Super Mario

MARIO CUOMO, almost presidential candidate, almost Supreme Court Justice, almost intellectual, and three-term governor of New York, might well lose his last bid for re-election, and not to some real comer, but to a Republican state legislator named George Pataki, a homunculus grown in a retort by Senator Alfonse D’Amato.

This is not as big news as it seems, if you know the numbers. Mario Cuomo has rarely been an electoral powerhouse. In 1982, his first gubernatorial race, he got 51 per cent of the vote against a political tyro. In 1990, his third race, he got 53 per cent against two tyros who split the anti-Cuomo vote. Only in 1986 did he roll up a landslide (65 per cent). Yet he has seemed to bestride the political world like a colossus, while Pataki-men walk under his huge legs and peep about.

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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MARIO CUOMO, almost presidential candidate, almost Supreme Court Justice, almost intellectual, and three-term governor of New York, might well lose his last bid for re-election, and not to some real comer, but to a Republican state legislator named George Pataki, a homunculus grown in a retort by Senator Alfonse D’Amato.

This is not as big news as it seems, if you know the numbers. Mario Cuomo has rarely been an electoral powerhouse. In 1982, his first gubernatorial race, he got 51 per cent of the vote against a political tyro. In 1990, his third race, he got 53 per cent against two tyros who split the anti-Cuomo vote. Only in 1986 did he roll up a landslide (65 per cent). Yet he has seemed to bestride the political world like a colossus, while Pataki-men walk under his huge legs and peep about.