A few of the best of the many good Mario Cuomo obits follow.
Charles P Pierce:
I had one overriding thought when I head that Mario Cuomo had died and that was how long it had been since I'd thought about Mario Cuomo. The only occasions in recent years in which he even came to mind were in the context of his kid, the dark prince of Albany. His time at the top of the political A-list was remarkably brief. The preferred literary metaphor for him always was Hamlet, but I always saw him more as an oddball Horatio, a scholar-politician misplaced in time, an intellectual outstripped by grubby political reality, an attendant lord to princes unworthy of his fealty. He gave remarkable speeches, but he led no movement, not even within his own party, which he saw move away from the principles he articulated so very well, and succeed by doing so. He was most influential as a symbol. He was most powerful as potential. His ideas went straight from his rhetoric into a kind of political diorama. He was rendered such a museum piece that the current governor of New York, who only is Mario Cuomo's son, is unrecognizable as his political heir.
Already, in his obituaries, he is being remembered more as a poet than as a politician, as a phenomenon more than a man. Poets are useful, even in politics.
Elizabeth Kolbert:
Mario Cuomo, who died today at the age of eighty-two, believed deeply in the power of words—too deeply, perhaps. I covered him for the Times in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties. For much of that period, I was convinced—as was just about everyone else in Albany—that he’d be the next President. The last time I called him up was in 1994, after he’d been defeated for a fourth term by an inarticulate backbencher named George Pataki. I’d been assigned to write about his legacy as governor. I asked him what he thought that would be. “Whatever you write,” he told me.
There were a lot of phrases that Cuomo liked to repeat, and most had a melancholy cast. “You go from stone to stone across the morass” was one. “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose” was another. Cuomo’s dark broodiness, his affinity for suffering, lent him moral gravity. His great gift—and it was an important one at the time—was to make listeners feel that politics was a serious business and that civic life matters.
Michael Cohen:
“A shining city is perhaps all the president sees,” said Cuomo. “But there’s another city . . . the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.”
At a time when Democrats too often tried to out-Republican Republicans, Cuomo made clear the divide between the two parties. “The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old . . . young . . . and weak are left behind by the side of the trail . . . We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.”
The former New York governor embraced the idea of transformative government as a force to improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
These are beautiful words. But don’t call it a great “political” speech. This was the keynote address for a party that won only a single state in the 1984 election. Nothing could have saved Walter Mondale that year, but what’s often forgotten about Cuomo’s speech is that in reflecting the core beliefs of the Democratic Party he was decidedly out of tune with the tenor of the times.
Steve Kornacki:
Former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who died on New Year’s Day at age 82, leaves behind a formidable political legacy – and a mystery for the ages: What if he’d gotten on that plane?
It was Dec. 20, 1991, a Friday, and the filing deadline for New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary was at 5 p.m. All eyes, though, were on Albany, New York where 10 weeks of torturous and highly public vacillation were for Gov. Cuomo finally coming to a head. In the statehouse, he and his team sought a last-minute resolution to a budget impasse that – the governor had suggested more than once – represented the only significant obstacle between him and a presidential candidacy. A few miles away, a private plane sat idling at Albany’s airport, ready to whisk Cuomo to the Granite State on a moment’s notice.
In seemingly out of nowhere Cuomo had told a closed-door meeting of his donors at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan that he would think about running for president in 1992. With that one gesture, he effectively froze in place the Democratic field – and all of American politics – for the rest of the fall.
Paul Waldman:
This would appear to tell us that that Romney suffered not at all from his often comical attempts to pander to the Republican base in the primaries, and therefore such pandering poses no danger for Jeb Bush. But is that really true? To believe it, we’d have to believe that this poll question — asking voters to place a candidate on an ideological scale — captures the pandering phenomenon.
But there’s reason to believe it doesn’t. First of all, it’s possible that the pandering registered with many voters as something more like “Mitt Romney is running around telling people what they want to hear,” rather than “Mitt Romney is more conservative than he used to be.” It’s absolutely vital to remember that most Americans are not like those of us who care deeply about politics. Because politics isn’t something they think too much about, they don’t necessarily have a firm grip on even some of the most basic distinctions between the parties. Many don’t even know what it means for one candidate to be a “liberal” and another to be a “conservative.”
