"Mario Cuomo, 82; N.Y. governor and Democrats’ liberal voice" by Adam Nagourney, New York Times January 02, 2015
NEW YORK — Mario M. Cuomo, the father of Andrew M. Cuomo, who hours earlier on Thursday was inaugurated for a second term as governor, led New York during a turbulent time, 1983 through 1994.
Cuomo burst beyond the state’s boundaries to personify the liberal wing of his national party and become a source of unending fascination and, ultimately, frustration for Democrats, but he may be remembered more for the things he never did than for what he accomplished.
For all his advocacy of an activist government, he did not always practice it, or could not.
Oh, look, another hypocrite.
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Mr. Cuomo might have surpassed Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, but in seeking a fourth term in 1994, he was defeated by George E. Pataki, a little-known Republican state senator from Peekskill. Mr. Cuomo’s advisers had counseled him not to run again, but he overruled them.
Andrew Cuomo, a former housing secretary under Clinton, sought to become governor himself in 2002, but withdrew from the Democratic field amid an uproar over remarks he had made questioning Pataki’s leadership after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
He ran again in 2010 and was elected. It was a redemptive moment for the Cuomo family, and the first time in New York’s history that a father and son had been elected chief executive. Andrew Cuomo was handily reelected in November.
Mario Cuomo, a lawyer by profession, could trim his sails in the face of opposition, but he held to more than a few positions that went against the grain of public opinion.
Most prominent was his opposition to the death penalty, a view that contributed to his defeat by Edward I. Koch in the 1977 mayoral primary in New York and that nearly derailed his first bid for governor. His annual veto of the death penalty became a rite, and he invoked it as a testimony to his character and principles.
Mario Matthew Cuomo was born in Queens on June 15, 1932, the fourth child of Andrea and Immaculata Cuomo. His parents, penniless and unable to speak English, had come to the United States from the province of Salerno, south of Naples, settling in Jersey City.
Mario Cuomo grew up in the South Jamaica section of Queens, where the family had moved and opened a grocery store. He worked in the store and on Saturdays served as the “Shabbos goy” for an Orthodox synagogue up the street, providing services as a non-Jew that the faithful were not allowed to do for themselves on the Sabbath.
Do I need even say it?
South Jamaica — an “Italian-black-German-Irish-Polish neighborhood,” as he described it — provided him with a career’s worth of anecdotes.
It was baseball, not politics, that first engaged him. After graduating from St. John’s Preparatory School in Queens in 1949, he played on the freshman baseball team at St. John’s University.
A strapping 6 feet tall, 190 pounds at age 19, he signed a contract to play center field for the Class D Brunswick Pirates in Georgia in 1952, reportedly receiving a $2,000 signing bonus. His baseball career was short-lived. Knocked in the head with a ball that summer, he was left blind for a week and had to give up the game....
Guess what I'm giving up.
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Related:
"If there is, however, one irony about Cuomo, it is that today Americans do believe the country is on the wrong track, and there is an increasing sense that the two cities of which Cuomo spoke are the defining construct of American life, circa 2015. His unapologetic liberalism might have fallen flat politically in 1984, but it might be even more relevant today."
Did he miss the last election results?
Heck, I've been told we do not even care about wealth inequality.
Also see: Mario Cuomo, 1932-2015: a champion of liberalism
Look, a double funeral (for those that don't know it, liberalism is also dead. I'm living proof of it).
