Cuomo’s Father Speaks of Presidential Future for Son

One recent Saturday, Mr. Cuomo, the former governor, showed up at his former residence, the Executive Mansion, and broached the unbroachable: before a crowd of about 100 relatives, friends and advisers gathered to mark his 80th birthday, he called his son, Andrew M. Cuomo, “the best governor in modern times,” and, according to several of those present, mused at length that the younger Mr. Cuomo might someday “have an opportunity to serve at a higher level, to serve the people of the United States.”

The moment was striking because — despite widespread discussion in political circles that Andrew Cuomo could be a strong contender for his party’s nomination in 2016 — the younger Mr. Cuomo has repeatedly sought to tamp down such talk. He has done so not because of any absence of ambition, but because he has carefully studied the presidential flirtation of the politician he knows best: his own father.

The younger Mr. Cuomo, although clearly paying attention to national politics, has taken a number of steps to show how serious he is about avoiding the national stage. He is planning a low-key role at this year’s Democratic National Convention — he will attend with the state’s delegation, but does not have a scheduled speech, despite being among the nation’s most popular governors. He has repeatedly turned down requests for interviews in the national news media, speaking almost exclusively to reporters from New York. He has made a point of rarely traveling outside the state, scheduling his vacations in the Adirondacks or the Hamptons.

By contrast, Mario Cuomo, less than two years into his governorship, vaulted into the national spotlight with a speech to the 1984 Democratic National Convention. He vacillated about the presidency for so long that he was at times derided as “Hamlet on the Hudson,” and he once famously left two planes sitting on a tarmac in Albany while he debated whether to fly to New Hampshire to enter the 1992 race.

Andrew Cuomo has made it clear that his own thinking about a possible presidential bid — or his decision not to think about it yet — is shaped by his assessment of his father’s experience; he believes the incessant speculation about his father’s potential presidential run hurt his ability to administer state government. For Mario Cuomo, budget negotiations with Senate Republicans became particularly fraught as presidential speculation grew louder. His son has been determined not to undermine his own tenure in Albany by fueling presidential chatter.

“I’ve seen this movie before, actually in this room,” he told reporters this year, while sitting in the Capitol’s Red Room, where governors have long held news conferences. “There’s like a whole little déjà vu going on for me. So I’ve seen this play, I know how it turns out.”

“Once you start saying let’s talk political — my own politics, my own aspirations — it can become not just distracting, in that it takes time, but it can become confusing and frustrating,” he added. “All I’m working on is being the best governor I can be.”

For many people, the prospect of an Andrew Cuomo candidacy seems obvious. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who served as speaker and negotiating foil to both men, said of Andrew: “I think if the opportunity presented itself, he’d be honored to run, and he’ll run on his record as governor of New York.”

There have also been hints of a rising profile: two journalists are working on competing biographies of the governor, and Mr. Cuomo is planning to write his own book; all would be released before the next presidential election in 2016. Mr. Cuomo, an aggressive and prodigious fund-raiser, did travel to Los Angeles last year to raise money from gay and lesbian supporters, and this year, in Manhattan, he was chairman of a panel for the Democratic Governors Association, an important networking group for politicians with national aspirations.

Like his father, Andrew Cuomo is carrying forward a liberal social ideology, at times challenging the Roman Catholic Church, in which both men were raised. Mario Cuomo, the state’s 52nd governor, supported abortion rights, while Andrew Cuomo, the state’s 56th governor, persuaded the Legislature to legalize same-sex marriage; both positions are at odds with church teachings. Mario Cuomo was also renowned for his opposition to the death penalty; Andrew this year tried but failed to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana.

But their differences are also distinct. Andrew Cuomo’s fiscal and economic policy takes more of a centrist cue from former President Bill Clinton, in whose cabinet he served as housing secretary; Mr. Cuomo remains close to Mr. Clinton, and the possibility that Mr. Clinton’s wife, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, could run for president in 2016 is a significant complication for Mr. Cuomo.

At the Executive Mansion party, Mario Cuomo wore a sport coat and an open-collared shirt, and if his voice was not quite as powerful and he did not stand quite as tall as he once did, he was in a good mood, joking with aides, working the crowd. Andrew Cuomo’s own speech was poignant and laudatory of his father — he called him “my hero.”

