Is it really any surprise that he receives friendly letters from Richard Nixon? Cuomo would be rightly disgusted by any comparison of their ethics (or their senses of humor). But they share an esthetic: the brooding intellectual, alone in a dark political world with nothing but his instincts. As young lawyers, both were rejected by big Wall Street law firms. Both nurse old resentments.
Without stretching the analogy to the breaking point, there’s also the sheer complexity of their combativeness, the layering of their identity as agonistes. It doesn’t matter that one has a ski-jump nose and the other a face for radio; it doesn’t matter that their insecurities are always in danger of blowing them up. They fascinate, and so they dominate. The Adlai Stevenson indecisiveness model never really fit Cuomo, because even when he is exasperating, he is always “in the arena,” as Nixon called it, quoting a much-despised former New York governor named Theodore Roosevelt.
Actually, Cuomo doesn’t like the boxing metaphors. When I questioned him at a press conference about the wisdom of “duking it out” with Dan Quayle, he subjected me to the same third degree that the thoroughly hazed Albany press corps has been putting up with for years. “Where are you from?” he demanded. When I told him Chicago, he responded: " You want to duke it out. I’m not a “duker-outer.’ That’s your neighborhood. My neighborhood believes in the mind, poetry, books, the Queens Borough Public Library.”
Mean? Funny? Both? Of course in the hothouse of a presidential campaign some Chicagoans would take note of the unintended slight against their fair city might have to apologize a little for his provincialism. Multiply that a hundred times-there can be a hundred such vintage Cuomoisms in a single day-and you get some idea of what his campaign might be like. Imagine columnist Jimmy Breslin as an informal campaign adviser. (Breslin is one of Cuomo’s closest friends.) I wondered aloud to a Cuomo aide about how his battles with the press would affect his candidacy. Would he seem exciting or exhausting? Does he do it because it’s in his interest, or in his nature? The next day, my phone rang, at home. George Bush plays golf, Cuomo calls reporters. It’s kind of a hobby.
I asked about his epidermis. “If by thinskinned you mean very, very quick to respond–that’s what I’ve done for a lifetime. I’d been a lawyer for more than 20 years. You can’t let the comment from the witness pass. If there’s a jury, everything is important.” Life as courtroom: reporters are witnesses to be cross-examined; voters are juries. This much is irreducibly part of his nature. But he draws the line there, adding without irony: “If [by thin-skinned] you’re talking about being personally sensitive to criticism, that’s a lot of crap.”
I had my perfect Cuomo sound bite now, but the question of his self-control was still at issue. Cuomo offered a familiar explanation for why the press highlights his explosiveness: “Because you’re a big Italian, everyone thinks you have to be very volatile.” At some deeper level, though, he knows that the biggest hurdle facing him is not his ethnicity or New York or the death penalty. It’s himself–his struggle to stay on close terms with what his idol Lincoln called “the better angels of [his] nature.”
Cuomo assured me that he can calibrate his combativeness: “If a high-school debater asks me a tough question at a gym in Chicago, I’m not going to answer her the way I answer Sam Donaldson.” But even the pleasure and political gain that comes from watching him deck Donaldson on the “Brinkley” show (“That’s silly, Sam, even for you”) may wear thin. The long-term dynamic is wrong. Ronald Reagan used Donaldson as a foil, too, but he did so by suggesting to the public that the press was beating up on the president, not the other way around. The difference is hardly trivial.
Cuomo must calibrate. If he can’t, the press will report only his theatrics and skip the substance of his powerful anti-Bush case. To win, Cuomo needs to be Cuomo without being too Cuomo. In other words, “The New Mario.”
