In one sense of course, the toppling of Mario Cuomo from his New York throne was part and parcel of the nationwide people's revolution against the Democrat Party. But the shock was a lot greater in New York than in most of the country. In the first place, Mario had for years been the Great Shining Prince of Democrat left-liberalism: witty, brainy, eloquent, left-Catholic theologian (an acceptable Catholic, for Heaven's sake, now that Teddy was old, fat, and discredited), a man who had taken the nation's liberals by storm at his speech at the Democrat convention of 1984. Ever since, he had been the Numero Uno presidentabile, if we may coin a term.

But second, and more strikingly, Mario was supposed to win; until Election Day, the polls had Mario comfortably in the lead. In contrast, for example, everyone knew that Tom Foley was doomed many weeks before the election. And the Cuomo lead was not part of what looked like a massive media disinformation campaign from mid-October on. Nationally, the Democrats were first supposed to lose badly, and then came the Gingrich contract, and then Clinton looked presidential while out of the country, and the media began to hype the Comeback Kid and the Comeback Party. The polls claimed that the Republican surge had stopped; they peaked too early; Clinton is up in the polls; the Democrats are now surging ahead; the public has had a chance to look at the "contract" and blah blah. The Democrats are up again! I had been optimistic about a Democratic collapse before that, by the final weekend before Election Day I was getting worried, snowed by the "scientific" media onslaught. But then, magically, the day before Election Day, whoops! the polls showed that the Democrat surge had magically stopped; the Republicans are up again, and by Election morning the polls were at least in the ballpark (although plaudits to political analysts Robert Novak, Michael Barone, and Stuart Rothenberg for getting the Senate shift right on the button, and they called the House pretty closely as well).

What was with the media? My astute colleague Lew Rockwell plausibly speculated that the media, after trying to hype their wish-fulfillment as long as they dared, had to preserve their credibility and start telling the truth by the Monday before Election Day.

But in any case, New York was different. Everyone in the media expected Cuomo to win handily down to the wire by several percentage points. Instead, Pataki won by 4 percent. What in the world happened? One straw in the wind; in its pre-election issue, the politically savvy weekly New York Observer had two interviews with the supposedly winning Cuomo camp. To the reporter's stunned surprise, David Garth, the legendary campaign head for Cuomo, instead of being euphoric or cocky, was elegiac, mournful, apologetic about his mistakes. And another Observer journalist reported that the pre-election mood in the Cuomo camp was one of "quiet desperation," trying mightily to bring out the black vote in New York City. As Rockwell explains, if political candidates have a lot of money, they can see what's happening far better than the media, because they take daily "tracking polls" that can pinpoint the coming election results. The media were off base, but Garth knew.

At the heart of the Cuomo-Pataki struggle was a war between the rival political consultants-campaign managers, arguably the two best in the business. Both men are tough, smart, abrasive, New York ethnics. Heading the Cuomo camp was Dave Garth, the Founding Father of modern political consulting, who cut his eye teeth in the Adlai Stevenson campaign of 1952. Garth began as a liberal Democrat, but has moved rightward over the years to become a centrist Democrat. In recent years, Garth has been most comfortable conducting campaigns from the right: his last great triumph was the centrist "fusion" Republican-Liberal campaign of Rudolph Giuliani for Mayor of New York, ousting the black leftist incumbent David Dinkins.

In the opposite corner handling George Pataki: the conservative-libertarian Republican, the shadowy, reclusive Art Finkelstein. Finkelstein's most recent coup was the brilliantly-run campaign of 1992, electing Al D'Amato for U.S. Senate against the anointed liberal Democrat klutz Bob Abrams. D'Amato managed to overcome "ethics" charges to defeat the colorless, over-confident Abrams. Particularly notable was Finkelstein's slogan for Al D'Amato, intoned repeatedly on TV: "Bob Abrams, hopelessly liberal."

