Which candidate, running as an
underdog in New York’s Democratic primary election, said the following?
“[O]nce the middle class goes over
to the right with the rich, they bludgeon the poor. The whole society suffers
because of the social disorientation that produces crime, deterioration,
everything evil. You cannot live with a large part of this state or nation
deprived. It can’t be done. You can’t build a wall between you and them and say
maybe they’ll go away…. [Y]ou can’t leave it to the rich to do the right thing,
any more than we could leave it to the business people to provide safe quarters
for the garment workers a hundred years ago. That’s why people burned to death
in factories… You need unions the same way you need policemen. You
need laws that say to the rich, you’re gonna have to share some of your wealth
— that’s why we have the income tax.”
You might well assume that those
are Zorhan Mamdani’s words. But they were spoken to me by Mario Cuomo, the
father of Andrew Cuomo, in April 1982, during his underdog gubernatorial campaign
against Ed Koch, which I was profiling
for The Village Voice.
Koch had defeated Cuomo five years
earlier in New York City’s mayoral election, partly by pitching the death
penalty, which Cuomo bravely resisted. And now Cuomo was polling seven points
behind Koch statewide. Yet, somewhat like the underdog Mamdani in 2025, Mario
Cuomo was drawing positive attention in 1982 by campaigning with tremendous
energy, charm, and eloquence. To the surprise of the Democratic Party
establishment of that time, Democratic primary voters in 1982 spurned the
overdog Koch for the underdog Cuomo, somewhat as primary voters now have
spurned the overdog Andrew Cuomo for the underdog Mamdani. The similarities,
and the ironies, are instructive.
Like Zorhan in 2025, Mario in 1982
did champion economic justice and ethno-racial inclusion. Like Zorhan, Mario,
too, was a son of immigrants in Queens, and he’d become a strong advocate for
justice and comity across ethno-racial lines on behalf of a broader civic
vision. Like Zorhan, Mario was subjected to rumors that he harbored antisemitic
views, even though, as I noted in the Voice profile, there wasn’t a
shred of evidence to suggest them. Like Mamdani, who already holds public
office as a member of the New York State Assembly, Mario Cuomo was lieutenant
governor under Governor Hugh Carey, although that office was so purely
ceremonial that at one point, Carey told a reporter that he wasn’t sure where
his lieutenant governor was or what he was doing. (Small wonder that The
Voice later archived my 1982 profile, the first really in-depth piece on
Cuomo, under the headline, “The article that made Mario Cuomo governor – No
Kidding!”) In June 1982, when Cuomo was still trailing Koch, the headline had
been, “Cuomo: Too True to be Good?”
That same question is being asked
now, too, not about the younger Cuomo but about Mamdani, even by some of his
well-wishers: Will he turn out to be oratorically progressive and rousing but
insufficiently seasoned and hard-ass—and too-readily stymied, as Barak Obama
and former New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio often were? Obama’s chief stymier was Mitch
McConnell. In DeBlasio’s case, it was a governor named Andrew Cuomo, who made
sure that “De Blasio became a scapegoat by design for the city’s
shortcomings as Cuomo often undermined him whenever possible.”
Andrew—whom I first quoted when he
was 24, just weeks out of law school—was co-managing his father’s 1982
campaign. He played hardball. He may even have undermined
his father at times or handled him in ways calculated to advance his own
fortunes alongside those of his Dad. Their father-son
competitiveness was often vigorous, intimidating, sometimes bitter, even in
bonding, as Michael Shnayerson’s biography of Andrew, The Contender,
shows well.
They were alike, in some ways,
father and son. Mario could be cutthroat. He would call Albany reporters when
they wrote a story he didn’t like and keep them on the phone for 45 minutes,
complaining. And for all his inspiring eloquence—and at his best, he had few
equals—he didn’t always offer much in the way of follow through. In one State
of the State Address as governor, he declared “The Decade of the Child.” A
couple years later, when the condition of the state’s children had not markedly
improved, Albany wags joked: “But he didn’t mean this decade.”
But for all that, more striking
today are the ways in which father and son were different. Mario had a
compassion about him that was not merely emotional. It was philosophical,
rooted in his senses of history, social justice, and his Catholicism. During a
decade (the 1980s) when American politics swung hard to the right and a
depressing number of Democrats veered that way themselves—and a decade, by the
way, in New York City when the first real-estate boom started, kicking off the
affordability crisis that Mamdani made the center of his campaign—Mario refused
to stop talking about things that the 1980s had made unfashionable: the poor,
inequality, unnecessary suffering in this land of plenty.
All of the ways in which Andrew
compares poorly to Mario should be understood now alongside legitimate
questions about whether Zorhan Mamdani can step up to the incredibly demanding
job of mayor (of course, he’s not there yet). Yes, Andrew Cuomo could stand up
to Donald Trump, as one tough guy from Queens to another. But the danger in that
pairing is that it takes one to know one. We’re lucky to have escaped it, no
matter what lies ahead.
The post Zohran Mamdani Reminds Me of Someone. His Name Was Mario Cuomo. appeared first on New Republic.
