NEW YORK CITY WILL BE A NOOSE FOR MARIO CUOMO

Waiting For Cuomo it's a Beck~~ettian vision. The hesitation, pondering and agonizing will soon be over. He's the brightest, most articulate available Democrat. But Cuomo, like all politicians, comes with some political baggage the biggest one isn't his first name. Rather it's the fiscal and social burdens of New York City. Cuomo's hometown could be the noose around his political neck.

New York City is bankrupt, but can't cleanse itself with a Chapter 11 bath. New York City has a gentlemanly mayor, David Dinkins, who suffers from terminal incompetency. Dinkins has a gift for indecision or maldecision. The city's tax base is diminishing as taxpayers flee the city. Its burdens for an enormous array of governmental services continue to increase.

As Cuomo runs for president, he will have to keep one eye on the campaign and one eye on New York City. We've never had a successful one-eyed campaign. If Cuomo is forced off the campaign trail to execute a controversial bailout of the city, he may execute his candidacy as well.

New York City has an image problem beyond repair by even the best of Madison Avenue spin doctors. It's the place where everything malfunctions subways, bridges, telephones, airports, highways, garbage disposal, environment, welfare hotels, hospitals, schools and often all at once.

It's the place where all of the social strains of American life converge in unremitting bitterness and chaos. Jews of disparate denominations, Koreans, American blacks, Caribbean blacks, Irish, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Russians and many other groups are all in the melting pot, but never melt. They remain contentiously separate with each new confrontation.

In the 1960s, the late Rabbi Meier Kahane, a master of discord, emerged from the bitterness of New York. Today, Reverend Al Sharpton and Professor Leonard Jeffries are exemplars of the city's antagonism and ethnic polarization.

New York is perceived as the capital of murder, drugs, the homeless, AIDS victims, single parent families and illegitimate children. Similar problems can be found albeit to a lesser extent in almost any other urban area such as Cleveland, Buffalo or Philadelphia. The difference is that those cities are only occasionally in the press. New York City is a constant source of daily news on all the things Americans fear.

As a people, we have never been much interested in geography. We are isolationists by disposition and are largely ignorant of foreign places. New York City is really the only foreign country that most Americans take much notice of. It's that distant land that America finds curious and weird.

A typical midwesterner muses: Mario Cuomo is the governor of this off-the-wall place. He ought to have a seat at the United Nations. He's the potentate of people we do not like and cannot comprehend. How can he relate to us out here in the great heartland of America?

Can the governor of our own evil empire win the minds and hearts of red-white-and-blue America?