But Cuomo’s long goodbye isn’t good news for the president. Cuomo was the ultimate Democratic Known Quantity. Privately, many of Bush’s shrewder strategists viewed Cuomo as an industrial-strength Michael Dukakis, destined to repeat the losing shibboleths of the past two Democratic presidential campaigns. “He was the easiest candidate for us to beat,” said Republican strategist Bill McInturff, “because he’s a caricature of a liberal Democrat.” The president’s demolition experts thought they knew where to place the plastic explosives on the Cuomo persona. “We would have needled him from day one,” said one senior Bush adviser. “Sooner or later he would have blown.”
And from day one Cuomo would have been on the defensive. The governor has cut state spending and embraced some supply-side tax notions. But he still presides over and symbolizes a state that embodies Great Society liberalism–and that faces a $5 billion budget gap. Bush’s advisers were salivating at the thought of being able to switch the attention from the dismal national economy to New York’s budget morass. Now Bush will have to answer more often for the federal debt and be pressed all the harder to offer economic cures more sweeping than tube-sock purchases.
The Democrats’ declared candidates–the “six-pack”–may not be as well known as Cuomo, but that could be a virtue, One senior administration official worried last week about a late-emerging Democratic stealth nominee, all but ignored by the nation until summer. The Bush team, he said, might not have enough time to “chip away” at the new Democratic nominee after the convention.
Cuomo’s absence also allows Bill Clinton, Bob Kerrey and Tom Harkin–the consensus “first tier” for now–to make themselves known without having to spend all their time undermining the New York governor. Among the six-pack, New York columnist Pete Hamill worried, there is no one speaking, as Cuomo does, in the cadence of the cities that are the ancestral home of the Democratic Party. But Democrats need to realize that those days are gone: America is now predominantly a suburban nation. The party, said polltaker and Kerrey adviser Harrison Hickman, must move on to “a new debate, on new issues, with a new generation of candidates.”
Watching Cuomo’s emotional speech last week, diehards insisted that he could still be forced to reconsider, or that the nomination would somehow be offered to him by a deadlocked convention next summer in, of course, New York City. But neither was a likely scenario, and most Democrats seemed ready to give up the obsession with Cuomo that began with his famous speech in San Francisco seven years ago. If they’re really ready to get on with the rest of their lives, then Bush maybe in even more trouble than he– or the Democrats–realize.
