The Machismo Piety of Mario Cuomo

...But there is still something laws, a few neighbors from down the street...

...Show me a wagon train that did not know it was moving through dangerous territory...

...He rarely even sat with his family at meals, preferring to remain on duty behind the counter (the family, of course, living upstairs...

...Also, as the governor and the editor both knew and the rest of the country would soon find out, Mario Cuomo was the fieriest orator the Democratic party has had since William Jennings Bryan...

...Is he, Mario Cuomo, certain that this is not happening to him...

...But everything big in life is a long shot...

...Then the freak newspaper poll that showed him leading: followed instantly by beaming faces, glad hands, money, endorsements, wellwishers, upbeat press and television...

...Now it so happens that I am a very patriotic American, and I think we are one people, and have great obligations to one another, as well as obligations to our country as a whole, to defend it, for example, and keep it safe...

...The whole family worked, Poppa, Momma, the five kids, and Poppa Cuomo worked 15 to 17 hours a day, seven days a week...

...There is evidence that, for all his talk of the "family of New York," and now the "family of America," he himself, in the Mezzogiorno manner, trusts few people hot related to him by blood or marriage...

...He enjoys waking before the 5:30 alarm and lying in quiet contemplation, sometimes rising, tak16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 ing some notes, then returning to bed...

...Is he certain he is going through all this to serve the people...

...But, sure enough, a minute or two earlier or later in the same San Francisco speech, Cuomo was crying, " O f course Democrats are for a strong defense...

...But Koch, his nemesis, fresh from a triumphant reelection as mayor with the nominations of both the Democratic and Republican parties, decided to have a go at the governorship, too...

...This habit of Cuomo's so baffled Ken Auletta, a columnist of the New York Daily News, that in a long, detailed, scrupulously fair-minded magazine arA Pirates' scout wrote that the 20-year-old center-fielder Mario Cuomo: " . . . is aggressive and plays h a r d . . , will run over you if you get in his way...

...The answer here is yes...

...And I suspect that it might have been this quality, as much as anything he actually said, that electrified the Moscone Center in San Francisco...

...The plain fact is that the utopian leftists who have captured what was once a strong, patriotic Democratic party are not tough enough for wagon trains...

...So, long before the world had ever heard of Geraldine Ferraro, let alone a reai-estatenik named John Zaccaro, everyone in the Democratic high command knew that the biggest comer in the party was New York governor Mario Cuomo...

...Unlike other immigrant groups, such as the Jews or Irish, family bonds among ItalianAmericans from the Mezzogiorno (south) were so tight that a son who went to college instead of helping Momma and Poppa at the family store was sometimes thought to be a bad son...

...The "Family of America" Mario Cuomo is talking about is of necessity no family at all but a giant, impersonal state--a state which is to some degree destructive of family...

...Even Cuomo's own daughter telling him he was on an "ego trip...

...Now the "committed" delegates at the Democratic Convention were not really committed, and Gary Hart's whips were busy trying to strip away delegates from Mondale in preparation for a call from Hart for a "conscience" vote: Which of us, Hart would ask, has a better chance of beating the incumbent...

...Queens...

...In 1977, at Governor Hugh Carey's request, he took a shot at the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City and got another thumping, this time from the popular Ed Koch...

...But whether he is fooling himself or just fooling others, I have my own opinion of Mario Cuomo: He is the most talented demagogue on the political scene...

...For the family of America...

...Show me a wagon train where a man didn't know that his best friend was his Winchester rifle...

...For with all his concern for the "redistribution" of wealth, Cuomo, to judge by his writings and speeches, has given very little thought to the process by which wealth is actually created...

...I had to cut it...

...It is ticle on Cuomo he wondered if the man was consciously deluding others--a practice common enough among politicians--or if he was in fact self-deluded...

...The only trouble was that word of Cuomo's plan got to the ear of Gary THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 15 Hart who, not unreasonably, decided he'd be damned if he'd peel away Mondale delegates only to hand the convention to that son of a bit-- from New York...

...Which is why you won't have to look for Cuomo in '88...

...Rather than lose 55 menin El Salvador, it appears, she would prefer to fortify our 2,000 mile frontier with Mexico--high watch towers, electrified barriers, land mines, army combat divisions deployed in depth--or perhaps even, why not, lose half a million men at E1 Paso (which really might include her son then...

...I shall pass over Cuomo's remarks about crime (who has been blocking the President's crime bill...

