Notebook

...I also count it as a plus that the Cuomos ' live in one house, the Executive Mansion in Albany—a small symbol of the modestly normal in a country where recent presidents have several when so many Americans have none...

...It would have been one of the virtues of a Cuomo campaign, especially now that George Bush says he's ready for a "dog-eat-dog fight...

...twitting George Bush about his no-show trip to Japan...

...Could he sidestep the slings and arrows of being a sitting target (the noncandidate candidate that some in the press love to hate seems to invite a daily political roasting...

...and, by keeping New York State's budget impasse in the news, highlighting the need for federal revenue reallocation...

...But it would have been a better campaign were he part of it...

...We need to come to some national consensus on how to see and judge them...

...they could use it...

...There were other virtues to a Cuomo campaign...

...Had Cuomo won the Democratic nomination, George Bush would have been forced to address in substance, and not slogans, some pressing issues: rising unemployment, decaying infrastructure, long-term economic growth, reallocation of national resources from the cold war to the new world order, and yes—still and once again—education of the young...

...Commonweal expects a lot of its subscribers...

...Not everyone is an ardent fan of the governor's philosophical musings and combative style...

...We would have ended, no matter who won, with a more sober sense than is now likely of what's wrong...

...too thin-skinned, they say...

...Demonstrably he has the political guts to point out how little real difference there is, in practice, between the Democratic and Republican agendas as they are played out in Washington...

...Mario Cuomo apparently did not need to run for president, but the country needed him to run...

...Until December 20, I thought Cuomo had been running a brilliant non-campaign campaign—giving the press a hard time...

...Governor Cuomo: Change your mind...

...But issues aren't our only problem...

...Some doubted he could have taken the Democratic nomination...

...I had gotten so used to the "fact" that Cuomo was really running, I had a list of issues, pitfalls, and correctives we would have addressed to the one candidate who publicly admits to reading Commonweal...

...Thinking and talking politics is what presidential campaigns, at least in part, used to be about (cf...

...NOTEBOOK MARIO...PLEASE A SPECIAL OFFER FROM COMMONWEAL The glum faces of my dinner partners after Governor Mario Cuomo's no-go press conference said it all: Mind you, not everyone was a Cuomo enthusiast, but there was deep regret for the campaign-thatmighthave-been...

...Cuomo has the political skill to expose the bankruptcy of at least some of the conservative and some of the liberal responses that aren't working...

...That is better than nothing, than more drift, more paralysis, more bombast...

...Nor are there easy ways out of our economic drift and political paralysis, not from Cuomo, not from any of the candidates...

...Where does this man get his metaphors...

...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS...

...Cuomo probably could not have produced another revolution of political reordering on the scale of FDR or Ronald Reagan, but his words, his ideas, his command of rhetoric would have given us a common language for talking about the combination of structural change and moral renewal that we need at this moment in our history...

...Not everyone felt that, if elected, he could run the country...

...This would be an improvement in a presidential candidate...

...Cuomo offers something else—and this is what was reflected Commonweal 17 January 1992: 5 in the regrets of our dinner table conversation—something this country needs now: intelligence, integrity, the capacity for dispassionate analysis, and a readiness to think politically about how he got to where he stands—on jobs, on moral character, on welfare, on the cosmos, on capital punishment, on teenage pregnancies, on abortion, on running for president...

...he'll never play in Omaha, they claim...

...His political and oratorical skills would have forced his fellow Democrats to sharpen theirs...

...Though some in the media find his thinking-out-loud and thinking-on-his-feet deeply irritating, those who believe politics involves more than image management find his candor and quickness engaging and useful...

...Cuomo clearly does not inspire the passionate and sometimes blind adulation accorded JFK or more recently Ronald Reagan, not from the press not from his constituents...

...He's not always right (his views on the law and abortion will need rethinking after the Supreme Court either overthrows or further limits Roe v. Wade...

...We'll extend your subscription for four more years...

...There may be nothing very useful about making the declared noncandidate the repository of one's hopes for the 1992 campaign...

...Truman, Kennedy, Humphrey-Nixon, and Carter...

...nonetheless he's a political man bent on persuading and convincing people by reason and not by trickery...