Discussion: New York Political Giant Mario Cuomo Dies At 82

Discussion for article #231587

The passing of a good man.

Andrew Cuomo has forgotten the face of his father.

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The passing of a decent man.
R.I.P Mario

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Cuomo was the kind of man who burned to do the right thing. You could sense it in his every posture, in every word he spoke, and yet he was also hugely funny, with a beautiful self-deprecating humor. Truly a man to admire on so many levels. RIP, Mario!

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It’s a shame that such a fine man is gone—and that his son has so few of the father’s fine qualities.

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He was a good man. Why didn’t he run for president when he had the chance? I’ve written this here, because the comments on Yahoo! are filthy, disgusting, vile slanders for political purposes only posting by scumbag pigs!

Why he didn’t run for president is a very complicated question with complicated answers, and obviously it’s easier for empty headed people with a keyboard to trash him than to try to understand why he didn’t run…

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Andrew is most assuredly not his father’s son.

Delivering the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, he eclipsed his party’s nominee, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, seizing on Reagan’s description of America as “a shining city on a hill” to portray the president as unaware of impoverished Americans. “Mr. President,” he said, “you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘tale of two cities’ than it is just a ‘shining city on a hill.’ ”

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Mario Cuomo, All sizzle. No steak.

Mario Cuomo, to the detriment of any presidential ambitions, was his opposition to the death penalty which he spoke out against year after year and also his support of the rights of women to choose abortion though he personally opposed it. So, sizzles and steaks are what happens in kitchens, and in this politicians’s career meaningless.

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It’s impossible for you to be more wrong.

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Oh,wow. A political giant passes away and TPM waits until 24 hours after his death to post the news…an AP report, no less. Guess those Golden Duke awards are far more important.

So sad. He was a good man.
RIP Gov Cuomo.

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Everything we need and want to know about the late governor is in the obituary in the NYT. My sense is that he always faced an uphill battle in politics because of his obvious Italian-American traits, including passion for the underdog

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You must mean Andrew.

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Actually his 1984 keynote speech at the Democratic convention made him not just a NY political giant, he was a nationwide giant. Arguably the best keynote speech ever.

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RIP Mario:
Interesting enough, the battles you fought in the political world at your prime are the same exact battles we are going through today on a larger country wide scale. The ideals of the Democrats and Republicans has never changed, just the players and the rules. We can only hope that in the near future, someone can step up and be half the man you were and continue the battle against the reapers until they are defeated permanently. It just might take a woman to do just that, we will see soon.

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“…He was 82…”

We’ve learned many things since World War II about how governments are headed by mortal men, sometimes imbalanced, very often wrong. Liberalism offers a way for a higher degree of certainty, stability, and fairness in reaching the morally right judgment through the majority opinion of a diligently informed public.

Contemporary conservativism is the anthesis of that. It’s a movement embedded with obfuscation at best using our nation’s long-found, hard-fought, traditional values and most sacred treasures for the selfish purpose of maintaining lives of obscene privilege.

“…We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we’ll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses…
—Mario Cuomo”

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It’s worth noting that Obama is not only the first black president, but the first president of any ethnicity to be identifiably the descendant of “immigrants”, in the sense of those who arrived in the US after the Civil War. And there’s still been only Kennedy representing the wave of Irish immigrants - all other presidents have been comfortably Protestant men of British ancestry, nearly all of whom (even those who grew up poor) were descended from colonial-era immigrants.

Despite their long presence at every level of government (including many governors, senators, and Supreme Court justices) for a long time, no one with a German, Slavic, Italian, Jewish, Spanish, or obviously Irish surname has ever been elected president, let alone someone non-European. Few have even run competitively. Rather stark when you consider it in relation to the country’s electoral composition even 100 years ago.

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Yes he was a good man but he blinked when he could have won the presidency. President Bush still had very high approvals (80+%) at the time after our/his “victory” in Iraq. We were in a short but step recession in the early nineties and Bush was out doing the “to the victors” parade thing going down Main street waving from the back seat of a convertible. I think Cuomo declined to challenge Bush because he didn’t want to be humiliated like Mondale was as he had an oversized ego and was too proud a person.