Introducing President Cuomo

Jonathan Alter says the deceased and former New York Governor, that Hamlet on the Hudson, “would’ve been a lion” had he run in 1992:

Most of us doubted he would show up and actually sign the papers allowing him to enter the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The New York Times had reported earlier that fall that Governor Mario Cuomo had spent only 36 nights out of more than 1,300 as governor in a bed other than his own at the Executive Mansion in Albany. The man just didn’t get out enough to be president.

But for liberal Democrats, the questions remain: Would he have won the presidency in 1992, and if he had, would the country have experienced a restoration of the New Deal and the Great Society and the liberal governing values he articulated so well?

The answer to both questions is no.

Exactly. The voting public’s reaction to Bill Clinton’s center-leftism was one of the most stunning reversals of both houses of Congress in American political history. Cuomo’s left-left-leftism would have generating similar results, only without Clinton’s centrist dealmaking abilities.

Hamlet would likely have been right back on the Hudson in 1996.