The last time a New York governor named Cuomo ran against a Republican Westchester County executive, there was a big debate about debates, with the challenger going so far as to carry around a life-sized cardboard cutout of the incumbent.
It had to be one of the goofier races for governor in a state that has a history of them. The governor was Mario Cuomo and the very nice, very frustrated, Westchester guy was Andrew O’Rourke. The year was 1986, and the reporters who tried to cover the campaign had an unusual problem because, well, there was no campaign.
“Debate!” O’Rourke insisted.
“Debates are boring,” responded Mario Cuomo, and he refused to schedule one.
Clearly, he didn’t want to give a public forum to O’Rourke, who was well-known and well-liked in Westchester but pretty much anonymous everywhere else in the state. Besides, O’Rourke had hardly any money, so why would Cuomo want to hand him free TV time?
Of course, being Mario Cuomo, he described his decision philosophically. Debates didn’t enlighten the political process, he said. They were simply rote recitals of pre-determined arguments, not real intellectual exchanges.
He challenged reporters: “Be honest. Aren’t you bored by debates, 60 seconds of this, followed by 30 seconds of that, on topics that have already been chewed over ad infinitum?”
That was, how shall I put it, convenient. When he first ran for governor in 1982, debates helped boost Mario Cuomo, a skilled courtroom lawyer who out-argued Mayor Ed Koch in the Democratic primary.
Mario Cuomo went on to debate, and defeat, Lewis Lehrman, a Republican who tried to convince New Yorkers that the nation should go back to the gold standard.
Cuomo was right that the debate format all but defeated any effort at coherence. As they often do, reporters jockeyed to ask the “gotcha” question that would make them the star of the show.
The candidates, in a timed, tightly constricted format, tried to sneak in the clever quotes that their staffs concocted, and that would provide easy fodder for campaign stories.
But whether Cuomo was right or wrong about the stultifying nature of it all, O’Rourke needed a debate to step up a notch. Which is why he lugged around that cardboard cutout of Mario. He’d stand it up at political events and “debate” it, a little like Clint Eastwood talking to the empty chair.
He got some attention the first couple of times he did it. Then the reporters lost interest.
One day later in the campaign, Gov. Cuomo was on a call-in show on an upstate radio station. O’Rourke called in and, ever so briefly, he got to debate the real Mario Cuomo.
That wasn’t boring, but it was brief. So those of us in the reporting business kept on — in the absence of any real campaign news — incessantly pestering the governor.
What do you know? It worked. Finally, Cuomo agreed to one debate, just as Gov. Andrew Cuomo finally acknowledged Thursday, “I believe we’ll have debates.” (Today’s Westchester County executive and Republican challenger, Rob Astorino, wants eight of them.)
Cuomo vs. O’Rourke was at the old New York Times building on West 43rd St. in Manhattan. The auditorium was packed.
Afterwards, walking out, I pushed next to the governor to ask him a question.
He put one to me before I could open my mouth. “Okay,” he asked, “what did you think?”
Reporters report; they don’t comment. But the governor pressed.
“Come on,” he repeated, “what did you think?”
“Okay,” I said, “it was boring.”
Mario Cuomo defeated Andrew O’Rourke, 65% to 32%.
Carroll, a former reporter who covered New York governor’s races from 1966 to 1994, is assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