...Politics is a tawdry business...

...Mrs...

...If it had been up to people like them, the West would never have been won...

...But without pausing to compare Ronald Reagan's "safety net" with the far skimpier safety net of Franklin D. Roosevelt, not to mention that of his immediate Democratic predecessor Woodrow Wilson, I would like to point out to Mario Cuomo that no matter how many times he calls America a "family" it is still not a family...

...A family is father, mother, children, grandpa, grandma, some aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins...

...This is not the Democratic party of Harry Truman...

...So you guys didn't hear the f u l l speech...

...Yet there is virtually none of this in Cuomo's Diaries...

...For, strange to recount, the Carter Administration has mysteriously evaporated into thin air...

...Mario's mother possesses the wisdom of the folk, his roots...

...When Mario Cuomo set out to become governor of New York in 1982, he confesses that he "needed a new way to describe my political philosophy," a fresh way to make people sit up and listen and not conclude, since he'd been in Albany for years, that he was "somehow out of date...

...His most prized moments, when not with his family, are when he is alone: working, reading, keeping his diary, thinking, planning...

...was to become N.Y...

...On the other hand, Mario Cuomo is not likely to fall victim to the bright lights and fleshpots that tarnished the image of his predecessor, Governor Carey...

...I learned to recognize the sound," writes Cuomo...

...Well, you see, Cuomo had this dazzling plan...

...His wife Matilda is so much better at all this than he, Mario, so much better at winning over a crowd...

...But Mario Cuomo is nothing if not self-contradictory...

...Everyone told him to pull out...

...But by far the most distinctive quality of the Diaries is their tone...

...It's not there...

...course Democrats believe that there are times that we must stand and fight...

...S i n c e wealth and the trappings of grandeur clearly leave him cold, what, then, makes Mario run...

...After the roof-raising ovation, the cheers still thundering in his ears, he went back to joking with the television reporters again, "What you guys missed was a really terrific word I made up...

...Cuomo's race against Republican Lewis Lehrman was close...

...Now this is such a pathetically reductive argument as to convince only the neo-pacifist, "ostrich" wing of the Democratic party gathered in San Francisco...

...Effective government must be a matter of compromise and mediation...

...Show me a wagon train that wasn't made up of people who were tough, disciplined, hard-working, and well armed...

...Show me a wagon train that did not pray to Almighty God...

...Is that a word?.' they ask me...

...So I look it up in the dictionary...

...With a superb sense of timing, and humor, he could carefully raise emotional intensity and deliver with spine-tingling feeling lines no other Democrat could even get past his lips...

...He has been known to sleep as little as an hour and a half during the campaign and to wake raring to go to those debates, television appearances, interviews, strategy sessions...

...Mario Cuomo likes to talk about the "mosaic of America," but his speech was a scintillating mosaic o f demagoguery from one end ~to the other...

...A few years ago, in a widely read Reader's Digest article, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak asked of Kemp, "Is he the GOP's future...

...If he THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 17 were to contemplate the history of even his own family he would realize that what lifted them from the hopeless poverty of Italy's Mezzogiorno was not government hand-outs but relentless hard work in the dynamic free-enterprise economy of this new America, where, as they say, a rising tide was lifting all boats...

...In the introduction to his Diaries he says it right out: "The traditional principles of the Democratic party came closer to giving political content to [the Christian] ideal than the tenets o f the Republicans...

...His daughters, too, are splendid--even the one who leaves him flat in the middle of the campaign to go about her business, get married, and set off on her honeymoon...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984...

...He still lives in Queens in the $28,000 house he bought long before he became a public figure...

...He found the notion in the most extraordinarily obvious place, he says, "in the idea of 'family.' " It became the theme of his campaign: "The Family of New York...

...A demagogue he definitely is...

...To the surprise of many, the strategy provided the margin of victory...

...Show me a wagon train that allowed its criminals to wander around committing new crimes...

...His son, Andrew, is also so much more talented than his s so gifted, so hard-working...

...Mario Cuomo's parents, on the other hand, were illiterate peasants with no skills, and Poppa Cuomo spent the first four years of his life in America digging sewers...

...But suppose Cuomo succeeded in setting the conRichard Grenier is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations...

...After explaining in his Diaries that what led him to the Democratic party was his "Christian ethic" and his idea of the family-seemingly intransigent beliefs--he adds that even more basic than these, the "essence of my political philosophy," is "reasonableness...

