Idealistic left-wing Democrat who could have been a presidential contender

Mario Cuomo, a three-term governor of New York known for his forceful defence of the liberal tradition in the Democratic Pary and his long hesitations over whether to run for the presidency, has died aged 82.

Cuomo, the father of current New York governor Andrew M Cuomo, led New York during a turbulent time, from 1983 through to 1994, when his ambitions for an activist government were thwarted by recession.

Yet in spite of severe limits on spending he still came to personify the liberal wing of his national party and became a source of unending fascination and, ultimately, frustration for Democrats, whose leaders twice pressed him to run for president, in 1988 and 1992. His perceived penchant for coming right up to the edge of a decision and then drawing back led pundits to dub him “the Hamlet on the Hudson”.

In an era when liberal thought was increasingly on the back foot, Cuomo, a man of large intellect and often unrestrained personality, celebrated it, challenging Ronald Reagan at the height of his presidency with an expansive and affirmative view of government and a message of compassion, influenced by the Catholicism that was central to his identity.

Sometimes he disparaged politics. “What an ugly business this is,” he liked to say. Yet at the same time he revelled in it, proving himself an uncommonly skilled politician and sometimes a ruthless one.

He was a tenacious debater and a spellbinding speaker at a time when political oratory seemed to be shrinking to the size of the television set. At the 1984 Democratic national convention in San Francisco, he outshone his party's nominee, Walter Mondale, with a speech that was the high-water mark of his national political career. Death penalty Cuomo could trim his sails in the face of opposition but he held to more than a few positions that went against the grain of public opinion. Most prominent was his opposition to the death penalty, an unpopular stance that contributed to his defeat by Ed Koch in the 1977 mayoral primary in New York.

As governor, his annual veto of the death penalty became a rite. He was similarly resolute when he defied his church in 1984 by proclaiming that Catholic politicians who personally opposed abortion, as he did, could still defend the right of a woman to have an abortion.

Cuomo’s essentially left-wing view of the role of government never wavered, even after he effectively lost the argument when his party embraced the centrist Bill Clinton.

Mario Matthew Cuomo was born in Queens in 1932, the fourth child of Andrea and Immaculata Cuomo. As a boy he worked in his family’s grocery store and on Saturdays served as the “Shabbes goy” for a nearby Orthodox synagogue, providing services as a non-Jew that the faithful were not allowed to perform for themselves on the Sabbath.

It was sport, not politics, that first engaged him. He was a baseball star in college, signing a contract in 1952 to play for a team in Georgia that netted him a $2,000 signing bonus. Cuomo “plays hard” and “will run over you if you get in his way”, a team scout wrote. But after a knock on the head left him blind for a week he was forced to give up the game.

Graduating first in his class from law school, Cuomo assumed he would have his pick of New York’s leading firms. Instead, one after another rejected him, in his view because he was Italian-American. “I obviously am the original ethnic from Queens: my hands, my face, my voice, my inflections,” he said. The experience fed a lifelong disdain for anybody who struck him as elitist.

He joined a Brooklyn law firm in 1963 and entered public life in the following year.

Governor Hugh Carey urged him to run for mayor of New York in 1977. Accepting the challenge with some trepidation, he found himself in a primary brawl with six brash city politicians, among them Koch and Bella Abzug. In the first round he came within one percentage point of the winner, Koch, and the two headed into a runoff.

It was a harsh campaign. In one instance placards appeared proclaiming, “Vote for Cuomo, Not the Homo”. (Koch had declined to answer questions about his sexual orientation.) Cuomo and his son denied having anything to do with the placards. At the same time, Koch was hammering away at him for his opposition to the death penalty.

In 1982, aged 50, Cuomo became governor of New York. His inaugural address struck a familiar theme, calling on state government to “be a positive source for good”. Fiscal prudence, he asserted, did not prevent government from providing “shelter for the homeless, work for the idle, care for the elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute”. Restless intellect Cuomo always displayed a restless intellect and a love of learning. He liked to cite the theologian Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote that endeavours should be based not on personal ambition but on a desire to contribute to the greater good.

He had a pointed sense of humour. When an engine failed on a jet on which he was travelling he barely noticed and kept talking about politics to members of the press acccompanying him until he noticed that a reporter across the aisle had turned ashen. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Aren’t you in a state of grace?”

He could also be cantankerous and quarrelsome. He was known to shout down the phone and one evening rang a New York Times reporter to say: "You set out to hurt me, and you succeeded. I hope you sleep well." The next morning, he called the reporter back, offering an apology from "an old man with a bad back".

There was speculation that he might seek the Democratic nomination in the 1988 presidential election, and after George HW Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis, that he might go in 1992. He had won a third term as governor in 1990, and in 1991, on a trip to Chicago, said he was “looking at” a run. But it never happened. Popularity eroded His remaining years in office were a series of grim footnotes as he struggled to keep the state government afloat in worsening times. When the 1994 election season began, he seemed unaware of how much his popularity had eroded. Eventually his Republican challenger, George Pataki, was to defeat him by five percentage points.

Cuomo returned to the law to work in a Manhattan firm, write books and give speeches. He grew wealthy and, he said, happy. Invited to sum up his own life, he responded: “People asked me what I want as an epitaph.” In response, he proceeded to reprise a line he had used many years earlier as a young campaigner in New York: “He tried.”

Mario Cuomo is survived by his wife, Matilda (née Raffa); sons Andrew, governor of New York state, and Christopher, a journalist at CNN; daughters Dr Margaret Cuomo, Maria Cuomo Cole and Madeline Cuomo O’Donohue; and many grandchildren.