verbiage spun out of cotton candy.
ReplyDeleteThank God, Cuomo's own dithering saved us from his presidency. If it had been anything like his governance of New York, it would've been a disaster (Howard Stern even ran to replace him, arguing that a shock jock with only three planks in his platform would be a major improvement). I was living in CT and working down in NYC during the Cuomo/Dinkins era, and anyone who didn't experience that hellish time doesn't realize what a miracle turnaround was wrought by Giuliani, Pataki, et al. Now, the voters of New York, in their infinite wisdom, have forgotten what it used to be like and elected Cuomo Jr. and Dinkins Jr. Another weakness of Progressives is that they cannot remember the past and keep dooming the rest of us to repeat it.