Dave Garth had a big problem on his hands. Not only was 1994 looming as a Republican year, but New York was sick, sick, sick of their former darling, Mario. Mario had begun as witty and eloquent; he originally won the governorship in 1982 in a tight race against the bright but humorless conservative Republican Lew Lehrman. Cuomo won it in debates with Lehrman, his quick wit effective on radio and TV. A highlight was the time that Lehrman tried to explain to fiercely pro-gun control New Yorkers why he was opposed. Lehrman drifted off into an elaborate and rambling explanation how he had grown up in rural Pennsylvania, and how it was important to know how to shoot gophers because horses would stumble into gopher holes and break their legs. Mario's riposte was in the best tradition of devastating New York wit: "Lew," he said, "in all the fifty years I have lived in the borough of Queens I have never once seen a horse fall into a gopher hole." End of Lehrman.

The wit has long gone, however. Mario had also charmed New Yorkers by his nagging, hectoring, intrusive style. Let any radio or TV talk show host criticize Mario, and the governor was immediately on the phone, rebutting, attacking, griping. Any journalist who criticized him got an angry or a needling phone call. At first, this seemed great: Mario was alive, aware, in-your-face, a true New Yorker. But after years of this, New Yorkers grew weary, especially since Mario didn't do anything. As term after term dragged on, and after twelve years in office, Mario's accomplishments were nil: the only results he brought in his wake were higher taxes, more crime, more welfare. During the summer, one of those incidents occurred that stuck in New Yorkers' minds as summing up the bog of decay that had slowly but surely settled in New York. The state maintains a recorded I-Love-New-York phone line, that anyone could call to get information on what's going on in the city. But during the campaign it was revealed that because of high costs and high taxes in New York, the actual phone operation had to be moved to rural Pennsylvania! Oh, Mario, Mario!

How would Garth play the Cuomo campaign? For the first several months, Garth went positive, showing commercials stressing Mario's nobility, his stature, his accomplishments, etc. But what accomplishments, exactly? Here we have to realize that while most politically aware Americans have long regarded Cuomo as the leader of the liberal-left, New York's strident and voluble Hard Left has long felt very differently. It is precisely because of Cuomo's great gifts that the Hard Left has felt bitterly betrayed. Apart from speeches, a thirst for power, higher taxes and a stubborn insistence on vetoing the death penalty, Mario hadn't really done a darn thing to bring socialism to New York State.

For the left and for the blacks, Mario's biggest betrayal was his implicit collaboration with Giuliani in 1993 to dump the disastrous David Dinkins. The left and the blacks couldn't forgive or forget the fact that the decisive element in swinging that tight race to Giuliani was Cuomo's investigator's strategically-timed report on the famed August 1991 black riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The Australian Hasidic scholar Yankel Rosenbaum had there been killed by a black mob. The Cuomo appointee's report laid conspicuous blame for total incompetence on Dinkins and on his inept black Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward. The Cuomo Crown Heights report was the decisive factor in beating Dinkins and electing Giuliani.

So when Garth went positive for Cuomo, there wasn't really much positive to say. As a matter of fact, the copious TV spots showing Mario saying "elect me for another four years, so I can finish the job," struck most New Yorkers as a grotesque joke. Finish what job, Mario?

The left in New York, usually loud to proclaim the importance of "issues" versus personalities, implored Mario to go negative against the virtually unknown Pataki, a farmer and then State Senator from Peekskill, up the Hudson Valley from New York City. Apparently, leftist reporters uncovered some shady "ethics" dealings by the bland, handsome, slightly goofy-looking Pataki.

Garth, however, was no longer comfortable going negative against conservatives. He launched another tack: he went negative against Al D'Amato, continually blasting D'Amato and deriding Pataki as a mere puppet of the Republican Senator. There were D'Amato's ethical problems, for which he had been cleared, and particularly the rather confusing, highly technical but still serious indictment of Al's beloved brother Armand, for lobbying on behalf of a corporation from the Senator's office. (That, however, was not illegal though it looked bad; the actual criminal charge was a bizarre accusation that Armand had committed some sort of fraud by pretending to lobby for the company, but not really doing so.)

