By R. W. APPLE Jr. 

It was the day after he had unexpectedly won the endorsement of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, and Gov. Mario M. Cuomo was flying high -- flying as high, that is, as his wary, pensive, rather equivocal nature would let him.

"Don't shove those things in so close," he said as the photographers and reporters thrust their cameras and microphones into his face, launching one of those rugby-scrum news conferences that are the hallmark of New York City campaigns. "You'll kill me, and just when my chances are starting to look good."

The Mayor's backing, the Governor said later, "ought to help a lot" in his uphill campaign for a fourth term against State Senator George E. Pataki, especially among independents.

"This is not simply one politician trying to transfer his popularity to another politician in the same party, which usually doesn't work," Mr. Cuomo reflected as his car inched along a Manhattan street without benefit of police escort. "A sizable number of people of all labels and categories are worried about this city and want help for it. Now the Mayor comes along and says this guy who belongs to the other party, who tried to beat me twice, and succeeded once, I think he'll help us and the other guy won't. People will think about that."

It is a measure of the hole Mr. Cuomo had dug for himself that Mr. Giuliani's support means so much. Although the latest polls have been showing the race too close to call, professional politicians had been telling each other, here and in Washington, that the Governor was not going to make it, and a slightly valedictory tone, plus a tendency to look back instead of forward, had crept into his speeches.

The thunderbolt of Mr. Giuliani's announcement sharply altered the mood of the Governor's campaign, banishing the musty smell of impending doom. But it meant that if Mr. Cuomo wins, Mr. Giulani, and not the Governor, not the old minor league outfielder, will occupy what Red Barber called the catbird seat. Mr. Cuomo will owe the Mayor a lot, if not everything, though he does not like to admit it. "Not if I have the strength to be an ingrate," he said. "I may have to start working on that."

Graveyard humor aside, the Governor's predicament is amazing. Seven years ago, and again three years ago, Mario Cuomo was considered a prospective President. A year ago, he was considered a prospective Supreme Court justice. Now, suddenly, he is considered a prospective has-been.

Governor of New York since 1983, he is acknowledged -- still -- as the premier American political orator and as one of the most intelligent people in American public life. The son of an immigrant grocer, he has retained the common touch that has been considered, since the days of Alfred E. Smith, the sine qua non of success in the raucous politics of New York City and New York State.

So what happened to him in the first place? How did he ever manage to fall behind a 49-year-old legislator about whom 40 percent of the voters in a poll taken less than a month ago said they knew too little to make a judgment? Is it just the wounds accumulated and the enemies made in three terms in Albany?

Has he been victimized by the intense (if perhaps temporary) national distaste for incumbents? Or has time passed him by? Has the sun set even in New York for the urban liberals, those devout believers in using government to fight social injustice? Has the tradition of Lehman, Wagner, Rockefeller and the two Roosevelts evaporated so quickly?

One of the Governor's predecessors, Hugh L. Carey, said the other day: "There is nothing wrong with his ideas. There are just no resources any more, and that makes it hard for him or anyone else in government to show results."

That is a benign view of liberalism's plight. A more hostile attitude is represented by the comment of B. Thomas Golisano, a third-party candidate, who summarizes the Cuomo credo (and problem) this way: "If it moves, you tax it; if it still moves, you regulate it; when it stops moving, you subsidize it."

At 62, Mr. Cuomo tends to blame his stars and not himself, although he said this week that he had "utterly failed to communicate what we have accomplished in the last 12 years," which sounds a lot like President Clinton explaining his own lack of popularity. One Governor's aide carries around a sheet of paper summarizing what he has done, to show to anyone who might need reminding.

Mr. Pataki's very anonymity has proven an advantage in a year when outsiderhood is revered almost like old age in Asian cultures. The Governor said at a meeting at a Manhattan synagogue one night recently, "It's very hard to box with a cloud of smoke, you know."

