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Cuomo offends with 'shuck and jive' comment

BY ERIK GERMAN | erik.german@newsday.com

10:13 PM EST, January 10, 2008

ALBANY - If you asked the bloggers Thursday, State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo stepped on a rhetorical land mine when he used the racially charged phrase "shuck and jive" while discussing the Democratic presidential primary in a recent radio interview.

Speaking Tuesday to the New York Post's Fred Dicker, whose show airs on Albany's Talk 1300 radio station, Cuomo said of the early primaries: "It's not a TV-crazed race. Frankly you can't buy your way through."

He added later, "You have to sit down with 10 people in a living room. You can't shuck and jive at a news conference, you can't just put off reporters, because you have real people looking at you saying 'answer the question.'"

The 1994 book "Juba to Jive, a Dictionary of African-American Slang," says "shuck and jive" dates back to the 1870s and was an "originally southern 'Negro' expression for clowning, lying, pretense."

A truncated version of Cuomo's quote appeared first on the Albany Times Union's Capital Confidential blog Wednesday with the claim -- later clarified -- that he was talking about "Hillary's win in New Hampshire."

Like a virus, the notion that Cuomo had made a racially insensitive remark about Barack Obama's loss leapt from Web site to Web site Thursday.

Politico.com entered the quote into its so-called "department of word choice." Wonkette.com. called the term "racist."

But several sites, including Newsday's SpinCycle blog, posted updates after hearing from Cuomo.

"The attorney general was clearly saying that Iowa and New Hampshire were important primaries because the candidates could not duck the tough questions," said Cuomo spokesman Jeffrey Lerner. "He clearly meant no offense to either candidate because he was praising both in the interview. 'Bob and weave' would have been a better phrase, that's certainly all the attorney general meant."

Joseph Mercurio, a New York City-based Democratic media consultant, said he doesn't think Cuomo hurt himself seriously. "Everybody's being a little politically correct," Mercurio said. "I think he had enough support from black voters in his campaign that this isn't going to be a big issue."

Perhaps Mercurio knows. He currently works for Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), whose January 2007 remark that Obama was the first black presidential candidate "who is articulate and bright and clean," drew wide criticism but didn't end his Senate career.

But Temple University's Nathaniel Norment Jr., a professor of African-American studies, said the history of the Cuomo's phrase made it inappropriate because it springs from an ugly period of our past.

It refers to "how black people had to behave in the presence of white people to survive. You have to shuck and jive or buck dance, you're putting on an act," Norment said. "In the context of a presidential election I think it's very derogatory to say." Melissa Mansfield contributed to this story