Mario Cuomo Still Believes

[deminks]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag-10Cuomo-t.html?_r=1&smid=tw-nytimes&seid=auto

You would think that Mario Cuomo would have been proud to watch his son Andrew sworn in as governor of New York last New Year’s Eve, ascending to the job his old man held for 12 years. Apparently, you would be wrong.

“You really want to know how I felt?” the elder Cuomo asked me last month. I nodded. “Yeah? Everybody says the obvious thing, which is, ‘You must be so proud.’ Matilda” — his wife of nearly 57 years — “says that all the time. ‘I’m so proud of Andrew.’ She says, ‘You never say you’re proud.’

“And I say: ‘Matilda, you want to do me a favor? Let’s go to the dictionary. And you know what I think “proud” means? “Proud” means you’re saying something good about yourself.’ She says, ‘C’mon, what a pain in the . . . ’ — and then she selected a body part of myself that I don’t want to mention. But I think it’s true. In my dictionary, ‘pride’ means that you feel that you have been enhanced by your efforts. So it’s not pride.

Then Cuomo drifted back in time, to the story of his father the ditch digger and his bride, immigrants who lost a son, also named Mario, because there were no city hospitals. Back to his own birth, assisted by midwife, behind the family grocery store. Back to Ellis Island and the absurdity of the proposition that he or his son might have come to occupy the highest office in the nation’s third-most-populous state. “I somehow stumbled through and became a governor,” he told me. “I’ve told you that story. It was all luck. Luck and nothing else.”

(snip)

Did that mean, I asked, that Mario Cuomo, who strongly opposed Clintonian compromises like the welfare-reform law of 1996, had come at last to appreciate triangulation?

“No,” he said quickly, shifting a bit in his swivel chair. Then, more softly, “I’m still a liberal, I guess.”

(end snip)

I don't care why this man refused the presidency or the Supreme Court. He will always speak for me. Me too, Mario. I'm still a liberal.

[n2doc]

1. Too bad it did't rub off on his son n/t

[ThomCat]

2. Yes. It really sucks that his son is

taking Koch money and taking the entire state to the right. :grr:

That bastard could have been the good of Spitzer without the bad.

Instead we have far worse than the worst of Spitzer with very little, or any, of the good that we got from Spitzer, and we get to watch as Cuomo sells out the entire state for what he thinks will be his own political advancement.

:nuke:

Anyone who takes Koch money should be eliminated from politics and replaced immediately. I wish we had known that Cuomo was polluted with Koch money, and so damned much of it. I wish we had known early enough so that we could have tossed him out on his ass and replaced him with a real democratic candidate in this state and put someone in office who really would have represented all of the democrats here in New York.

Cuomo clearly has no intent or interest in representing anyone but himself and the Koch's.

[Enthusiast]

3. Koch money = pariah status.

That is all.

[Overseas]

4. Wonderful article.

Thank you for posting it. Feels good to visit with the inspiring liberal who believed in building our best government rather than just the cheapest.