Levy: Two Cuomos, two approaches to poverty

Lawrence C. Levy, a former Newsday columnist, heads the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. He has attended 26 State of the State addresses.

It may have been the greatest speech in modern political history, in the class of FDR and JFK. It was the speech that made Mario Cuomo an icon.

On July 16, 1984, New York's first Gov. Cuomo delivered the keynote at the Democratic convention in San Francisco. His rhetorical target: Ronald Reagan's vision of America as a "shining city on a hill."

"There's another part to the shining city," Cuomo declared. "The part where some people can't pay their mortgages . . . where students can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate . . . there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it."

On Wednesday, the son of Mario Cuomo delivered the most important speech of his life. It was a tour de force in many ways. In 45 minutes, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo expertly and sometimes humorously listed a litany of New York's fiscal and ethical challenges. And he compellingly detailed his ideas for defeating them. In his first State of the State, you could hear the timbre and intonations of his father and feel his family passion for public service.

But in this plan to close a $10-billion budget deficit and an incalculable integrity gap, Andrew Cuomo parted company - or perhaps even broke faith - with his father. The son did not talk about the people and places who - in good times and bad - pay the highest price for government failure. He talked about cutting taxes for the wealthiest New Yorkers, but not about the people who, in his father's words "sleep . . . in the gutter, where the glitter doesn't show."

Andrew Cuomo didn't talk about the poor or poverty.

And that has implications not just for our moral compass but for our economic prospects. It affects not just the cities, but the places where poverty is growing faster than anywhere else in New York and around the nation: the suburbs. He didn't talk about a crucial Long Island problem.

Poverty and its manifestations are multiplying in our relatively wealthy region. And when the ravages of the Great Recession finally recede - when the rising tide lifts many boats - social and economic disaster areas, such as Hempstead, Roosevelt and Wyandanch, still will be mired. An increasing number of Long Island's kids will be attending the region's poorest, and the state's poorest performing, schools - a peril to their own and the region's future.

Cuomo appropriately lectured about creating jobs and about the burden of high taxes on business and homeowners. He justifiably promised cuts in aid for education and health care, especially Medicaid. But he said nothing about the need to protect the poor and disabled, who rely on such programs, nothing about fighting the diseases afflicting children in poverty. He said nothing about how to protect the poorest schools from the consequences of capping spending when, arguably, they aren't spending enough.

The politics and practicality in all this are understandable. The public wants to hear about jobs and taxes. And it should hear about them - Cuomo can't accomplish anything if he doesn't gain the people's confidence. His record in public service suggests he cares very deeply for those in need, especially the homeless, and if he doesn't do something about unsustainable "structural" deficits, eventually the safety net they depend upon will be shredded. A lot of liberals don't get that.

But not even a word about the poor, about those cities and the suburbs beneath the hill? Reagan could have given this speech. Yes, the new governor did say New York needs "to continue to achieve social progress that made this state famous." But he said it so quickly that many nervous human service advocates either missed it or wondered what he really meant.

Maybe Cuomo felt he has nothing to prove. Or maybe, as the son the great liberal lion, he felt he had everything to disprove. Whatever the reason, the son could have done with just a little more of the father.