Recall how Clinton returned to Arkansas from the campaign trail to preside over the execution of a mentally disabled man. Such was the importance of showing the country that he was a “different kind of Democrat.”
Cuomo was not different then. Independents and moderate Democrats would have seen him as the same old, same old; a liberal who wanted to give their hard-earned money to poor people. Ross Perot, whose presence in the race helped sink Bush, would have drawn much more from Cuomo than he did from Clinton, who ran to the center that year.
Had Cuomo somehow won, he would have been a compelling president; the most blunt-speaking since Theodore Roosevelt and the most intellectual since Woodrow Wilson.
But it’s hard to imagine him getting much done, especially after the House went Republican in 1994. Americans in the 1990s were ready to move past the liberal solutions of the past, even if the unintended result was the hollowing out of the middle class.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member