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Cuomo's world view has also been shaped by the philosophy of the French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings were suppressed by the church until after his death in 1955. Until the early 1960s, Cuomo accepted the teaching of the priests at St. John's that life was a moral obstacle course, a treacherous interval between birth and eternity. But in the '60s, Cuomo says, he was liberated by the discovery of Teilhard's Divine Milieu (a book he has "dipped into 100 times"), in which the Jesuit propounded the philosophy that God made man to embrace the world rather than reject it. This view vindicated Cuomo's own preference for engagement with the world and confirmed his judgment that his liberal activism and commitment to social justice had both a moral and a specifically Catholic imprimatur.
Cuomo's record as Governor and his depth as a thinker should be considerable assets in a race for the presidency. But it is neither his record nor his thinking that makes him so significant to many Democrats; it is his voice, his skill as a communicator, his ability to seize on symbolic issues. He has that most potent of political attributes, a personal magnetism that tugs at the public's attention. "I think at this stage Cuomo is the strongest of the contenders," says Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt, a conservative Democrat who is a potential rival for the nomination. Some are waiting to see how Cuomo will position himself. "It's a question of which Cuomo he will try to sell," says one Democratic strategist. "His San Francisco speech in 1984 was really an eloquent defense of the past. But if he is going to sell the pragmatic Governor who also has a heart, that's another matter."
At the moment, the Cuomo strategy seems to be to run for President by not running, reflecting the newest conventional wisdom that it may no longer be necessary to begin campaigning years before the nomination. In the relentless glare of the media age, overexposure can be more devastating than an undernourished organization, and the public can grow disenchanted with campaigners it knows too well. A candidate with a solid background and strong base (New York, say) might be able to patrol the sidelines--at least until near the end of 1987--and gain as a presence through his absence. With a ramshackle organization, Gary Hart upset Walter Mondale in New Hampshire. Cuomo, his advisers hope, could do the same to Hart this time around and perhaps have the staying power needed to make it all the way to the nomination. At the moment, Hart is the clear front runner; a poll for TIME last week by Yankelovich, Clancy, Shulman found that among all the potential nominees, three times as many Democrats and independents prefer Hart to Cuomo.
Although it is likely that Cuomo would appeal to voters in the urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest, traditional Democratic power bases, both his style and his message may play less well in the South and the Sunbelt, regions that are critical if the party hopes to regain the presidency. Cuomo is still largely unknown in the South and West, to party activists as well as voters.