As a short-run tactic, the demonizing by Garth of D'Amato was highly effective, and Al got rattled, committing a series of gaffes in mid-October. The most damaging error, in this P.C. age, was a quip D'Amato was overheard making to Pataki's glamorous lieutenant-governor running mate, Betsy McCaughey. D'Amato was anxious to line up the coyly neutral Rudolph Giuliani for an October endorsement of Pataki for governor; after all, they were both in the same party. D'Amato laughingly suggested to Betsy: "Why don't you make Rudy an offer he can't refuse?" Immediately, the assembled harridans of left feminism rose up in their righteous wrath and denounced poor Al from one end of the stable to the other. It got to the point, where, at a crucial late October stage of the race, Al D'Amato had to skip town on "vacation" and leave for California.

Shortly afterward, on October 24, Garth pulled his seemingly decisive coup: inducing his old client Rudy to cross parties and endorse Cuomo for governor. Everyone was all smiles at the photo-op: Rudy yammering about how good this would be for the city of New York (i.e., New York State funds and goodies galore), and Cuomo and his stooges blathering about how Giuliani showed high "courage," devotion to "principle," etc. What "principle," pray tell? Picking the highest bidder? The Giuliani October betrayal was one of many cases where liberal Republicans made their late, cheap hit against the candidates of their own party, participating in what Sam Francis aptly calls the "Backstabbing Faction" of the Republican Party. It shouldn't be forgotten, however, that Rudy was taking a neatly calculated risk; not only did his action seem decisive, but Rudy's other power base in New York politics, the Liberal Party, should not be overlooked. They, as Cuomo backers, were pleased. Giuliani had been the "Republican-Liberal" candidate for mayor in 1993.

There was another reason why Mario seemed to have it wrapped up by late October. During the summer, a third-party candidate suddenly popped up, a man who had far greater potential for damaging Pataki than the floperoo ex-Libertarian candidate, radio shock jock Howard Stern.

The centerpiece issue of Pataki's campaign was the promise of a large 25-percent income tax cut, basing himself on the successful Christine Whitman race for governor of New Jersey in 1992. But all of a sudden there popped up an unknown mini-Perot, a centi-millionaire computer payroll magnate from Rochester, B. Thomas Golisano. Running on the small but permanent ballot line, the Independence Fusion Party, Golisano poured millions of his own money into the campaign, attacking Pataki from the right, and promising much deeper tax cuts than Pataki was supporting. By the end of October, Golisano was getting 14 percent in the statewide polls, and over 30 percent, in his home area of Rochester. Since almost all of these votes would be drawn from Pataki, the Golisano race seemed to insure a Cuomo reelection.

And Cuomo had accomplished this feat without going negative against his opponent, thereby maintaining his high-minded, quasi-theological image as some sort of secular saint. His campaign did orchestrate a press conference at City Hall in New York four days before the election, where Giuliani and his No. 2, nasty leftist New York Public Advocate Mark Green, denounced federal HUD grants that had found their way to a Pataki legal client in Peekskill. But the media, themselves lazy, adopted a strategy of not airing any negative reports, in other words, not giving free publicity to any material that the campaign itself wasn't willing to push on television. In other words, no free media rides, unless the Cuomo campaign was willing to pay for TV spots. But neither Garth nor Cuomo were willing to lower Mario's dignity by going public with such material. Besides, why do so when the triumphal reelection of Cuomo was wrapped up?

In the meantime, Art Finkelstein had not been idle. Before things seemed to fall apart in the fall, Pataki had been doing very well. Pataki went negative very early, keeping the emphasis on everyone's weariness with Mario. For positives, Pataki stayed pleasant and vague, concentrating on the tax cut issue that had elected Christine Whitman in New Jersey, supplemented of course by attacking the high crime rate. For the negative, Finkelstein drew on the highly effective slogan that had elected Al D'Amato in his very tight race for U.S. Senate against Bob Abrams. In the new Pataki slogan repeated again and again: "Mario Cuomo, too liberal, for too long," Finkelstein brilliantly encapsulated in the last five words both the liberalism and the long twelve years that people had had to put up with Cuomo.