...Show me a wagon train that had ablebodied adults not working...

...not to mention the uncanny disappearance o f the C a r t e r Administration...

...O f this that has led him at key points in his career to ringing and strident proclamation of his position--after which he in effect sits down at the table and says, "Okay, boys, let's cut a deal...

...When approached by television correspondents just before he delivered his keynote address in San Francisco, and knowing full well it was going to be a dynamite speech, he said (with the nation listening), "Aw you guys from New York have heard it all before...

...Francis of Assisi as a spiritual member of the Demo• cratic party is taking a pretty long lead...

...If they'd only let me keep that word I made up, then you'd have really heard a speech...

...He'll be there...

...The Diaries are filled with elaborate praise for his colRandom House, $19.95...

...For the love of God...

...Kemp is where the voters are, and where they are likely to be for many years more...

...leagues and supporters, particularly members of his own family...

...Hart: a synthetic man, ashamed of his roots, a man who changed his name, age, religion, accent, handwriting, and tried to fabricate a military record...

...And I would suggest that he reflect on the fact that at a recent dinner of the National ItalianAmerican Foundation attended, highly exceptionally, by all four presidential and vice-presidential candidates, President Reagan was greeted with a tumultuous, standing ovation and cries of "'Four more years...

...I have h~ard or read dozens of Cuomo's speeches by now, and, failing as he does to perceive any dangers at all in the modern mega-state, he rarely gets through a campaign address without a reference to the Republican party (certainly Reagan Republicans) as "social Darwinians" dedicated to the "survival of the fittest," as if his potent New York state Republican rival Jack Kemp proposed to leave the unemployed to starve to death...

...He called press conferences and no one came...

...He first came to public attention during two particularly nasty subsidized-housing disputes, in New York City's Forest Hills and then at Coop City, where he proved himself a superb mediator...

...The low ratings in the polls...

...I n a recent column musing on the 1988 Republican presidential race, David Broder placed Jack Kemp's name in a list that included among others George Bush, Howard Baker, and Robert Dole...

...It is amazing how much backbiting of his rivals Cuomo slipped into the press without getting the reputation of being a rat...

...Whereupon Cuomo thought up the most diabolically clever, if bizarre, strategy to be seen at the hustings in quite a while: Get Two for the Price of One--Keep Koch as Mayor, Cuomo for Governor...

...As another Italian emigrant, a fellow named Buonaparte (original spelling) once said: De l'audace, de l'audace, toujours de l'audace...

...Although the question is well worth asking, I do not think in Cuomo's case we are likely to come up with a clear answer...

...So this was Cuomo's plan: a "draft Cuomo" movement...

...Cuomo's recently published Diaries: The Campaign f o r Governor ~ make fascinating reading: The dismal beginnings when he had painfully few supporters because of his image as a "loser...

...about the present Administration having "no real commitment to our friends" (which party wants to throw Central America to the dogs...

...They stick with their patron (or "rabbi" as it's called in New York) until they see their main chance...

...Say what you will, in a sneaky way I kind of like the guy...

...The Diaries, although replete with the nitty-gritty of practical politics, conjure up a dominant image of a humble Mario Cuomo rising before dawn and, day after day, filling out his application for sainthood...

...Cuomo's speeches are far more impressive listened to than read...

...Unlike that pseudo-ethnic, Geraldine Ferraro, who went to a boarding school in Tarrytown for rich Catholic girls, married well, and sent her daughters to private schools for rich Episcopalian girls, Mario Cuomo is the genuine article...

...Once in cold print, their incoherencies, non sequiturs, and hackneyed phrases lie there dead on the page, and one realizes just how magnetic his presence and delivery must be in order to bring audiences to a fever pitch, as he has been known to do time and again "in the clutch...

...And there weren't enough Yuppies to elect a President anyway...

...How disloyal...

...Another is the sense of physical and intellectual energy he conveys...

...Is he living up to the injunctions of Teilhard de Chardin--referred to ceaselessly as his moral guide...

...What is noteworthy is that Kemp is the only one of that group who could lay claim to the Reagan constituency...

...about Reagan "escalating into a frenzy the nuclear arms race" (who has been moving three SS-20 missiles a week into Eastern Europe and violating what arms agreements we have...

...New Yorkers could keep their beloved Mayor Koch, and yet get this capable, diligent, effective public servant for governor: Mario Cuomo...

...On the scale of Queens, it was like Amy Carter running for mayor of Plains...

