Word: cuomo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...discovery should be no surprise, even to those inured to the pandering platitudes proffered by Hart. Mondale, and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson. Cuomo's credo is defiantly traditional and defiantly conventional. He states in the regal third-person: "...HE WILL [govern] ON THE BASIS OF TRADITIONAL DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES, WHICH HE HAS CONVERTED INTO SPECIFIC IDEAS THAT ARE TRADITIONAL AND DEMOCRATIC." Cuomo's vision shines brightly because it is so forthright--government can and should help those who can't help themselves--and so innocent, unsullied by the ravages wrought by deficit spending and the gimmicky neo-liberalism developed...
...this arguably courageous stand in favor of active government makes no impact, because Cuomo never works through the practical arguments of why we should accept liberalism or what exactly his version of liberalism means beyond welfare politics. Ronald Reagan has emphatically shown that liberalism does not cut the mustard politically in the '80s, but Cuomo doesn't go beyond lofty rhetoric in refuting this limited vision...
Liberalism is under attack from all sides--political, cultural, and philosophical--and as a political creed it sorely needs a defender, a knight in shining armor. Yet Cuomo, a deeply religious man, approaches liberalism as he does Catholicism, reciting the party line as an article of faith rather than as the product of intellectual inquisition...
TIME AND time again, Cuomo touches on the key issues of latter-day liberalism--busing, quotas, the death penalty, race relations, labor relations--only to leave the reader grasping for straws. Recounting a February 21, 1981 speech to a Glen Oaks Jewish group, Cuomo writes...
...Cuomo then proceeds to drop the topic leaving the reader wondering exactly why the issue should be so simple--they oppose busing, ergo they are selfish, period, exclamation mark. But, in the aftermath of major deterioration in many school systems where students are bused, and the violence and "white flight" that greeted Black students in yellow buses in South Boston in 1974, the concept of busing is no longer blindly accepted, even by many self-described liberals. Yet Cuomo blithely dismisses his audience, without actually telling us--or himself--why they are wrong...