ALBANY, Jan. 4--Six years after he first chose not to run for President and two years after he declined for a second time, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo no longer has quite the star quality that once bolstered his popularity at home.
A brutal recession and 11 years of incumbency have taken their toll on his approval ratings. And the experiences of David N. Dinkins in New York City and Jim Florio in New Jersey serve as reminders that the record of just one term can be enough to convince voters to reject an incumbent.
Now with his poll numbers at an all-time low, Mr. Cuomo is deciding whether to run for a fourth four-year term, knowing that a 1994 campaign would focus almost exclusively on his 11-year record in New York.
And that record, according to a broad range of lawmakers, lobbyists and economists, is a decidedly mixed one, particularly on the critical issues of fiscal management and crime.
Mr. Cuomo guided the state through the second recession of his tenure without either raising broad-based taxes or unraveling the state's extensive social-services safety net. But he was unable to stem the loss of 524,000 jobs from New York in the last four years, fully 6 percent of the state's job base.
And while Mr. Cuomo has doubled the state's prison capacity and increased the ranks of the state police by 14 percent, New York's violent crime rate is 11 percent higher than it was when he took office in 1983.
The Democratic Governor plans to disclose his political plans by the end of the week, shortly after delivering his 12th State of the State address on Wednesday, his aides said.
Even before making that announcement, Mr. Cuomo seemingly has set out to separate himself from the failings of the government he has led since 1983.
Unable to convince the state's divided Legislature, which has a Republican majority Senate and a Democratic-controlled Assembly, to address political issues like campaign spending limits and voter registration at the polls, he has led a crusade for a constitutional convention that could circumvent the Legislature. Unable to win an equitable distribution of education aid for New York City, he appointed a special commission to examine, and ultimately condemn, the state's Balkanized system of school governance.
After years of withering Republican criticism about the state's tax structure and its epidemic of violent crime, he will use his State of the State speech to propose tax cuts and gun-control measures.
In sum, as Mr. Cuomo enters the last year of his third term, and prepares for a possible race for a fourth, he is working aggressively to publicize his successes and shore up the vulnerabilities in his record.
Mr. Cuomo's critics maintain that he has failed after 11 years to build a distinctive legacy out of either concrete or policy. They complain that he has never approached the potential suggested by his elegant oratory and searing intellect.
"Here's a person who raised our hopes so high and has yet to fill them in," said Senator Kemp Hannon, a Republican from Garden City, L.I., whose comment was echoed by lawmakers in both parties. "We always remember Rocky for what he did for the state university system. What are we going to remember Mario for?"
Many legislators and Capitol lobbyists said that too much of Mr. Cuomo's energy has been devoted to political calculation, whether it be blaming the state's economic failings on Republican administrations in Washington or using his differences with the Senate Republicans as a foil for inaction. Not enough time has been spent, they charge, in building public support for his initiatives, including two failed bond acts, or in forging the ties and trading the chits necessary to make things happen in Albany.
A Lasting Legacy? No, Thank You
Mr. Cuomo mocks the word "legacy." If he does not have one, he says, it is only because he has done so much in so many areas that his record is not easily reduced to bumper-sticker sloganeering.
Why not call him "the education governor," he asked in an interview on the last day of his 11th year in office, noting that state aid to schools has doubled during his tenure. How about "the master builder," he suggested, citing the $32 billion in state, local and Federal money he says will be spent on infrastructure projects from 1993 through 1997.
Is there, he asks, any part of his environmental agenda, including the country's first acid rain law and a dedicated fund for land preservation, that he should have sacrificed "in the name of focus, emphasis and legacy, whatever that is?"
Maybe, he suggests, he could be called "the ethics governor," a reference to the state's first ethics law, passed in 1987. Or "the lifesaver governor," because the state's highway fatality rate is the lowest since 1945, the product of $11 billion invested in road and bridge construction, the nation's first mandatory seat-belt law, and a rise in the legal drinking age.
He said he would settle for "the governing governor."
"You ask me kind of broadly what was your greatest accomplishment," he said, propping his feet on his desk. "It was resisting the temptation to put my ego before the agenda and say: 'I will do something to let them remember me for all time. I will build myself a pyramid of accomplishment.'"
But with his approval rating now hovering at 34 percent, down from a high of 78 percent five years ago, Mr. Cuomo is trying aggressively to spotlight his successes. His press office has distributed a pair of synopses, one of five pages and one of 12, that itemize his accomplishments. With the help of aides on the state payroll, he has written a book that aims to debunk what he calls "the shibboleths" about New York and his government. It is scheduled for release in April.
He takes credit for the construction of Battery Park City, Riverbank State Park and Stuyvesant High School. He boasts of appointing the first two female, the first black and the first Hispanic members of the Court of Appeals.
He trumpets his role in creating programs that offer state-subsidized health insurance for the children of the working poor and that require health insurers to accept all paying applicants, regardless of risk. Last week, he signed a bill that will increase spending on community mental health programs. And he has nurtured several welfare programs that encourage welfare mothers to seek work.
Coming Up Short Against Republicans
Mr. Cuomo also admits to failures, attributing most of them to the recalcitrance of the Senate Republicans. He said, for instance, that he regrets not winning a larger share of school aid for New York City or convincing the Legislature to limit campaign contributions and spending.
And he said he was disappointed that he had not been able to win agreement from the Senate Republicans on a variety of crime proposals, including bills that would create special penalties for bias crimes, establish a sentence of life without parole for murderers, and end the requirement that second-time felons go to prison. His conflicts with the Senate on those issues are at least partly the result of polarization generated by Mr. Cuomo's opposition to the death penalty, which he has vetoed each year.