Bernie Quigley:
Already, The New York Times identifies the rising Democratic governor of Rhode Island, formerly a venture capitalist, as the "anti-Warren." Already, the Hillary Clinton campaign sets its sights on former Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). The Wall Street Journal on Dec. 29: "Hillary Clinton's allies say she can bring white, working-class voters back to the Democrats." Meaning those to whom Webb appeals. Who will win in the street fight that is clearly ahead for the Democratic Party?
But this is not good news for Republicans. The Democrats' energy rises again as it has not since John F. Kennedy rose against the posh parlor-politics of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Gov. Adlai Stevenson (D-Ill.). Time itself made even the world-shaking Franklin Roosevelt era irrelevant to the rising post-war period. Bad news for Republicans, because the fight which would determine the next half-century was intramural among Democrats. Republicans after President Eisenhower were sidelined.
Adam Gopnik:
The news that the parents of the children massacred two years ago in Sandy Hook, near Newtown, Connecticut, by a young man with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, were undertaking a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer was at once encouraging and terribly discouraging. The encouraging part is that those parents, suffering from a grief that those of us who are only witnesses to it can barely begin to comprehend, haven’t, despite the failure to reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre, given way to despair. Like Richard Martinez, after his son was murdered by a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter, they’re allowing themselves to be angry, and then turning their anger into action: they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible.
The filed complaint—the numbered paragraphs give it an oddly religious feeling, like theses nailed to a church door—is worth reading in full, however painful that might be, not only because of the unbelievable suffering and cruelty it details on that terrible morning but also because it offers, in neatly logical fashion, an indisputable argument: the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time. Despite the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having previously declared that such weapons “serve a function in crime and combat, but serve no sporting purpose,” Bushmaster sold it anyway—and precisely on the grounds that it could kill many people, quickly. “Forces of opposition bow down. You are single handedly outnumbered,” the advertising copy read.
Sahil Kapur:
Top Republicans, eyeing full control of Congress next year, are considering changing the rules of the budget process so as to make tax cuts appear less harmful to the deficit.
They want to adopt a method called "dynamic scoring," popular among conservatives since the 1970s, which scores budgets under the controversial assumption that tax cuts generate economic growth and make up for lost revenue — something critics have likened to "fairy dust." The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the official scorekeeper, does not use the method, but Republicans, and even some conservative Democrats, want it to.
House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan (R-WI), who expects to chair the tax-writing Ways & Means Committee next year, floated the idea of requiring CBO to use dynamic scoring at a Financial Services Roundtable speech on Sept. 18. Likely next Majority Leader if Republicans can win the Senate, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) championed the method in a 2013 interview with the National Review. Outside proponents of supply-side economics, such as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, also like the idea.
"In practice, dynamic scoring is just another way for Republicans to enact tax cuts and block tax increases," economist Bruce Bartlett argued in the New York Times in 2013. "It is not about honest revenue-estimating; it's about using smoke and mirrors to institutionalize Republican ideology into the budget process."
The fundamental problem with dynamic scoring is that it requires the CBO to make dubious assumptions about the future economy, and extrapolate those assumptions into job-creating effects as a result of tax cuts.
Ron Elving:
Barring new and jarring developments, House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is going to survive the story that he addressed a conference of white supremacists in 2002.
Unless further evidence emerges of liaisons with the European-American Unity and Rights Organization, or EURO, Scalise will take his oath next week for the 114th Congress as the No. 3 leader of the chamber's GOP — the party's largest majority since 1928.
That was the message tucked into the bouquet of supporting statements Scalise received Tuesday from Speaker John Boehner, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other prominent Republicans.
Ben Casselman:
There are, broadly speaking, two explanations for the recovery’s failure to reach the middle and working classes. One is that it just hasn’t yet been strong enough, but as growth picks up, so will Americans’ fortunes. The other is that there is something more fundamentally wrong with the structure of the U.S. economy that growth alone won’t solve. The new year is shaping up as a test of those two theories. Now that the recovery has taken hold, will it finally reach the many Americans who have been left behind?
Jordan Weissman:
My Favorite Graph of 2014: The Rise and Rise of the Top 0.1 Percent