Cuomo’s vision of an "unconventional convention" is that, a few weeks before the general election, each presidential candidate, and his or her team of potential cabinet secretaries, should come together for an entire weekend and discuss the big issues facing the country in marathon series of televised debates. "We want their prepared answer," a goal that jars with my journalistic instincts, "we don’t want to catch them off guard. What we want is the truth."
Financial Times
Mario Cuomo knew exactly where he wanted to have lunch with the FT - "Piano Due", a restaurant a few steps from his law office....and this comfortable dining room is a favourite because it is Italian in a way that is familiar and important to him.
“Manhattan’s Italian food is northern Italian, fancy Italian," he tells me. "But most of the Italian Americans, came here for economic reasons", and so most of the Italian Americans are from south of Rome and that’s Naples, Salerno, Sicily, all of those places. That food is more robust, more flavourful.
At a moment when US politics is focused on race, gender and class, this reference to the subtler distinction of ethnic community is a useful reminder that "white", “African American" and "Hispanic" are not the only self-definitions which matter to Americans.
Once Cuomo organises our lunch, inevitably, the next thing on the menu is the election, a subject Cuomo, who used to be mooted as possible presidential candidate himself and who gave the speech nominating Bill Clinton at the 1992 Democratic convention, is following avidly. He starts by telling me that he has advised Chris Matthews, the MSNBC anchor who has been one of the more prominent chroniclers of the race [full disclosure - I sometimes appear on his show], to "stop drinking that black coffee".
I brace myself for an anti-journalist diatribe. But Cuomo surprises me, going on to say of Matthews: "I love him, I think he’s a great guy, he’s very smart." He also turns out to be a fan of NBC’s "excellent" Washington bureau chief, Tim Russert: "They [both] really love the game and that shows in the way they go at it. There’s no smooth aloofness in what they do."
In Cuomo’s view, "if you want somebody to get the information out of someone, Tim does that as well or better than anybody", a skill that was on display during a recent Clinton-Obama debate when Russert raised tougher issues than either of the candidates. It turns out that the television journalist cut his teeth in politics working for Cuomo: "He was my counsel and he was my first PR guy, but it would have been an insult to call him a PR guy."
What Cuomo really wants to talk about, though, is not pundits or PR, but "the issues" and his belief that more "truly big ones" will be at stake this November than in "any presidential campaign in modern history since Kennedy/Nixon". For that reason, Cuomo thinks the country needs a new type of political debate. The problem, he says, is that "party political conventions are purely theatrical". (Our lunch took place before it became clear that a "purely theatrical" convention might become a highly desirable, and possibly unachievable, dream for Cuomo’s Democrats.) "You exaggerate your virtues and the other team’s vices," Cuomo told me. "But it’s a con game. What I would like to see is an unconventional convention."
Cuomo’s vision of an "unconventional convention" is that, a few weeks before the general election, each presidential candidate, and his or her team of potential cabinet secretaries, should come together for an entire weekend and discuss the big issues facing the country in marathon series of televised debates. "We want their prepared answer," Cuomo says, a goal that jars with my journalistic instincts, "we don’t want to catch them off guard. What we want is the truth."
I am not the first journalist Cuomo has shared this proposal with and he tells me, with real surprise, that when he described the idea to a cable television executive his retort was, "well, how do you pay for this?" Cuomo knows for sure that wouldn’t be a problem: "Are you kidding? You think the first time, you don’t think everybody would want to be involved in it?" Fortunately for me, this turns out to be a rhetorical question.
Before long, we are back on the safer ground of how the political battle is actually being waged. Cuomo reminds me several times that he hasn’t endorsed anyone, although he says the Clinton campaign called seeking his support. But given his historic ties to the Clinton family and his dynasty’s endorsement - in the person of his son Andrew, the New York attorney general - of Senator Clinton, it is hard not to suspect that the former governor leans in that direction, too.