But the Governor rejected any suggestion that he could have won concessions by wielding his veto more aggressively to create bargaining opportunities with the Senate Republicans.
"How do you reach people who have been in power for 55 years and know that as long as this campaign finance law remains unchanged and the freedom of information law does not apply to them that you'll never be able to beat them?" he asked.
The key issue that would confront Mr. Cuomo in a campaign this year is his management of the economy and the state budget. Mr. Cuomo said the recession made him feel as if "I have lost three years, as if I never had a chance to govern because we spent all our time trying to balance the budget."
Throughout New York's economic decline, which hit harder and lingered longer than in many other states, Mr. Cuomo has adhered to twin principles. He was committed to freezing rates on broad-based taxes in order to keep New York competitive with surrounding states. He avoided the sharp cuts in welfare programs enacted by states like California and Michigan, feeling they would punish the poor at their most vulnerable time.
But the methods that Mr. Cuomo and the Legislature used to avoid more serious fiscal pain has brought them heavy criticism. For three consecutive years, they mounted midnight raids on reserve funds and concocted an imaginative brew of fiscal gimmicks, some of which have been declared illegal by the state's courts.
They delayed paying salary to state workers, changed accounting methods to reduce the state's payments to its pension fund, and sold highways and prisons to quasi-public authorities. Wall Street's most respected credit rating agencies responded by lowering the state's bond rating, which is now the second lowest in the nation.
Mr. Cuomo said he did not regret his decisions, even those overturned by the Court of Appeals.
"I regret that it was illegal, or found to be illegal, but I think the result comes out a very good one," he said. "Is it the best thing to do? Of course not. But normally the question is was it better than a tax increase or a cut in substantial programs like education and health, which is where most of our money goes. And my answer is absolutely. Are you glad you did it? Absolutely."
Some economists, like Hugh A. Johnson, chief investment officer of First Albany Corporation, commend Mr. Cuomo for keeping the state competitive, regardless of his methods. Other fiscal monitors said the reliance on gimmicks and nonrecurring revenues would only prolong the state's budgetary problems, insuring that budget gaps recur long after the economy regains strength.
"They set the stage for creating bigger deficits in the future without solutions," said Cynthia Green, deputy research director of the Citizens Budget Commission. "That's why we're still not out of the woods."
The recession worsened what already was a forbidding fiscal problem, the growth in the cost of the state's generous Medicaid and welfare programs.
From 1989 to 1993, a period when the state's welfare rolls grew by 31 percent, its spending on both public assistance payments and Medicaid grew by about 50 percent. During Mr. Cuomo's tenure, state Medicaid spending has increased by 276 percent, partly because the state now pays some long-term care costs once paid by local governments.
In the last three years, the Governor and Legislature have made modest efforts to control Medicaid costs, like requiring many patients to join managed-care programs and asking some to make co-payments for selected services. But those changes have yet to have much impact on the budget.
The cost of social services is a major reason that the state's total spending grew by 129 percent during the Cuomo years, a period when the cumulative inflation rate in New York was 50 percent.
But the state's tax burden, measured by the Census Bureau as a percentage of personal income, is no higher today than it was when Mr. Cuomo took office. The Governor and Legislature cut personal income tax rates during the 1980's and the sales tax has remained at 4 percent in the Cuomo years.
But the Governor has agreed to a number of other increases in taxes and fees since 1990, including a 15 percent surcharge on the corporate income tax, a 5 percent hotel tax, and steep increases in taxes on petroleum.
Business leaders complain that the state's tax environment has contributed mightily to job losses. The state added 469,000 jobs in the first seven years of Mr. Cuomo's administration. But since then the state has lost that many jobs, and more. From July 1990 to February 1992, the period over which the country experienced a net loss of jobs, New York accounted for 28 percent of the total job loss.
"Sitting back and watching the erosion of the job base, clearly this situation can't go on much longer," said Marc M. Goloven, an economist with Chemical Bank. "Otherwise it becomes a question of who's going to turn off the lights. Stabilization of the job base isn't enough. I think the state has to begin discussing a radical transformation of its tax structure."
That message seems to have gotten through to Mr. Cuomo in the last year. In Wednesday's speech, he plans to call for "an atmosphere of aggressive hospitality to business," including cutting the corporate tax surcharge and the hotel tax.
Ultimate Happiness Of Unhappy Voters
Local government leaders, meanwhile, argue that Mr. Cuomo has raised some taxes significantly -- theirs. Just as Mr. Cuomo has complained that the Federal Government passes financial burdens to the state, local leaders charge that the state has done the same to them, and that they have had to raise taxes to cope.
When only state taxes are considered, New York's tax burden ranks 22d among states, according to the Census Bureau. When state taxes are combined with local taxes, the state ranks second.
Edward C. Farrell, executive director of the New York Conference of Mayors, said that property taxes in cities and villages increased by an average of about 10 percent a year from 1989 to 1993, a period when the state cut its unrestricted aid to local governments by half. Twenty-one counties and four cities have increased sales taxes since 1990.
But Mr. Cuomo argues that local governments, particularly New York City, have not tightened belts the way the state has. He notes that the share of the state budget allotted for local aid has increased to 69 percent from 60 percent when he took office, although Mr. Farrell says that much of that money was for Medicaid and schools.
"They don't have an argument," Mr. Cuomo says of the local officials. "But they're winning politically because they have access to their people and they tell them over and over that it's the Governor."
Mr. Cuomo predicted that he will not be able to convince the public that he is right. "It's too complicated," he said. "And it's worse than that. People don't want to be convinced. Why? Because then I deny them the right to be mad at me. Then they're really unhappy."
