PICKING CLEAN THE BONES:

Cuomo's Lincoln: The former New York governor remakes the sixteenth president in his own image: a review of Why Lincoln Matters Today More than Ever by Mario Cuomo (Andrew Ferguson, 07/05/2004, Weekly Standard)

This is not Mario Cuomo's first book, far from it. As one of those politicians who mysteriously acquire a reputation as a bookish fellow, the former governor of New York has--no, written isn't the word. It is more fitting to say that as an intellectual-politician, he has had his name placed in close association with a number of books: two or three wonkish tomes on public policy, a collection of his own ghost-written speeches, and two thick volumes of excerpts from his personal diaries that were, by painful contrast, self-evidently written by him. A children's book, too, rolled off the Cuomo production line a while back.

In fact, this is not even Mario Cuomo's first book on Lincoln. In 1991 he hired the historian Harold Holzer to commission and assemble a collection of scholarly essays by Lincoln enthusiasts in honor of communism's collapse--nota bene Shannon Jones--and the volume was released with both Cuomo and Holzer listed as editors. (But only Mario got to be interviewed by Larry King.)

Still, Why Lincoln Matters stands alone in the Cuomo corpus. As with the diaries, much of the book shows signs of having been written by its author. Cuomo acknowledges that one chapter was "written with" Holzer, and the hand of the expert collaborator is consistently visible, especially in the citations from Lincoln's Collected Works that appear artfully throughout, hung like deadweights to the floating zeppelin of Cuomo's prose. All in all I'd bet this is Mario's favorite of his many books. [...]

No reader will be surprised that Mario Cuomo, in surveying the span of Lincoln's life and absorbing the vast expanse of Lincoln's writing, has discovered that Mario Cuomo and Abraham Lincoln have one hell of a lot in common. The discovery has been humbly made, and for the most part Cuomo wants us to understand that in the firm of Lincoln & Cuomo, he's happy to assume the role of junior partner. Even so, Why Lincoln Matters seems as much about its author as about its subject. After the introduction, Cuomo takes us on a tour d'horizon of "today's challenges." (Challenges has always been one of his favorite words; more dramatic than problems, more abstract than difficulties, more Kennedyesque than issues, it is used by him as a synonym for all three.) Page after page floats by before the reader remembers that the book was supposed to be about Abraham Lincoln. Of Cuomo, however, we get a lot, and also a lot--say, here's a surprise--of George W. Bush.

Around page fifty or so, Lincoln makes a reappearance, and it turns out that Bush has very little in common with him, unlike some other former governors I could name. [...]

If there's a single confusion in Why Lincoln Matters that underlies the others, it is Cuomo's misuse of Lincoln's idea of equality. Cuomo writes of equality as a goal or a dream, an unfinished program or a will-o'-the-wisp, beckoning us to ever-more ingenious attempts at reshaping the world. Lincoln took equality to be simply a fact. Human equality is built into creation; it is the premise of self-government, not its end. And the purpose of politics and government is to encourage the flourishing of what is already the case.

The distinction between these two ways of looking at the American creed is crucial and, nowadays, unexpectedly pertinent. Cuomo's idea of equality requires endless schemes to force upon the country an equality of condition--let's say, to take one of Cuomo's recurring examples, a government-administered system of universal health care. Lincoln's idea of equality, on the other hand, though nobler than Cuomo's, is in practice more modest. Universal health care run by the government may or may not be a good idea; nearly two centuries after his birth, no one can say how Lincoln, a fleet and wily politician, would address the question if he faced it today. But the question itself, like most political questions, is prudential, not a matter of fundamental principle--and it draws no particular answer from the life or work of Lincoln. You can't enlist him in a cause so small.

Here's how good a book reviewer Andrew Ferguson is: he makes it worthwhile that even bad books are published via the delight he affords us in watching him eviscerate them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 5, 2004 8:40 AM