...The first polls showed Cuomo trailing Koch by 35 points...

...Consequently, Cuomo carries about inside him the most cunningly disguised competitiveness in town...

...But Cuomo wasn't going to run on the bottom half of a losing ticket...

...The Mezzogiorno remains in Cuomo in the way he spends his little spare time: with his family, his blood kin, inHart decided he'd be damned if he'd peel away Mondale delegates only to hand the convention to that son of a bit-- from New York...

...Bad Catholic...

...If the primaries were held today, all the others would be contending for votes in what might be called the Gerald Ford wing of the party--and Kemp would have about as clear a shot at the nomination as any non-incumbent in recent memory...

...And there is no doubt that Mario Cuomo is telling the truth when he says that this awareness has never left him...

...Cuomo's incendiary speech to the San Francisco convention was certainly a triumph of style over substance...

...Although appointed by Carey as N.Y...

...For every case that came before the court he prepared an exhaustive brief, and studied long hours...

...Secretary of State, a largely honorific post, how could he or anyone else foresee that the next year Mary Jo Krupsak, the woman who had beaten him for lieutenant governor, would decide at the last minute to challenge Carey for the governorship...

...And just recently, in San Francisco, he stretched the idea even further until it became: "The Family of America...

...What, then, was Governor Cuomo's main chance...

...With the Krupsak slate defeated, and Cuomo now lieutenant governor, who could have predicted that four years later, in 1982, Carey would have slipped so badly in the polls that he would choose not to run again...

...Good Catholic...

...Richard Grenier THE MACHISMO PIETY OF MARIO CUOMO Well, at least he's not Geraldine Zaccaro...

...Open 'round the clock, the store served the workmen on night shifts at the factory down the street, providing hero sandwiches, and was the neighborhood grocery by day...

...The local office holders who told him quite openly that they could not afford to endorse someone who would probably lose-particularly with Koch's welladvertised reputation for vindictiveness...

...Barring only the possibility that George Bush succeeds to the presidency before 1988, Kemp will be the Republican nominee four years hence...

...In his discussion of the government's "redistributive function," he writes, "ten years of Vincentian t r a i n i n g . . . only reinforced my conviction that if St...

...Francis of Assisi than "laws written by Darwin," I should remind the governor that if we were to take Saint Francis as our model, with all the reverence that is the saint's due, we would become a nation o f . holy beggars--a platform I would not like to have to campaign on, nor would Governor Cuomo...

...A long shot, you say...

...Instead they are filled with self-criticism, and most distinctively with examinations of congcience...

...Stalemate...

...Scrimping for every penny, he finally opened a tiny grocery story in South Jamaica, about Mario Cuomo which suggests the young and determined ballplayer stepping out onto the field...

...Not that Cuomo was always a winner...

...It's going to be boring...

...Now the country at the moment is filled with people pointing their fingers and crying, "Bad Christian...

...A weak speaker, he trembled like a tuning fork under attacks from Battling Fritz Mondale...

...By contrast to the other two, Cuomo: strongly masculine, forceful, not in the least ashamed of his roots, but who, to the contrary, could express a blazing patriotism for America still quite general among recent immigrants...

...How could Cuomo do such a perfidious thing...

...State Supreme Court Justice Ferraro...

...How unworthy he himself is, perhaps...

...Finally, his populist appeal to blue collar and minority constituencies has been so clear, so demonstrably effective, that no opponent, Democratic or Republican, would have much of a chance to indict him as antipoor, anti-black, anti-labor, and so on...

...For the love of this great nation...

...To judge from his rhetoric Mario Cuomo has not quite absorbed the point expressed with such succinctness by Paul Johnsor~in his Modern Times, that the dominant political fact of the twentieth century is the development of the mega-state, and that the power of the mega-state to do good has grown slowly and ambiguously, while its power to do evil has expanded with awesome speed...

...Reagan lacked before 1980...

...Mondale: called "polenta" by Cuomo's mother, which John Glenn translated into "mush...

...But when in power he delegates authority with difficulty...

...Nor is it the Democratic party of John F. Kennedy ("We will pay any p r i c e . . . " ) , but it is the national Democratic party of today...

...His career in baseball, although shorter, was not dissimilar...

...But I don't know whether it's the humor, the masculine personality, the combativeness, or just the old ballplayer in him: There is something about Mario Cuomo that makes me feel that when the time came, and all the present leading wimps of the Democratic party were running like rabbits--the Mondales, Ferraros, Harts, and Kennedys --Mario Cuomo would stand his ground and fight...

