Cuomo's Sparring Partner

By Frank Trippett

As Humorist Art Buchwald saw it, White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan had given supporters of New York Governor Mario Cuomo reason to rejoice. How? By lambasting Cuomo as a "glib, fast-talking lobbyist for a reactionary liberalism" in his campaign against President Reagan's tax-reform plan. And by branding the Democrats' star performer a "welfare statist" who belongs to an "American Left" whose "dirty little secret is that it is interested in power, not people." Such choice abuse, in Buchwald's view, added up to the "kind of endorsement from the White House" that "a Democratic candidate for the presidency would kill for."

Buchwald's satirical assessment appeared close to the truth last week. The attacks from the White House provided Cuomo with the biggest splurge of public attention and sympathy he has received since his "Shining City" keynote speech transfixed the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco last July.

Cuomo, to be sure, routinely disclaims any ambition for the White House, insisting that he is a candidate only for re-election as Governor next year. * But he has more than welcomed fresh attention as point man in the gathering campaign against the Administration's tax-reform plan. In that role, Cuomo had been popping up all over the place last month -- on ABC's This Week with David Brinkley, on PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour, at Harvard's Class Day, at the New York University commencement, before the congressional Joint Economic Committee. Still, his crusade seemed to be struggling in obscurity until he was hit with the Buchanan bombardment. The combative White House communications director responded to Cuomo first in a news conference and later in a letter to the New York Times. Wrote the publicist who used to feed Vice President Spiro Agnew some of his acid lines: "I never anticipated much in the way of decency or accuracy from the commentaries of Mario Cuomo."

Buchanan cleared his attack ahead of time with White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan. As a former aide to Richard Nixon, though, he should have realized that he was doing Cuomo the same sort of favor that President Lyndon B. Johnson inadvertently did for Nixon. In 1966 the former Republican Vice President was gadding about (with Aides Pat Buchanan and William Safire in tow) trying desperately to get some national attention, when one day he had the good luck to say something about Viet Nam that angered L.B.J. Johnson lashed out at Nixon as a "chronic campaigner" who "never did really recognize what was going on when he had an official position in the Government." The result, as Theodore H. White recounts in The Making of the President: 1968, was that "Nixon was, overnight, front-page again." Buchanan has certainly not helped Cuomo so dramatically. Nonetheless, he has handed New York's Governor the official White House seal of disapproval as Most Important Adversary in the tax-reform battle.

Cuomo seemed to enjoy his new status last week when he hopped to Washington for a round of meetings, an appearance at the National Press Club and a roast attended by top Democratic leaders. Buchanan, he told questioners at the Press Club, "has been far more valuable to our cause than I have been." The Governor also noted casually that President Reagan had sent him a birthday telegram the same week that Buchanan had launched his all-out assault.

Cuomo's formal address at the Press Club was a summary of his arguments against Reagan-style tax reform, particularly the Administration's proposal to eliminate the deductibility of state and local taxes (which Cuomo says would cost New York $4 billion in revenues a year) while decreasing the capital gains rate. The Administration plan, Cuomo argued, "is a rip-off dressed up as reform." In the five years since the 1981 tax cut, Cuomo said, "the President will have (reduced) the tax rate on our richest Americans by 50%."

Answering Administration claims that only a handful of high-tax states favor his position, the Governor said it was true that only 15 states would be directly harmed by the repeal of the state and local deductions. But, he said, "those states have more than 40% of the nation's population," and he added that the state and local tax deductions are "used by more people than any other in the federal code." Moreover, Cuomo pointed out that in April 1983, Reagan said that eliminating the deduction would create "a tax on a tax."

Cuomo's pilgrimage to Washington included a 20-minute call on House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who avoided committing himself to Cuomo's position on the deduction issue. He also huddled with several New York Congressmen over his scheduled appearance before the House Ways and Means Committee in July. Not all Democrats on Capitol Hill are eager to line up behind the Governor; many feel that New York's high tax deductions serve as powerful grist for Reagan's speeches around the country. "This is a war between Cuomo and the other Democrats," said Buchanan, pointing to Democratic tax reformers such as New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley and Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt. "Despite what he says, Cuomo will be perceived as being willing to kill tax reform to retain a deduction that benefits primarily the well-to-do."

One aide to a Democratic Senator agreed with that assessment. "If I were advising Mario, I'd tell him to cool it," he said. "As the Governor of New York, he has to oppose the elimination, but he doesn't have to make this much noise." Pollster Pat Caddell, who advises Cuomo, feels the Governor's high profile against the tax plan is worth the gamble. Said Caddell: "Sometimes you lead when nobody else is there. There is still a long way to go on this tax issue, and other voices may soon follow."

With reporting by Marcia Gauger/New York and Alessandra Stanley/Washington