New York Daily News

WE MISS YOU NOW, MARIO

Beacon of decency before dark Trump era

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around here believe he is about to make the run at the White House that his father never did.

When his father died three years ago, I recalled the walk I took with Mario Cuomo from his Manhattan hotel down to Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1992. He was on his way downtown to rehearse the speech he would give that night placing Bill Clinton’s name in nomination at the Democratic National Convention. And because he was a child of his city and the Garden is a central plaza of the city, the day was thick with might-have-been. Of course there was the feeling from those who knew him, and who did understand the good and greatness he had always carried around inside him, that somebody should have been placing his name in nomination at the Garden that night.

I remembered how it was around 42nd St. and Sixth Ave. that day, when we had stopped for a light, when he stopped and smiled at me and finally said, “How many ways are you going to ask me about regrets?”

The oratory he offered later at the Garden, oratory he practiced off a teleprompt­er in a small room in the afternoon before an audience of half a dozen people, was soaring and hopeful, because Cuomo was always a patron saint of hope.

A few days after he died, Andrew Cuomo eulogized his father in a fine, eloquent moment of his own, from the pulpit at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola up on Park Ave. Among his remarks that day were these, about New York City:

“The intelligen­t course, the constructi­ve course, the responsibl­e course is to learn the lessons from the past tragedies, to identify the necessary reforms, to improve our justice system, to move this city forward. And that’s just what we will do. I promise you that, Pop.”

And perhaps part of that promise for Andrew Cuomo really will be making the run that his father never did, in 2020, against Donald Trump, about whom you know the old man would have had plenty to say.

We see what we see and hear what we hear in Trump’s America. Where once we had statesmen like Mario Cuomo on the political stage, now we have nobodies from Florida like Rep. Francis Rooney and Rep. Matt Gaetz, Rooney calling for a “purge” of the FBI and Gaetz, whoever he is, calling for the firing of a great American like Robert Mueller. They are too dim, both of them, to understand that they are doing nothing but punching at the air, and out of their reach.

But you see them continuing to play to the camera, acting like giddy captains of the pep squad for the current administra­tion. As they do, you remember the keynote address Mario Cuomo gave at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984, the night he became a star on the national stage, reaching out to the country, as Jimmy Breslin wrote, with those ballplayer’s hands of his, taking dead aim at President Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a shining city on a hill.

“A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well,” Cuomo said that night. “But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the 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.”

Now, 33 years later, we watch the country be looted by the glorified looters who wrote this new tax law, see global warming denied, see such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, two of the monumental­ly overrated political figures of all time, act as if party matters more than country; see a President who talks about making America great and does everything possible to divide it, in 280 characters or less.

Mario Cuomo was different, and better. He was a child of his city and immigrant parents whose voice always spoke to the best of us, to what are supposed to be our highest ideals. As the new year begins, we need those ideals as much as we ever have. We need a New York voice like his, again rising to a shout. Maybe from his son.

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