...As for Cuomo's wild pronouncement that he would rather live under laws written by St...

...Once at the hustings, however, Cuomo's self-deprecating streak takes a completely different form...

...I n the Italian-American context, Mario Cuomo is an odd case of firstgeneration acculturation...

...I will go further...

...No pat phrases, he says, no canned solutions, no ideology, no Scylla, no Charybdis...

...Compare the three men, after all...

...In the years before law school, when Cuomo played pro baseball with a farm club of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Pirates' scout wrote to Branch Rickey of 20-year-old center-fielder Mario Cuomo, "Potentially the best prospect on the c l u b . . , is aggressive and plays h a r d . . , will run over you if you get in his way...

...for himself, for being governor of the country's second largest state, and for being a representative of those Northeast blue-collar "ethnics" that the Democrats absolutely had to win back from Reagan if they were to have any chance at all of winning the election...

...A fourth is the fact that, unlike the prepresidential Ronald Reagan, his public record is not weighted down with items that could be stigmatized as "extremist...

...But many politicians enter with this noble goal, no doubt, and end up pursuing power in sheer hypocrisy...

...He had been asked to give the much-awaited keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in San Francisco, which he took, correctly, as an indication of the high esteem in which he was held in the party...

...Jimmy Carter seems to have been a fellow Fritz Mondale once ran int0 in an elevator...

...But Cuomo is a highly intelligent man, and one thing he has certainly retained from his Catholic upbringing is that pride is a sin, and Christian humility a virtue...

...l[n 1974 he first ran for Lieutenant Governor of New York State and was trounced...

...The only moral and godly justification for entering it would be to serve the people...

...But as Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia observed tartly in a speech to the House the following week, there is no " o f course" to it...

...But Mario was very good at school, as well as at baseball, so he attended the local Saint John's College, then Saint John's law school, where he split top honors with another classmate and won a clerkship at the N.Y...

...But you must admit that a man who claims St...

...I pass over his remarks because there is something that comes across about Mario Cuomo that seems to have nothing to do with his words at all...

...And it was only when, at last, his eldest son Andrew was old enough to run a campaign--the 1982 race for governor --that Mario Cuomo found a campaign manager he could place his faith in...

...The answer one is tempted to give is: power in its most naked form...

...The difficulty in raising money...

...Cuomo decided to havea shot at the governorship himself...

...Would not a "draft Cuomo" movement appear like a whirlwind...

...The effective, wellreceived speeches with not a line of coverage in the press...

...Granted, the others mentioned by Broder would far outpoll him among the media people, but that hardly seems a decisive handicap...

...Though he falls short of Ronald Reagan as a communicator (who doesn't...

...At this point it looked as if Cuomo's political career might well be over...

...A related advantage is that, by the time the primary season rolls around in 1987, he will have had sixteen years of service in Congress...

...Overnight people who before wouldn't have given him the time of day began to telephone: Mondale, Moynihan, Kennedy...

...he has several key strengths that even Mr...

...His wife Matilda constantly reminded him during his lieutenant governorship that it was not illegal nor even frowned upon for him to continue his private law practice during the off season--imagine the clients he could get...

...Or that, three days before the state's Democratic convention, Carey would ask Cuomo to join him on the ticket in her place...

...they would do well to steer clear of them, even as metaphors...

...I just can't see him arguing for the kind of social Darwinism [Republican] that has been thrust upon us in recent years...

...In the closing months of 1984, it is perhaps not inappropriate to point out that no matter how many times the hero of George OrweU's most famous novel calls his national leader "Big Brother," he is still not his brother...

...about our "stagnating" economy (where have those seven million new jobs come from...

...When you take your child to a daycare center you are not leaving him with your sister but with a stranger, and the kind of care this stranger will provide your child is anybody's guess...

...Mario realized fairly early that his father was simply giving his life so that his children would have a better one in this new world, this America...

...Ferraro's father was the proprietor of two flourishing commercial enterprises, and her cousin, State Senator Ferraro, later Queens District Attorney Ferraro (who oddly enough gave Geraldine her first job as Assistant D.A...

...There are other Democrats who have systematically voted for every defense-weakening amendment...

...about helping' 'Latin American governments that murder nuns" (on whose watch were the nuns murdered, and who began the sending of military aid to El Salvador...

