ALEX BRUMMER reports on the man they call ‘St Mario’ Is this the main who will be next President of the United States?

Press, 26 February 1987, Page 12

ALEX BRUMMER reports on the man they call ‘St Mario’ Is this the main who will be next President of the United States?

An electrifying rendition of Mario Cuomo's vision of America as a “sharing family”-drew excited gasps Of appreciation in New Orleans recently from a southern audience which was left with little doubt that the undeclared candidate’s frustrating months of inner contemplation are about to end. "He has consulted with his closest associates and he is running,” said one veteran bf Mr Cuomo’s two successful campaigns for Governor of New York. "There is $3-$4 million in the bank, the political operatives are lined up, and he has better name recognition than Democrats like Bruce Babbit who have been in the race for months.”

In-hls first foray to the Deep South since his record-smashing re-election as Governor of New York in November, the cerebral Mr Cuomo seemed, to have beaten back the inhibitions and ambivalence which- characterised his presidential ambitions.. He even did the Louisiana thing of sampling Cajun food and proposing solutions for the oil priceinduced depression in the region. Nevertheless, the political striptease which has built public excitement up to climatic levels remains a part of the. act. At a relaxed low-key press conference at New 1 Orleans’ Tulane University, set back from the elegant crystal-doored mansions of St Charles Avenue, Mr Cuomo gently chides the media over the cliches it uses to describe his indecision. “They say I don’t have the fire in the belly” for a presidential race, he quips. “I’m glad I don’t, because if I did I’d need seltzer (the gassy;New York soda) in the mouth to put it out.”

The self-deprecating humour has become part of an armoury Mr Cuomo is using to defuse what are seen as his personal and political negatives. In the same way that President Reagan brilliantly used the one-liner to defuse the age issue in the 1980 and 1984 elections, Mr Cuomo is deploying humour to good effect in minimising his Italian background and his untelegenic looks.

He tells, for instance, the story of when he went to the White House to meet President Reagan as part of a governors group. Just as his name was to be announced a flash of recognition came across Mr Reagan’s face: “That’s OK,” the President said “I know Lee lacocca” As the • house roars with laughter the Governor adds: “I guess we Italian-Americans all look alike.” At Tulane, a prestigious priv-

ate university with some of the strongest law and medical faculties in the Deep South, Mr Cuomo uses a dinner table incident to make light of his Mafioso looks. Sitting next to him as he tucked into his crayfish was a prominent anthropologist, Dr Doris Stone whose first comments, readily relayed by the governor, were: "You’re not as ugly in person as in the pictures.”

Mr Cuomo close up certainly looks different from some of the tall, broad-shouldered, blowdried rivals, like Mr Richard Gephardt and Mr Jack Kemp, who he will be meeting in lowa, New, Hampshire, and beyond. He Is a stocky man who needed to stretch at Tulane to poke his balding head above the podium. He has a prominent nose, more Jewish than Italian, dark hooded eyes, and a deep crevice from his eye to his chiff. He looks much better with - his goldframed spectacles on than off.

But Governor. Cuomo’s political strength derives not. from his ethnic origins or looks but from his intellectual domination, his inner strength, and beautifully modulated voice complemented by dramatic hand movements. The inner-energy he. is investing in his decision to run for the White House is typical of the preparation for everything he does.

Each speech he makes is a work of art, as his stirring address to the 1984 Democratic Convention in San Francisco underscored. He goes through up to nine handwritten drafts before delivering a speech, often extemporising even then. Mr Cuomo diligently records his mental struggles in his diaries, often in the early hours of the morning, while his family sleeps. Generously quoting philosophers from Aristotle to Teilhard De Chardin, the diaries are, as the “New Yorker” magazine put it ... “His confessional, his private dialogue with his conscience.” This intense mental effort about everything he does appears to be rooted in his education at St John’s College in New York, a Catholic college in the Vincentian missionary tradition, where he went on to become a law professor. His winning brand of politics, which he personally labels as “progressive and pragmatist” springs, from the ideas of Sir Thomas More, his hero. “More 1 was a combination of practicality and principle, of high aspiration and weakness,” Mr Cuomo has said.

Aslj Governor of New York, Mr Cuomo has talked like a New Deal liberal in the tradition of his illustrious predecessor Franklin p. Roosevelt, and the Kennedy?. But he has acted as a pragmatic leader. “Cuomo is fundamentally a centrist,” argues NeW-York’s Mayor, Mr Ed Koch, whom Mr Cuomo shouldered aside in the 1982 Democratic gubernatorial primary in New YorkIndeed, while New York state supports the largest welfare rolls in ‘the country, and puts the greatest financial resources into education of any of the 50 states, it has had a balanced budget under Mr Cuomo’s leadership. Thiis fiscal success has been achieved by working with rather than against the legislature: a. lesson In governance yet to be follbwed in Washington. Mr Cuomo is an opponent of capital punishment but a strong

upholder of criminal justice. His period in office has seen 10,000 more criminals put behind bars. He is a devout Catholic and father of five, who went to Notre Dame University in 1984 to openly challenge the right of his church to impose anti-abortion views on the nation.

This eclectic moralistic politics provides a strong reminder of President Jimmy Carter, whom Mr Cuomo lavishly praised in his long, and at times intense, ques-tion-and-answer session with students in the magnificent golfleaf decorated auditorium at Tulane. Like other governors who have run for the presidency. Mr Carter and Mr Reagan, Mr Cuomo is weak on foreign policy. “It’s his Achilles heel,” one Cuomo consultant acknowledged, although 54-year-old Mr Cuomo has been abroad once, as part of an aid mission which the United

■ ' • . t;. ■ States sent to Italy in the wake of the 1982 earthquake. When I questioned him in New Orleans on the Iran-Contra affair and the. Reykjavik summit his answers were muddled. He waffled on about the need for more "consistency” in policy, and the "need to change the procedures,” and in particular the problems between the-National Security Council and State. He was also upset about thelbetrayal of the allies, notably the Italian Prime Minister, Mr Benito Craxi over the Iran arms sales. In his formal address on ’direction 87” he drew his est applause when he systematically ripped into America’s nuclear strategy, attacking the amount spent on weaponry and pointing out how far even $1 billion of aid would go in alleviating social suffering — an obligation when the nation is viewed as a family.. "Chernobyl,” Mr Cuomo asserted, “serves as a reminder of a wider, even more pervasive, more horribly catastrophic thought ... the threat of a hundred thousand Chernobyls exploding at once, by the pressing of a button.” ; There can be little doubt about the acceptability of Mr Cuomo’s ethnic-centred politics in the North-East. He has shown in New York state that being a big city Italian, as New York as a pastrami on rye, can carry both rural and working-class areas upstate. The critical question Is can “St Mario” (as some of his detractors have nicknamed him) wage war in the South. The conventional wisdom is that the 1988 election will be won in this region. To underline this theme the Republicans will hold their convention here in the state once dominated by the Kingfish, Huey Long, and the Democrats will go to Georgia.

Mr Cuomo eloquently sought in New Orleans to portray the nation as a family of states. After the Civil War, he noted, it was the North which rebuilt thd South, now again "it would be wrong for New York to be unwilling to help states like Louisiana and Texas.”

It is a fetching theme, elegantly constructed and enhanced by figures showing that Mr Cuomo’s personal Interventions in Washington on tax reform helped the South. At Tulane, Mr Cuomo was received with film star en- . thuslasm. But Anglo audiences in tougher places from Alabama to North Carolina may be less sympathetic than on the bayous. From the “Guardian,” London