Reason to Believe. - book reviews

MARIO Cuomo has for years been hailed as both the philosopher-king and the humble "conscience" of the Democratic Party, a formidable, saintly genius of liberalism. Since his efflorescence at the 1984 Democratic convention, even many conservatives have accorded this, their archenemy, a certain respect.

Mario Cuomo is a walking reductio ad absurdum. He likes to define who he is by attacking other people, to whom he attributes bad faith and bad reasoning. He is, as former New York State Comptroller Ned Regan once put it, "always on offense."

When confronted recently by a New York Post investigative reporter who wanted to know why Mr. Cuomo and some friends had the special privilege of playing basketball at a city facility closed to the public, Cuomo, referring to his intervention to save the Post in 1993, shot back, "Special privileges was when I kept you alive." A red herring, and a tu quoque. Classic Mario Cuomo.

In that unguarded moment Mr. Cuomo stumbled onto a truth nowhere to be found in this book, allegedly a "vivid rebuke" to the Contract with America. That truth is that government intervention to save or enhance certain people's jobs is a kind of "special privilege" for "special interests." And it deserves the contemptuous treatment Mr. Cuomo gave it in his encounter with the reporter, since it is nothing but influence peddling. In this book Cuomo sanctifies it, elevates it to a national interest, and calls it "investment."

Mr. Cuomo's mania for "investments" resulted in a $5-billion deficit for his state, which is one reason he is now undergoing serious demythologization. The process started when it was revealed that, as governor, Cuomo had the state sell to itself a prison and a road, an unconstitutional means (called "one-shots") of creating long-term debt without voter approval.

Then there were damaging revelations that a close personal friend and appointee of Mr. Cuomo's allowed the Mafia, right under his nose, to infiltrate New York City's Javits Convention Center.

This book continues the Cuomo slide. Critics Left and Right have panned the "vivid rebuke" for its lack of specifics. Like most devotees of the New Deal paradigm, Mr. Cuomo doesn't know exactly what to say now that big government is in crisis. So he excuses the lack of detail by telling us that all his ideas would require "thousands of pages of bills and budgets" -- a variation on the schoolboy's evasion, "It's too complicated -- you wouldn't understand." Cuomo often got away with such thoughtful liberalism when he was governor, where he could appoint, with much fanfare from the press, a special "blue ribbon" commission to act as his demiurge.

Here, on his own, Cuomo prefers to go via negativa. His scare tactics include invoking a return to "social Darwinism" or the meat-packing Jungle of Upton Sinclair. The "contractors" (i.e., Gingrich & Co.) would take us back to the Articles of Confederation (straw man) and ignore our Constitution (begging the question).

Does government need fixing? Sure it does, says Cuomo. Do we need to get rid of burdensome regulation? Sure. But we don't need "mindless" deregulation (straw man).

Did the Democratic Party make mistakes? Sure "they" did.

Do we need to regain "a compelling sense of individual responsibility -- to pull your own weight, save for the future, put your children's needs before your own, or give something back to the community"? Sure. But meanwhile something called the Republican "New Harshness" -- the other half of Cuomo's Manichean universe --is threatening humanity.

Mr. Cuomo suffers from a bad case of sloth. In this book he appears incapable of engaging ideas and opponents seriously, with attention to detail. In attacking libertarians, he cannot decide whether he wants to be a politician, in which case he can be simplistic, or Thomas Aquinas, which would require a substantial Summa directed against the Cato Institute. So for a patina of phony sophistication he resorts to straw men and false dilemmas, which reveal the limits of his imagination.

Regarding Phil Gramm's remark about government "that rewards us when we fail and taxes us when we succeed," Cuomo thunders: "we must infer [government] ought to give to those who presumably succeeded and take from those who fail." No, Mr. Cuomo, we need not infer that. It would be a fallacy.

Here is Cuomo trying to defend industrial policy: "Decisions over closing surplus military bases or producing new generations of weapons have become struggles for local jobs and community development," a kind of "de facto" industrial policy by Republicans. Again, tu quoque. Cuomo, so skilled at pointing out apparent hypocrisy in others, does not really know how to argue his own position.

If we were to roll the tapes of his old State of the State addresses, the television appearances, etc., I suspect we would find quite a lot of this kind of thing. The real Mario Cuomo is not brilliant, he is just powerfully, fallaciously argumentative. He is the gaseous brown dwarf who never became a star; a would-be President, would-be Supreme Court Justice, would-be distinguished author. Now he fritters away his time on talk radio, bullying Ted from Brooklyn into "yes or no" answers, and chastising radio loudmouth Bob Grant.