...Although both of their families came from the same region in Italy--Campagna--hers from the back country of Naples, his, thirty miles to the south, from the back country of Salerno, Ferraro had advantages Cuomo never had...

...And, o f course, no endorsements from the p a r t y ' s grandees like Mondale...

...The small number of enthusiastic backers who, when the "invincible" Koch decided to enter the race, grew faint-hearted, their voices becoming wan and wistful on the telephone...

...State Court of Appeals (supreme court) in Albany...

...Selfdeprecation being an indispensable part of every comic's repertoire, Cuomo discovered very early that it was easy for him to make audiences laugh, and, in fact, he has an excellent sense of humor, professional timing, a mastery of the change of pace...

...It was a fiasco...

...He always played hard and played to win, but in his first summer with a Pirate farm club he was beaned by an errant pitch and suffered severe head injuries-head injuries which, he now jokes, "twenty years later drove me into politics...

...Although, among his many antiMondale digs, Cuomo has declared it is a great mistake for the Democratic candidates to mix religion into the political campaign, and although he has spoken in a much attended address at Notre Dame of the necessary separation of church and state, he himself announces blatantly that he joined the Democratic party because of its superior Christian values...

...People who have worked for him assure me that Cuomo, although he usually conceals its rawest aspects, is "combative as all hell...

...For Mario was the new king of the whole Northeast...

...One is his record of leadership on national issues...

...But, to follow the line of reasoning used by Gingrich in the House: Show me a wagon train that had food stamps...

...The trouvaille o f the speech was the metaphor of the wagon train crossing the plains (really just an adaption of his "family" metaphor...

...Mondale knew Cuomo's worth because, before the Great VicePresidential Auditions in North Oaks, Minnesota, he had asked Cuomo not once, but twice, to join him as his running mate...

...Neither could beat Reagan...

...His net assets come to something in the vicinity of $100,000...

...But Cuomo did not find it proper...

...Ideologically and programmatically he stands at the very center of today's Republican consensus...

...But still Cuomo won that one, too, and found himself overnight the hottest new Democrat in the country, Governor of the Empire State...

...Four more years!'" whereas that imitation Wasp Representative Ferraro, although a member of the Foundation's board and despite her Italianate name, received only "warm applause...

...In his first ruri at lieutenant governor, in 1974, he c0uldn't bear to delegate anything at all and served as his own campaign manager, scheduler, and dispatcher...

...Which is why Gary Hart turned into such a lovely person at the end...

...They say honest politicians die poor, and Mario Cuomo is certainly doing his damnedest on this account...

...Good Christian...

...Ferraro seems to be running for the Neville Chamberlain Peace Award, and since her nomination has never once spoken in public fvithout announcing her determination to prevent her 20-year-old son from ever fighting in a wa r, any war...

...If one were to go by his printed speeches one would think that the nuclear freeze, for example, is desirable simply because "life is better than death...

...The Democratic convefition even as Cuomo spoke was in the process of nominating for Vice President a woman who had voted in the House for the Studds Amendment-which would in effect have required our complete withdrawal from Central America...

...How admirable and efficient she is, writes Mario...

...Francis of Assisi were alive today, and was reckless enough to get involved in politics, he would be fighting for some kind of progressivism [Democratic] that sought to help people improve their lives...

...The world sure likes winners...

...He has a definite ascetic streak and luxury tempts him not at all...

...about the deficit (who invented deficit financing and has been in control of the House for the past thirty years...

...One of his most successful modes is that of the unassuming, ordinary fellow, just like you and me...

...vention on fire (which actually happened...

...Suppose Hart prevented Mondale from going over the top on the first ballot, then the second...

...He goes even further...

...let's hope he's not a dangerous one...

...In my experience, opportunism, hypocrisy, pious fraud, self-deception, deliberate deceit, and just plain lying are all ranged on some kind of continuum...

...Almost by definition, autobiographical works by politicians are self-serving, explaining studiously how the author was right and his adversaries wrong...

...There's nothing startling about that--it's everybody else's list as well...

...His recent novel The Marrakesh One-Two will be published in paperback this month by Penguin...

...The telephone on the New York newspaper editor's desk would buzz at 8:30 in the morning...

...It would be Governor Cuomo himself, friendly, chatty, with the latest inside word from the Democratic pollsters that both Mondale and Hart were dead ducks...

...But loyalty among elected officials is a sometime thing...

...There are Democrats in the House who have never in their entire career voted for a defense bill...