Hamlet in Albany

...Cuomo began to receive media coverage and the support of journalists like Jimmy Breslin and Jack Newfield in the late 1960s, when he mediated two acrimonious disputes in his native borough of Queens...

...He is unlikely to encounter much worse...

...Like his Catholic predecessor Hugh Carey, Cuomo has repeatedly vetoed legislative attempts to restore the death penalty, despite widespread majorities in favor of capital punishment...

...Ed Koch, who had sworn at the Wailing Wall that his ambition soared no higher than perpetual occupancy of Gracie Mansion, was full of hubris in the wake of his triumphant 1981 re-election as mayor and decided that his public wanted him to be governor after all...

...I'm glad I am an atheist...

...In a TV debate Cuomo unmistakably raised the gay issue, an ethical lapse that even his worshipful chronicler deplores...

...It is true that in a long speech at Notre Dame, Cuomo did publicly address the problem of reconciling his role as a faithful Roman Catholic communicant with his duty as chief executive of a wildly diverse assortment of Jews, Protestants, Greek Orthodox Catholics, Buddhists, Moslems, agnostics, and atheists...

...The 1982 gubernatorial race transformed Cuomo into a winner and a national figure...

...McElvaine's case for Cuomo is as unpersuasive as it is familiar...

...He has cut taxes in an expanding state economy and increased state aid to public schools, but these popular and fiscally safe measures hardly required political courage or vision...

...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman As Michael S. Dukakis advances inexorably to the Democratic nomination, despite or possibly because of his carefully concealed charisma and programmatic vagueness, and the Jackson campaign begins to disintegrate into the chaos of movement politics, the horde of Cuomo-for-president enthusiasts— among them the author of this biography—has all but dispersed...

...In a celebrated Playboy interview, Koch delivered himself of the judicious view that residence in the suburbs was a living death, devoid of more exciting diversions than driving to Sears in a pickup truck to select gingham dresses...

...Certainly Cuomo has not been constrained by consistency...

...It was not his finest hour...

...Forest Hills Diary, the book he produced about the second skirmish, was engagingly written and well received by reviewers...

...Lieutenant governor at last, Cuomo experienced the customary frustrations of a job as useless as the vice presidency...

...One would be hard-pressed to identify an area in which Cuomo has taken a major initiative, much less scored an important success...

...As governor, Cuomo's record has not been especially distinguished...

...Let us look at the record...

...Equally observant of his responsibility to respect the views of other citizens, he has sedulously refrained from any attempt to translate Catholic teaching into public law...

...With considerable organizational backing, Cuomo ran in the primary for lieutenant governor in 1974...

...Initially an opponent of Westway, he, like Koch, reversed himself in proper deference to the coalition of property developers, bankers and construction unions that dominates New York City affairs...

...Alongside Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale, he might, I suppose, appear to be a latter-day William Jennings Bryan, particularly in the absence of Bryan recordings...

...The gap between the rhetoric of compassion and the state's delivery of services to the financially vulnerable is embarrassingly wide...

...For saving most though not all of the Corona dwellings, and for sharply scaling down the Forest Hills project, Cuomo deserves credit...

...Now a certified loser, Cuomo attracted little attention to his stands on issues...

...There is a further difficulty...

...In his 1978 re-election campaign, Carey found it convenient to resurrect Cuomo as his running mate...

...If Cuomo accepts this decree, he condones statefunded murder in the shape of abortion but rejects it as a punishment for adult criminals...

...Although Cuomo's 1984 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention laid them in the aisles, in cold print its blend of family piety and reverence for America as every immigrant's land of opportunity is banal and sentimental...

...Almost inevitably, this gifted reconciler of groups divided by color and class soon drew the interest of the political community...

...The first centered on the proposed demolition of a number of homes in a bluecollar neighborhood called Corona, to create space for an athletic field that was to be part of a new high school...

...His supporters, with or without his knowledge, distributed nasty literature advising Democrats to "vote for Cuomo, not the homo...

...Al Gore—not my choice—deserves better in life than the embrace of Ed Koch...

...So it occurred that Cuomo finally won a primary...

...In 1977, Cuomo sought the mayoralty nomination against Edward I. Koch and lost again...

...McElvaine would have us believe, too, that Cuomo is a serious intellectual who wrestles nonstop with knotty theological and jurisprudential issues...

...In retrospect, Playboy was a warmup for his virtuoso performance in last April's Democratic Presidential contest...

...Cuomo towered like a mountain because of the flatness of the surrounding territory...

...He then very narrowly defeated Lew Lehrman, a drugstore magnate addicted to the gold standard and supply-side economics, and occupied the State House...

...There is also a shortage of hospital beds, particularly in New York City...

...Hubert H. Humphrey did at least as well and Franklin D. Roosevelt incomparably better...

...The state's housing performance is abysmal...

...He lost...

...The second hinged on a somewhat maladroit attempt by Mayor John V. Lindsay to erect high-rise low-income housing in fiercely upper-middle-class Forest Hills...

...Until this decade, it is fair to say, political handicappers thought of Cuomo as a decent guy without much of a political future...

...The irony of the author's paean to the Governor is that it reinforces at least this political junkie's opinion that Mario Cuomo is a politician of average capacity endowed by nature or God with an above-average gift of gab and a regrettable tendency to inflict his conscience on any available audience...

...I applaud his resistance to state-sponsored murder as well as his agreeing to Medicaid-funded abortion...

...One of this volume's defects is a failure to give a satisfactory explanation of its hero's evolution into a pro-choicer on abortion...

...McElvaine's brief for Cuomo as a Catholic intellectual is, if anything, weaker than his attempt to inflate Cuomo's record in Albany...

...It had escaped the Mayor's attention that most of the voters lived elsewhere, in Utopias of shopping malls and pickup trucks...

...Nevertheless, the Cuomo phenomenon merits inspection...

...Catholic doctrine holds that from the moment of conception a fetus is a human being, presumably equipped with a soul...

...In so doing, Cuomo has incurred the wrath of Cardinal John J. O'Connor, a theological authoritarian who brings to mind unf ondly the departed Cardinal Francis Spellman...

...New York City was the only place, his Honor made clear, for real people to live...

...Obedient to the teaching authority of the Church, Cuomo has personally accepted reiterated papal injunctions against abortion and contraception...

...Conventional wisdom held that he was a cinch to win the nomination and election...

...His dubious consolation prize was getting to serve under Governor Hugh Carey as secretary of state, an inconspicuous position occupied long ago in Averell Harriman's administration by Carmine DeSapio...

...Dukakis can point to the passage of legislation guaranteeing health insurance for all of his state's residents, an innovative work and welfare program, and his role in spreading the Massachusetts boom to depressed mill towns like Lowell and North Adams...

...But if civic peace requires easy availability of abortion in the absence of public consensus against it, shouldn't a consensus in favor of capital punishment oblige a governor, however reluctantly, to yield to the will of the people...

...Carey saw Cuomo as infrequently as possible...

...Some of his current admirers might be startled to learn that as late as 1974 he opposed abortion liberalization and over-the-counter sales of contraceptives, as a good Catholic politician ought...

...But the political wiseacres failed to reckon into their calculations the Mayor's ingratiating habit of putting his large foot into his capacious mouth...

...After much agonizing, he reached conclusions identical to those of Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Edward M. Kennedy, and antedating them, John F. Kennedy...

...Ronald Reagan at least lunches with George Bush...