The Gist: Go Quietly

Maybe it was all of the attention around the 9/11 anniversary. Maybe it was just a third rail, too electrified to step on. Whatever the reasons, it was rather striking that there wasn’t more commentary about Andrew Cuomo’s racial remarks to New York Times columnist Bob Herbert after he dropped out of the gubernatorial Democratic primary two weeks ago. He may be a Cuomo, and he may have married a Kennedy, but this guy not only subverts the supposed values of the Democratic Party; he’s an embarrassment to Italian-Americans, reaffirming every raw stereotype about the relationship between blacks and Italians in New York.

"The negative here," the former Clinton HUD secretary told Herbert, explaining why he did so badly in the polls and why he eventually pulled out of the race against New York State Comptroller Carl McCall, "is that I was running against the first African-American. It was his turn."

In other words: He was a white victim of a kind of political party-driven affirmative action–even though McCall has a resume a mile longer than that of Cuomo, who has never held elective office. If anything, McCall was for a while the victim of nepotism on a grand scale, running against someone whose entire career has been about trading on his famous father’s name. Wayne Barrett in the Village Voice makes the interesting assessment that Al Sharpton and others quietly threatened that if Cuomo went hard on McCall and McCall lost, they’d do to him what they did to Mark Green in the 2001 mayoral election: take their support over to the Republican in the general election and rail that the Democrat was racially insensitive. In that scenario, Cuomo, who has ambitions for 2006, pulled out early rather than be tarred for the future. Whether or not that is true, however, Cuomo’s arrogance, like Green’s, is still his greatest downfall: by making these statements, rather than bow out quietly and gracefully, he’s tarred himself.

"How could I go against Carl McCall?" Cuomo asked Herbert rhetorically, denying that his own ego had anything to do with his demise, and complaining that he couldn’t go negative on an African-American. "How could you do that?" he asked, mocking those who might question him if he did. "Don’t you like black people? Aren’t you a progressive? Aren’t you a liberal? You young, arrogant SOB. "

Cuomo went on both Phil Donahue and Charlie Rose the night before the Herbert column was published, reciting the same screed. The precursor to these statements came last year, not long after Green lost the mayoral race, when Cuomo was caught on tape talking about a "racial contract" to elect minorities: "Carl would be the second installment in that contract, that racial contract, and that can’t happen."

Onetime New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who has been a figure of national prominence in the Democratic Party, was an icon for Italian-Americans precisely because of the stereotypes he broke. He melded the language of liberalism, unity and inclusion with that of Italian-Americans themselves, speaking of the "family of New York." By example he certainly did a lot more to heal tensions between Italians and blacks and other minorities than did some of those Italian-Americans who came after him, like, say, Rudy Giuliani.

Tensions between blacks and Italians have boiled over too many times over the years, often exploited and magnified by the media. The 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins, beaten and shot to death by a gang of Italian-American teenage thugs in Bensonhurst who were screaming racial epithets, brought those tensions into living rooms nationwide. Italian-Americans, for many years the lowest on the totem poll of white ethnic minorities when it came to education and income levels, were easy targets for national Republican politicians in the 80s, who exploited white fears, telegraphing the idea that through affirmative action blacks were taking their jobs. And Andrew Cuomo’s words are just as effective at putting forth the same idea, even if they were not meant to be.

Unlike his father, Cuomo’s privileged upbringing was light-years from those of the people in the working-class Italian neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, where some still believe that a black person got ahead of them at work because it was "his turn." Much of Cuomo’s adult life has been spent running his father’s political campaign and as a political appointee in Washington. His perception of New York is purely political, and his comments reflected that. He needs to spend more time just plain living in New York, and less time living as a politico. He might then learn the power of words, and know when to keep his mouth shut.

Is That All There Is?

Wall Street Journal colum-nist Peggy Noonan informs us that, now that the Sept. 11 anniversary has come and gone, we have to move on from the event–and that presumably includes herself. What on Earth she’ll write about now, I don’t know. But Sept. 11 provided her with a year’s worth of syrupy slop week in and week out, as well as a lot of freaky paranoia, which of course always has a loyal following.

She began soon after the attacks, telling us about her suspicions of dark-skinned people who were walking around with a camera near St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The columns got loopier and loopier. One that I’ve read several times, and which I’ve passed on to friends for sheer entertainment, is about how she walked across the Brooklyn Bridge early one morning and actually said hello to a black man–a black man, in black sunglasses, sitting in a black van with tinted windows. To be blunt, Noonan’s got something weird going on with the Brooklyn Bridge–"it spans" she wrote–and has recently gotten into gently caressing "those two heavy stone towers" as she walks across.

But I digress.

"I found myself fully awake at 5 a.m. yesterday and went for a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge," she explained about her encounter with the black man back in July. "‘Good morning!’ he said. ‘Good morning to you,’ I answered, and for no reason at all we started to laugh, and moved on into the day. Nothing significant in it except it may or may not have happened that way 30 or 40 years ago."

In this same column Noonan decided to become a dream analyst, though it seems the project she half-heartedly initiated has fallen through, as she’s not mentioned anything about it since that July column:

"So: The Sept. 11 Dream Project. We should begin it. I want to, though I’m not sure why. I think maybe down the road I will try to write about them. Maybe not…

"To respect is to record. There is a response function at the end of this column, and you can use it to send in your Sept. 11 related dream–recurring, unusual, striking, whatever."

I attempted to send in the following dream: "I was on the Brooklyn Bridge at 5 a.m. and a crazy woman was chasing me, trying to say hello. I ran for my life!" But alas, the WSJ online response function wasn’t accepting any more dreams apparently.

"The sun rises tomorrow on the new era, the post-9/11-trauma era," Noonan wrote on Sept. 11,apparently letting us know she was putting to bed these 9/11 ramblings. "We will make our way through the next year without the wild emotional force of 9/11 pushing us forward."

A brave new world for Peggy Noonan.