The mood in New York, Mr. Cuomo says, is as ruinous for incumbents as the mood anywhere else, and he rattles off the reasons, the words coming as ever in a seemingly unstoppable stream:

"The middle class hasn't gone anywhere in a long time . . . there's no uplifting distraction, like a war, and there are no heroes, no Joe DiMaggio or Martin Luther King or Bobby Kennedy, not even old Ronald Reagan, that genial man they grabbed because there was nobody else . . . they conclude that government has failed to solve problems, like crime and the homeless and drugs, which is certainly true, so why, they ask, should they give government any more money? . . . the American people are in a mood to pay a quarter and throw three balls at the clown's head, and I keep sticking my head into the circle."

All this is practiced, and he had said similar things to a British reporter the day before, but he is taken aback by a question about his legacy. In an interview at The New York Times earlier in the campaign, he finally said, laughing, that he wanted to be remembered for having served four terms. This time, he responds with a mixture of exasperation and fatalism: "My son told me in 1983 to think about my legacy, and I was offended by that. Now I guess it will be: I fought the death penalty."

A prominent New Yorker active in past Cuomo campaigns, but sitting this one out in disillusionment, thinks that the Governor is a big part of the problem, "just too damned self-centered, too isolated, unable to see beyond himself after 12 years in harness." He calls Mr. Cuomo "the most intellectually and emotionally frustrating politician, and maybe person of any kind, I have ever known."

"Ordinary voters instinctively recognize these problems," the former associate said, on condition of anonymity. "They know he's brilliant, they know he has this power, they know he has the capacity to deliver, and he doesn't. They are sick of the mess in the streets, and they are sick and tired of the rhetoric."

There is certainly plenty of the latter. The well has not run dry. And, as a state legislator commented, there is also an ample supply of a kind of soaring idealism that is missing from Washington these days. However apprehensive Mr. Cuomo may be about his future, he still wows audiences -- with his big vocabulary (what other candidate talks about homiletics and eschatology?), with his references to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and to black history, with his passionate delivery, his emphatic hand-claps, his self-addressed questions ("So what are you going to do about that, Mario?"), his jokes told in the cadence of the city's meaner streets.

But travel with him for a day or two, and you realize how much of his time the Governor spends in telling stories about the past. He talks about his poor, illiterate parents, about his mentor, Judge Adrian Burke, about Fishhooks McCarthy, Al Smith's legendary fixer, about the rabbi who helped give him his start and especially about his past electoral successes, "always as the underdog." He talks about New York State as "the tabernacle of democracy," as the engine of the economy, as if it were 1950 and California and Texas were still the sticks.

He lists for a meeting of Teamster leaders the strikes during which he has stood beside them. He does not mention that all were failures. He derides the idea that any politician can supply "some magic solution that will descend from the heavens." Mario M. Cuomo, proud professional, like his brother Democrats Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts and Thomas S. Foley in Washington, knows how complicated these problems really are.

So he rails, like the elderly Lear, at the troubles that have befallen him, at the rules of modern politics he is compelled to live with, at the impossibility of "discussing in a 28-second commercial the complexities of fighting the crime in our streets."

What he does not talk about very much are his plans. Pete Wilson, the Governor of California, a Republican of Mr. Cuomo's generation, was equally unpopular a year ago, probably more so. He has staged a comeback by finding dramatic ways to identify himself with the deep-seated public resentments that Mr. Cuomo also talks about, in Mr. Wilson's case crime and illegal immigration.

Mr. Cuomo has not done that. Mr. Cuomo hates oversimplification; Mr. Wilson considers it inevitable, the very crux of modern political communication in a large state like his.

David Garth, the Governor's campaign consultant, says Mr. Cuomo would be far better off if he had spent more money on earlier re-election efforts; he spent only about $5 million on each, compared with Nelson Rockefeller's outlays 30 years ago, at least $15 million every time he entered the fray.

But at least as important is the image of himself that Mr. Cuomo has built up, piece by tiny piece, over all the years and all the miles since he was elected for the first time in 1982, two Presidents and who knows how many speeches ago.

People hungry for quick fixes, the Governor acknowledged at one point this week, may ultimately be put off by "the very things I say and the way I say it, being as complicated as I am and trying to be as subtle as I sometimes do."

Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company