Cuomo liked to throw his weight around, never more so than in his Covid-19 mandates addressed to the New York restaurant industry. One must hope that he has developed a fondness for home cooking. Why he became governor is something of a mystery; at HUD he bore more than a little responsibility for the Community Investment Act and consequent “toxic waste” recession. Like his father, he was almost purely a rhetorical politician; Mario Cuomo’s greatest service to the nation in his 12 years in Albany was in twice declining a Supreme Court nomination.

The other post-World War II New York Democratic governors have likewise, with the exception of the under-appreciated Hugh Carey, been disappointing. Carey, unlike the senior Cuomo, bravely faced up to New York City’s fiscal problems. For Averell Harriman, a one-term New York governorship was but a spring-board; acting Governors Poletti and Patterson were not in office long enough to make an impression. The state’s post-war Democratic senators, with the magnificent exception of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have also been a dismal lot, never more so than at present. For the divisive celebrities Robert Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the New York Senate seat was always just a launching pad for higher ambitions.