Word: cuomo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Cuomo style is a mixture of warmth and wit. He is simpatico. As a reporter embarks on a question, Cuomo yells out, "I deny it! I deny it!" He describes something that irks him as "just a walnut in the batter of eternity." In the midst of a conversation Cuomo is having with an elderly woman from Queens, his press secretary, Martin Steadman, sneezes while she is talking. "That's a Yiddish sign," she says, "that the person talking is telling the truth." Cuomo turns to Steadman: "Next time, see if you can sneeze while I'm talking...
...speaker, Cuomo is a modern master of the ancient art of rhetoric. His repertoire includes sarcasm, mimicry, hyperbole, irony, parables, analogies and allusions. He poses questions and answers them, sets up philosophical straw men and knocks them down. He begins slowly and gains momentum; he races up the hill of one sentence and coasts down another. His timing is that of a stand-up comic. His voice can be as soothing as a late-night disk jockey's or as rumbling as an Old Testament prophet's. He can, on occasion, be shrill, edging toward the sanctimonious. But always...
...Cuomo sleeps only four or five hours a night. His eagerness to work, not an alarm, wakes him around 5 a.m. In a study off his bedroom, he brews a cup of coffee and settles down for an hour or so of communing with his diary (see following story). At 6:45 he gets a regular call from an aide in New York City who summarizes the morning papers. Cuomo dissects everything that is written about him. Each morning he does 17 minutes of yoga, therapy for his bad back. His official day begins when he rides to his second...
...each Monday, Cuomo directs a senior-staff meeting of some 30 people. At one recent session, the subject of Medicaid comes up. An aide says that his administration has reached an impasse. "Impasse," the Governor says, like a finicky lexicographer emending an improper usage, "means no progress. None of that." After the meeting, in his office, Cuomo will punch out telephone calls himself. He rings the mayor of Niagara Falls. He is out. He calls his son Andrew, a shrewd 28-year-old lawyer who ran Cuomo's campaign for Governor and is in many ways his father's alter...
...Cuomo is a detail man who likes to do things himself. He polishes his elegant speeches and his clunky black shoes--and is proud of both. He reads the fine print in the bills he signs. There is no gatekeeper on his staff; he is the axis of the wheel. One ex-staffer says that Cuomo has created no real machine of government, has no grasp of management systems: "He runs a high- level mom-and-pop operation...