Sunday, March 23, 2008
Mario Cuomo: Views on the Election Process
The ANNOTICO Report
Cuomo thinks the country needs a new type of political debate. The problem is that "party political conventions are purely theatrical". "You exaggerate your virtues and the other team’s vices," "But it’s a con game. What I would like to see is an unconventional convention."
Cuomos vision of an "unconventional convention" is that, a few weeks before the general election, each presidential candidate, and his or her team of potential cabinet secretaries, should come together for an entire weekend and discuss the big issues facing the country in marathon series of televised debates. "We want their prepared answer," a goal that jars with my journalistic instincts, "we dont want to catch them off guard. What we want is the truth."
Cuomo lists "the big issues", as the war in Iraq, healthcare, education, the environment and nuclear power, the national debt and the weak economy. He has some interesting views on the influence of the President on the US Economy. I only partially agree.
Lunch with the FT: Mario Cuomo
Financial Times
By Chrystia Freeland
March 21 2008
Mario
Cuomo knew exactly where he wanted to have lunch with the FT - "Piano
Due", a restaurant a few steps from his law office....and this comfortable
dining room is a favourite because it is Italian in a way that is familiar and
important to him.
Manhattans Italian food is northern Italian, fancy Italian," he tells me. "But most of the Italian Americans, came here for economic reasons", and so most of the Italian Americans are from south of Rome and thats Naples, Salerno, Sicily, all of those places. That food is more robust, more flavourful.
At a moment when US politics is focused on race, gender and class, this reference to the subtler distinction of ethnic community is a useful reminder that "white", African American" and "Hispanic" are not the only self-definitions which matter to Americans.
Once Cuomo organises our lunch, inevitably, the next thing on the menu is the election, a subject Cuomo, who used to be mooted as possible presidential candidate himself and who gave the speech nominating Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic convention, is following avidly. He starts by telling me that he has advised Chris Matthews, the MSNBC anchor who has been one of the more prominent chroniclers of the race [full disclosure - I sometimes appear on his show], to "stop drinking that black coffee".
I brace myself for an anti-journalist diatribe. But Cuomo surprises me, going on to say of Matthews: "I love him, I think hes a great guy, hes very smart." He also turns out to be a fan of NBCs "excellent" Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert: "They [both] really love the game and that shows in the way they go at it. Theres no smooth aloofness in what they do."
In Cuomos view, "if you want somebody to get the information out of someone, Tim does that as well or better than anybody", a skill that was on display during a recent Clinton-Obama debate when Russert raised tougher issues than either of the candidates. It turns out that the television journalist cut his teeth in politics working for Cuomo: "He was my counsel and he was my first PR guy, but it would have been an insult to call him a PR guy."
What Cuomo really wants to talk about, though, is not pundits or PR, but "the issues" and his belief that more "truly big ones" will be at stake this November than in "any presidential campaign in modern history since Kennedy/Nixon". For that reason, Cuomo thinks the country needs a new type of political debate. The problem, he says, is that "party political conventions are purely theatrical". (Our lunch took place before it became clear that a "purely theatrical" convention might become a highly desirable, and possibly unachievable, dream for Cuomos Democrats.) "You exaggerate your virtues and the other teams vices," Cuomo told me. "But its a con game. What I would like to see is an unconventional convention."
Cuomos vision of an "unconventional convention" is that, a few weeks before the general election, each presidential candidate, and his or her team of potential cabinet secretaries, should come together for an entire weekend and discuss the big issues facing the country in marathon series of televised debates. "We want their prepared answer," Cuomo says, a goal that jars with my journalistic instincts, "we dont want to catch them off guard. What we want is the truth."
I am not the first journalist Cuomo has shared this proposal with and he tells me, with real surprise, that when he described the idea to a cable television executive his retort was, "well, how do you pay for this?" Cuomo knows for sure that wouldnt be a problem: "Are you kidding? You think the first time, you dont think everybody would want to be involved in it?" Fortunately for me, this turns out to be a rhetorical question.