By the time of Giuliani's endorsement, two weeks and one day before the election, Pataki had held a substantial 7-to-8 points lead in Pataki's internal tracking polls. Giuliani's late hit endorsement of Cuomo reversed the standing radically; by October 28, eleven days before election day, Cuomo had vaulted into an enormous 13-point lead. Panic ensued in the Pataki camp. What to do?

Art Finkelstein's response was the brilliant masterstroke of the campaign. While the Cuomo camp understandably crowed about the endorsement, the Pataki campaign hammered away constantly at what Finkelstein astutely labeled "the deal" – what John Randolph of Roanoke once famously called "the corrupt bargain." It was "a deal," the Pataki people charged, for New York City to get still more taxpayer funding to leach off upstaters in the rest of the state. After all, why else would Giuliani stab Pataki in the back at the last minute? The Cuomo-Garth emphasis on Rudy's "courage" and "integrity" didn't cut much ice with an electorate already sick of politicians. Moreover, Giuliani administration officials, hailing the endorsement of Cuomo, incautiously told newsmen that they were counting on $150 million in increased state aid to New York City once Mario was re-elected.

That admission was all that Finkelstein needed. Keeping Pataki himself above the fray, Finkelstein ran a TV commercial using surrogates charging Cuomo with "buying votes" by cementing the deal with the Mayor. On October 29, Pataki was sent on a whirlwind trip to several upstate cities, hammering on the corrupt bargain theme and raising the red flag of still more taxes going to the City: "Mr. Cuomo is sending your hard-earned tax dollars to New York City." The hated City: a city that had already been draining upstaters of vast sums of taxes, and for what? The City: heartland of crime, and of welfare, where fully one-third of the population is on the dole. In the meanwhile, in a two-pronged strategy, the Pataki camp implored the upstate votes not to "waste their vote" against Cuomo and high taxes by pulling the lever for Tom Golisano.

On the same day that Pataki began his whirlwind tour upstate, Dave Garth made his big tactical error of the campaign. He sent Rudy Giuliani on an upstate tour of his own to counter Pataki. But why in the world would Garth think that Giuliani, the symbol of the hated City, would be popular upstate? All it did was underline the Pataki attack strategy. Immediately, Finkelstein purchased additional anti-Giuliani TV ads on upstate stations, and also mobilized visible protests outside all of Giuliani's upstate news conferences. After the election, Kieran Mahoney, another top Pataki strategist, gloated: "I thank the mayor for making that upstate swing. It was sporting. It was timely. It was needed. And he energized our base by doing it." Another Democrat miscalculation was on how many votes the Giuliani endorsement would actually draw for Cuomo. It is true that the mayor's regime has been popular in New York, for getting the cops to crack down on street bums and making some visible budget cuts. But who not already voting for Cuomo in New York would be swayed by a Giuliani endorsement? Precious few. Liberals were already pro-Cuomo, and those too fed up with Mario to vote at all were not about to be persuaded by the endorsement of a Republican – a tiny breed in the city as it is. More important, the blacks in the City could not forgive Giuliani for overthrowing their beloved Mayor Dinkins, and his endorsement of Cuomo only underscored the substantial Cuomo role in defeating Dinkins. Generally, blacks and Hispanics need a strong motivation to go to the polls at all. The blacks now had no such motivation, despite the best efforts of Dinkin's former deputy mayor, the advertised black "political genius," Bill Lynch, to get out the vote in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

In the wake held at Cuomo headquarters on Election Night, Mario's top two political strategists"Garth and head boss of the Liberal party, Raymond Harding – admitted that the much-sought Giuliani endorsement had proved counterproductive. Too late now!

