He may well lose this time. He is running for a fourth term (he jokes that a Queens friend asked, ““Is that legal?’’). He is opposed by a cipher – a state senator named George Pataki – who is sponsored by a sleaze, the incorrigible U.S. Sen. Alfonse D’Amato. ““But it’s not really D’Amato who’s behind Pataki,’’ says Richard Brodsky, a Democratic state assemblyman. ““It’s Peter Finch in the movie “Network’: they’re mad as hell and they don’t want to take it anymore.’’ The polls have Cuomo a few points down, but the feel of the campaign is dire. Most audiences aren’t nearly so tolerant as the one in Lawrence. Indeed, Cuomo’s next stop that night was a television call-in show where he was battered by taxpayers. Even the host piled on: she had called the ““I Love New York’’ tourist information line and was surprised to learn that it was being answered in Pennsylvania – to escape New York’s confiscatory business taxes. ““Big deal, you found a company that moved to Pennsylvania,’’ Cuomo snapped. ““Jobs are always leaving. Jobs are always coming.''

Mario Cuomo would have you believe the public anger is generic, a function of the times – but that is only partly true. ““They hate him,’’ says a New York City Democrat. ““They are sick of his talk.’’ There is something to that. Cuomo’s oratory has come in two flavors, and both now work to his disadvantage. There is the grand, soaring rhetoric the rest of the country has seen – the 1984 Democratic convention Cuomo – but which hasn’t had any practical effect on the lives of New Yorkers. And there is the less felicitous Cuomo of the radio talk shows, angry, defensive, bullying callers who disagree (most local reporters know this fellow well). ““When you come from Queens,’’ he says, ““a day without an argument is a wasted opportunity.’’ Still, the act has grown old.

There are those who say that Cuomo has been held to a higher standard than most, a prisoner of the expectations raised by his oratory. Perhaps; but he hasn’t been a particularly courageous governor either. He was handed a challenge, and dodged it. New York isn’t well suited to compete in the postindustrial world. It has overtaxed enterprise and oversubsidized dependency, with predictable results. The state has hemorrhaged jobs in recent years, even after the recession eased. A recent study says nearly a third of local businesses still want to move elsewhere. It has the second highest state-local tax burden in the country. It has sneaky, hidden taxes – on energy, for example – and vast regulatory contraptions that raise the cost of everything. Meanwhile, there are 1.6 million people on welfare (out of a population of 18 million), and the state spends $5,975 per capita on Medicaid vs. $1,938 for California.

A major restructuring has been needed – lowering taxes, reforming the public sector – and Cuomo has been loath to provide it. He’s never been very interested in how government works, in finding ways to make it more efficient. He has preferred not to use his line-item veto; he has quieted his divided legislature – Democratic assembly, GOP Senate – with thick, gloppy ladlings of pork.

Cuomo has another problem. The two main issues this year are taxes and crime – both of which are surrogates for a deeper issue: race. The relationship between race and crime, at least in the minds of nervous white people, is obvious; and in a state with such generous subsidies for the poor, gripes about taxes – you’re giving my money to them – quickly become racial as well. Cuomo, in fact, has been tough on crime, but he doesn’t get much credit for it because he’s perceived a softie. He’s built more prison cells than any other New York governor, but he’s stood – courageously, and at no small cost – against the death penalty. At the same time, though, he has patronized the black political class, indulging their talk of hopelessness, pining for ever-larger government to ““create opportunity’’ – at the very moment when a tide of immigrants, including many black West Indians, have been creating opportunity for themselves, taking jobs native-born blacks scorned, saving New York with their enterprise in the 1980s.

The contrast with Daniel Patrick Moynihan – who will coast to a fourth term in the U.S. Senate this year, a rare unthreatened Democratic incumbent – seems particularly stark. Moynihan has been notoriously candid about the impact of individual behavior – the disintegration of the black family – on poverty. Voters may not know the details, but they sense his honesty. Given a national stage, Mario Cuomo chose to rhapsodize about the things government could create if given the chance. But the treasured community of his youth – the old neighborhood – grew from the streets up, not from the top down; from strong, motivated individuals treating each other responsibly. Cuomo is a talented man, a public poet – but he has celebrated at the wrong altar, exalting the civil service rather than a civil society, and now he is being made to pay.