Before long, we are back on the safer ground of how the political battle is actually being waged. Cuomo reminds me several times that he hasnt endorsed anyone, although he says the Clinton campaign called seeking his support. But given his historic ties to the Clinton family and his dynastys endorsement - in the person of his son Andrew, the New York attorney general - of Senator Clinton, it is hard not to suspect that the former governor leans in that direction, too.
He permits himself a moment of regret for Clintons poor performance in the 11 contests she lost between February 5 and March 4. "Shed be ahead now, Im sure, if shed just shown up in all those races," he tells me. Like many of Clintons public supporters, he also cant resist criticising the strategy that kept her from effectively competing in so many places: "What struck me and a lot of other simple-minded people was how come youre not contesting all of these states? Why is he there and youre not there? Why does he have money and you dont?"
Executive ability has been an important issue in the race so far, and Barack Obama has told his backers to judge his potential for the Oval Office in part by how he manages his effort to get there. But Cuomo is quick to insist that Clinton should bear no personal blame for her campaigns stumbles. "You dont manage your own campaign," he tells me. "So no, I wouldnt say it has anything to do with her."
[RAA: But Mario, Hillary chose the people who did manage the campaign. What does that say about her judgment???]
Cuomo is getting animated, but he is also enough of a politician to realise this isnt at all what he wanted to talk about. He firmly steers us back to his preferred subject of "the big issues". He runs through the list: the war in Iraq, healthcare, education, the environment and nuclear power, the national debt and the weak economy. It is a familiar list, but Cuomo offers a few twists. My favourite is his admission, offered almost in passing, that no political leader can make his country rich. "No president creates economic prosperity," Cuomo says. "Roosevelt didnt end the depression with his alphabet program. The war ended the depression. The almost inevitable irony is that if you are a president or for that matter a governor you get credit for whatever happens while youre there and you get blamed for whatever happens while youre there."
One of Cuomos most famous political lines is his assertion that "you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose". It is a phrase a lot of people are quoting at the moment, including the man who coined it. The line is apt today, Cuomo believes, because the nation is hungrier than usual for political poetry. And Obama, Cuomo concedes, is doing a great job crafting it.
Obama can give a speech," Cuomo tells me. '"Hes very, very strong personally. His persona is wonderful, just like Reagan. Reagan went out there and said, Morning in America [his campaign message], were going to change everything. Thats all he had to say because everybody was unhappy with the previous period. So theyre unhappy with the previous period now." But, in an argument that is not a million miles away from Clintons "solutions, not speeches" line of attack, Cuomo thinks poetry without prose is dangerous for America: "Nobody promised better than Reagan and what he offered us was an utter failure."
Instead, Cuomo thinks American voters are ready for a politician prepared to diagnose the countrys ills and offer specific remedies, even if they dont taste very good: "Im hoping that we dont have another Morning in America situation. Im hoping we have a general election in which Clinton or Obama say, look, were going to offer details and specifics. Were going to trust the American people to reward us for our honesty and our candour. And heres the price youre going to pay, Mr and Mrs America. It may be about time we started paying a price.
...I take my chance to ask Cuomo one of the big political questions of the year " whether race or gender will determine the election. Cuomos answer is instant and enthusiastic: "I honestly, objectively conclude, a good Greek-American could have won: Dukakis. A good Italian could have won: Giuliani - given the correction of certain moves. A good Irishman: obviously Kennedy. A good black " I dont think theres any question." A woman? "Absolutely."
This cheerful certainty that America "is open to excellence of all kinds" leads us back to where we began our meal " the importance of immigrants and their communities. "The greatest gift the country has had is waves, generations of immigrants, who came here from all over the globe, all of them bringing their own special gift," Cuomo tells me. He is not one of the people who thinks the resulting multiculturalism is a dirty word: They called the United States the melting pot for the newcomers. Presumably a melting pot was supposed to somehow boil away their cultural distinctions and produce some kind of bland uniformity " I always thought that the better analogy would be to the mosaic, a church window."
It is a good moment to conclude, because Cuomo turns out to be working on a series of childrens books about the cultures of Americas different ethnic communities. After lunch, he steers me to his nearby office to give me two copies of another childrens book he has written, which he signs for my young daughters....
Chrystia Freeland is the FTs US managing editor
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