Moreover, in retrospect, it is clear that the basic Garth strategy of demonizing Al D'Amato didn't really work either. After all, Al D'Amato may be rude, crude, and in-your-face, but in this and in the way he looks and talks, Al is a true New Yorker. He may be an abrasive ethnic to heartland Americans, he might not play in Peoria, but he is quintessentially New York. Why should a demonizing strategy work? After all, it was only two years ago that Al swept in, defeating Bob Abrams by over a million votes. Hard as it may be for non-New Yorkers to realize, they love D'Amato in New York. He became known years ago as "Senator Pothole," for his assiduous attention to the humdrum, day-to-day needs of his constituents. And shortly before election day, Al was gloriously vindicated, for his beloved brother Armand was not only freed by the appeals court, but the judges threw out Armand's indictment and conviction as outrageous; why was this man being persecuted at all? Go get'em on Whitewater, Al!

Politically and geographically, New York State may be divided into three sections: heavily liberal and Democratic New York City, the moderately Republican suburbs of the City (Long Island and Westchester), and heavily Republican upstate. The key to a statewide victory, by either party, is (a) the size of the margin in each region, and (b) the size of the regional turnouts. New York State has a total of 8.8 million registered voters; of these, 57 percent came out to vote. But the turnout rates differed radically over the regions: the suburbs turned out a modest 53 percent of eligible votes, upstate a sizzling 69 percent, while the city came out with a feeble 46 percent. The size of the margins reflected the outpouring of anti-New York City votes upstate. Thus, New York City gave 70 percent of its total vote to Cuomo, only down two percent from his last electoral victory in 1990; Cuomo's percentage in the suburbs, however, dropped sharply from 50 to 43 percent; while his percentage upstate fell like a stone, from a respectable 46 percent four years ago to only 32 percent this year. Combine the low turnout in the City with the anti-Cuomo outpouring upstate, and you have the fateful defeat.

Upstate, the key was the vote of the three large cities, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, usually so heavily Democratic that they carry their respective counties solidly for the Democrats (Erie, Monroe, and Onondaga respectively). In 1990, each of these counties had gone substantially for Cuomo. This year, however, the worm turned: Erie going for Pataki by 36,000 votes, Monroe by 21,000, and Onondaga by 49,000 – the latter a whopping 2:1. The Pataki campaign was also remarkably effective in smashing the Golisano vote: estimated before the election at about 14 percent overall and at more than 33 percent in his home base of Rochester, Golisano wound up with a measly 4 percent of the total, and only 20 percent in Monroe.

There were two other statewide races this year in New York. The attorney-general's race was supposed to go handily to the very left-wing, very abrasive Democrat, Jewish lesbian Karen Burstein. A former state senator and family judge in Brooklyn, Burstein had been around for a long time, whereas her Republican opponent, Dennis Vacco, a former U.S. Attorney from Buffalo, was virtually unknown. The New York City left was set to celebrate the election of an open lesbian. The problem was that, while her supporters were of course familiar with and celebrated Burstein's gay agenda, the rather naive and socially conservative upstate public had no clue to what was going on. This of course often happens with special interest groups: They know the real poop, while the majority, blissfully unaware, don't have a clue.

It was important, then for someone, some Republican, to call attention to Karen Burstein's potential electoral disability upstate. But who was going to do it? No one wanted to be the sacrificial lamb, to incur the wrath of the left and the liberal media, no one wanted to be denounced as reactionary and "socially intolerant." Certainly not the "socially tolerant" Pataki. D'Amato wasn't going to stick his neck out on this one. And neither was Vacco, who had been pounding away credibly on crime and the death penalty but hadn't caught fire, willing to do the job himself. Which surrogate would step forward and tell the important but unpalatable truth?

Finally in mid-October, up to the plate stepped the conservative Guy V. Molinari, borough president of Staten Island, a small conservative Italian and Irish Catholic borough of New York City which had voted last year in favor of secession from the detested city. Molinari, who couldn't care less about the New York Times or the Village Voice, had the courage to point out the Emperor's lack of clothes. Karen Burstein is an open lesbian, Molinari charged, and as a lesbian she should not be in charge of enforcing the law of New York State, which sometimes includes the outlawry of lesbian activities. A storm of liberal abuse heaped upon Molinari's head, while Vacco himself protested that one's sexual activity is no one else's business. But as the issue caught fire, Vacco added that private activity was one thing, but a political lesbian agenda was something quite different, and a legitimate issue to attack. By the end of the campaign, Vacco was able to point out that a Burstein campaign flier proudly proclaimed that she would "help lead the fight for lesbians and gay men in New York and across America." What "fight," exactly?

