Are Andrew Cuomo’s aggressions in large part responses to his father’s self-doubts? Sometimes, it appears that they are.
Mario Cuomo was urged to run for the White House because of and after his defense of his party and his faith at the Democratic convention in 1984. He was urged to run again four years later, when he would have faced not the Gipper but the elder George Bush, whom he correctly viewed as a less fearsome opponent. They begged him to run in 1991, when Bush was thought vulnerable.
Mario Cuomo had numerous chances to advance his prospects still further and turned them all down. He was even given the chance in 1993 to let President Bill Clinton name him to the seat on the Supreme Court that would go later to Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Oddly enough, he turned down even that position, for reasons he never explained.
There is a well-known story from that same cycle that planes were waiting at the airport in Albany to take him to New Hampshire so he could register in that state for the primary there before the deadline expired, but they remained on the tarmac, and he never showed up. He said and insisted he loved being governor, which may have been true. But it did not save him from being washed out with the rest of those in his party in a cyclone that struck in 1994.
Cuomo, who could have been on the Supreme Court with a lifetime appointment or might have beaten the elder Bush in the 1988 or 1992 cycles, found himself at age 63 without a career or a future, his main occupation being that of a talk show host for a program that ran in New York on Saturday mornings between the hours of 9 a.m. and noon.
“The man who said no,” wrote David Remnick in the New Yorker in the autumn of 1995, “no to a presidential run in 1991 and no to a seat on the Supreme Court — is taking a call from ‘J.C. in San Diego.’ J.C. is a libertarian, [who] would like to get rid of all laws.”
When your moral and all-too self-doubting father ends his career being tossed out of office and yakked at by morons, you may decide that the wages of virtue are less than expected, and the real costs of sin are not high.