He permits himself a moment of regret for Clinton’s poor performance in the 11 contests she lost between February 5 and March 4. "She’d be ahead now, I’m sure, if she’d just shown up in all those races," he tells me. Like many of Clinton’s public supporters, he also can’t resist criticising the strategy that kept her from effectively competing in so many places: "What struck me and a lot of other simple-minded people was how come you’re not contesting all of these states? Why is he there and you’re not there? Why does he have money and you don’t?"
Executive ability has been an important issue in the race so far, and Barack Obama has told his backers to judge his potential for the Oval Office in part by how he manages his effort to get there. But Cuomo is quick to insist that Clinton should bear no personal blame for her campaign’s stumbles. "You don’t manage your own campaign," he tells me. "So no, I wouldn’t say it has anything to do with her."
[RAA: But Mario, Hillary chose the people who did manage the campaign. What does that say about her judgment???]
Cuomo is getting animated, but he is also enough of a politician to realise this isn’t at all what he wanted to talk about. He firmly steers us back to his preferred subject of "the big issues". He runs through the list: the war in Iraq, healthcare, education, the environment and nuclear power, the national debt and the weak economy. It is a familiar list, but Cuomo offers a few twists. My favourite is his admission, offered almost in passing, that no political leader can make his country rich. "No president creates economic prosperity," Cuomo says. "Roosevelt didn’t end the depression with his ‘alphabet program’. The war ended the depression. The almost inevitable irony is that if you are a president or for that matter a governor you get credit for whatever happens while you’re there and you get blamed for whatever happens while you’re there."
One of Cuomo’s most famous political lines is his assertion that "you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose". It is a phrase a lot of people are quoting at the moment, including the man who coined it. The line is apt today, Cuomo believes, because the nation is hungrier than usual for political poetry. And Obama, Cuomo concedes, is doing a great job crafting it.
“Obama can give a speech," Cuomo tells me. '"He’s very, very strong personally. His persona is wonderful, just like Reagan. Reagan went out there and said, ‘Morning in America’ [his campaign message], we’re going to change everything. That’s all he had to say because everybody was unhappy with the previous period. So they’re unhappy with the previous period now." But, in an argument that is not a million miles away from Clinton’s "solutions, not speeches" line of attack, Cuomo thinks poetry without prose is dangerous for America: "Nobody promised better than Reagan and what he offered us was an utter failure."
Instead, Cuomo thinks American voters are ready for a politician prepared to diagnose the country’s ills and offer specific remedies, even if they don’t taste very good: "I’m hoping that we don’t have another ‘Morning in America’ situation. I’m hoping we have a general election in which Clinton or Obama say, ‘look, we’re going to offer details and specifics. We’re going to trust the American people to reward us for our honesty and our candour. And here’s the price you’re going to pay, Mr and Mrs America’. It may be about time we started paying a price.’’
...I take my chance to ask Cuomo one of the big political questions of the year " whether race or gender will determine the election. Cuomo’s answer is instant and enthusiastic: "I honestly, objectively conclude, a good Greek-American could have won: Dukakis. A good Italian could have won: Giuliani - given the correction of certain moves. A good Irishman: obviously Kennedy. A good black " I don’t think there’s any question." A woman? "Absolutely."
This cheerful certainty that America "is open to excellence of all kinds" leads us back to where we began our meal " the importance of immigrants and their communities. "The greatest gift the country has had is waves, generations of immigrants, who came here from all over the globe, all of them bringing their own special gift," Cuomo tells me. He is not one of the people who thinks the resulting multiculturalism is a dirty word: “They called the United States the melting pot for the newcomers. Presumably a melting pot was supposed to somehow boil away their cultural distinctions and produce some kind of bland uniformity " I always thought that the better analogy would be to the mosaic, a church window."
It is a good moment to conclude, because Cuomo turns out to be working on a series of children’s books about the cultures of America’s different ethnic communities. After lunch, he steers me to his nearby office to give me two copies of another children’s book he has written, which he signs for my young daughters....
Chrystia Freeland is the FT’s US managing editor
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