In the end, Vacco won narrowly but substantially, by three percentage points. The outcome was a big surprise and a shock to the left. Karen Burstein holding a kind of therapy group for her lesbian sisters at campaign headquarters, everyone sobbing and denouncing "homophobia," and Burstein reading a poem from Auden that was solemnly quoted in full by the adoring press the next day. Go quote Auden in private, Burstein!

After the election, Molinari summed it up: "By the time the election rolled around, I don't think there was a tiny hamlet in that state that wasn't aware not only was she a lesbian but...that she had a gay and lesbian agenda....It probably made the difference in the election."

Apart from Senator Moynihan, a centrist Irish Catholic who won his inevitable smashing victory against the hapless, Republican liberal millionaire, Bernadette Castro, the only statewide Republican who lost, shockingly snatching defeat from the jaws of a Republican tide, was Herbert London. London lost the comptrollership race to the only black on either ticket, the bland Carl McCall from Harlem, who had been appointed to the vacancy by Cuomo eighteen months before. McCall was supposed to be the weakest Democrat on the statewide ticket. So how did he manage to beat the conservative London, who had run a very good race for governor on the Conservative ticket four years earlier, almost beating out the tomfool Republican candidate, the Wall Street economist Pierre Rinfret?

McCall and London were supposed to be neck-and-neck in the polls; so how did he wind up with a six point margin, the first black ever to be elected to a statewide office in New York?

In the first place, McCall, a former banker, raised a lot more money, and he poured out TV attacks on London's conservative views. As a black, moreover, he was able to bring out more support than the others from black neighborhoods. But, after all, it was a conservative and a white political year, and these factors were not the keys to McCall's surprising victory. The key is that Herb London blew the race, committing a series of wrong-headed and almost ludicrous miscalculations. Let's face it: Herb London goofed.

One problem is that Herb was a visible sorehead. He had tried to run for governor, and his delegates at the Republican state convention were strong-armed by D'Amato so as not only to nominate Pataki, but also to deprive London of the 25 percent he needed to get automatically on the primary ballot without having to go through the difficult process of gathering signatures. London denounced this deed as an outrage, and threatened to run against Pataki on the Conservative ticket, whereupon he was persuaded by the D'Amato forces to take the comptroller's spot on the ticket. But London couldn't keep his mouth shut, and twice he deeply angered the Republicans by openly attacking Pataki, the head of his own ticket, and suggested that Pataki either lead or get out of the way.

But worse than that: London, an Orthodox Jew, made as the central theme of his campaign: anti-Semitism! denouncing the Crown Heights riot and trying to implicate McCall as a black anti-Semite. This absurd charge was promptly rebutted by the McCall camp, bringing out several prominent Jews to protest this outrage. But more importantly, Herb London never seemed to realize that while Crown Heights and charges of anti-Semitism may go over big in Brooklyn, upstate WASPs and Catholics really don't spend their days worrying about Jews and anti-Semitism. It is simply not their central concern, and until he wises up to this central fact of life, Herb London will never win a statewide election.

And so justice pretty much triumphed in the New York election. After the election, George Pataki moved swiftly if quietly to punish the Backstabbing Republican Left. It took two weeks for Pataki to return Giuliani's Election Night congratulatory phone call, and it is pretty clear that goodies are not going to flow Rudy's way in the next few years. In addition, Pataki moved effectively behind the scenes to dump the long-time Nestor of the Republican left in New York State, State Senate majority leader Ralph Marino, whom the Senate Republicans kicked out on behalf of the conservative Joseph Bruno. In a desperate attempt to save his precious power job, Marino offered to sacrifice his widely hated long-time counsel and theoretician, Angelo Mangia, but Marino had no takers. Both Mangia and his boss are out, and Marino is now talking elegaically of immediate retirement. 1994 was the end of a political era in New York State in more ways than one.