Mario Cuomo followed up his comment about higher office by saying, “Not that anyone should want such a thing.” The crowd laughed, but he said, “No, I mean it,” and then he lamented that a president could wake up in the morning, press the wrong button and be at war.

He said there had been too many bad wars of late, and then he explained, in his aggressively Socratic way, why he and his son do what they do. He talked about his time as an altar boy and said he had even worked on Sabbaths at a synagogue. He said he believed that people are on earth for a purpose, to make a difference, to make the world a better place, and that that was the underpinning of their belief in government.

Slightly varying versions of the remarks were related by four people present who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because the remarks were meant to be kept private. The Cuomo administration had no comment, and Mario Cuomo did not return calls for comment.

Harold Holzer, a historian and former aide to Mario Cuomo who attended the party at the mansion, declined to discuss the presidential comments, but did say that the elder Mr. Cuomo “said the difference between Andrew and me is that I made plenty of mistakes.” He added, “Andrew learned from all of my mistakes and he doesn’t make any.”

It was a sentimental afternoon from two men who are not exactly known for being warm and fuzzy — or easy to work for. Joseph Percoco, an aide and sometime enforcer to the current Governor Cuomo who also served the first Governor Cuomo, was said to provide comic relief, recounting how the current governor frequently gives him grief about his tie, or his weight. “Andrew’s the older brother that I never had,” he said, “and never wanted.”

But it was Mario Cuomo’s comments that had the Cuomo loyalists buzzing, trained as they are to avoid public discussion of what might come next. There is a price for speaking out of turn in Cuomoland — as an aide to Andrew Cuomo once said, “We operate on two speeds here: Get along, and kill.” Then again, how do you tell your 80-year-old, three-term governor dad to hush?

“It was definitely one of the take-aways,” one attendee said, adding that people remarked afterward, “Jesus, Mario was talking about him running for president!”

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Romney Merged Law and Business at Harvard

One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government.

The program is so small that it has drawn little attention outside rarefied circles, but that may change as its most famous graduate, Mitt Romney, campaigns for the White House, subjecting every phase of his life to scrutiny.

When Harvard started its so-called J.D.-M.B.A. program in 1969, there were just a handful like it. Others have cropped up since, but Harvard’s has what may be the most successful alumni roster, particularly in finance.

In addition to Mr. Romney, founder of Bain Capital, the roughly 500 graduates include Bruce Wasserstein, who led the investment bank Lazard until he died in 2009; leaders of multibillion-dollar hedge fund and private equity firms like Canyon Capital Advisors, Silver Lake Partners and Crestview Partners; high-ranking executives at banks like Citigroup and Credit Suisse; C. James Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of the nation’s top trial lawyers.

The young Mr. Romney wanted to go to business school, while his father, George W. Romney, a cabinet secretary and former Michigan governor, urged him to go to law school. So the younger Mr. Romney did both, studying at Harvard from 1971 to 1975.

“What was special about these people was that they had bandwidth,” said Malcolm S. Salter, an emeritus business professor who helped create the program. “They had to be driven, hard-working and organized to a degree that was unusual even for Harvard business or law grad students.”

Guhan Subramanian, who graduated from the program in 1998 and now is its faculty chairman, said the students could be viewed as “résumé builders who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives and are just checking off all the boxes.” But he said they are genuinely interested in mastering both fields.

Students must be admitted separately to the business and law schools before applying for the program. That is a feat in itself, because the two student bodies are quite different.

The law school takes younger students, often straight out of college, putting more emphasis on academic credentials, while the business school usually wants work and leadership experience. Business students are often described as being more gregarious and at ease with numbers, law students as more intellectual and facile with words.

And then there are politics.

“I was among the most conservative people at the law school and one of the most liberal people at the business school,” said Peter Halasz, a partner at the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, who completed the program in the early 1980s. “Studying at both exposes you to many different kinds of people and various sides of an argument.”

The political gap was wider in Mr. Romney’s era, scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, when law students wore T-shirts and business students wore ties to class. “The law school was very swept up in the politics of the time, but the business school pretty much ignored them,” said Detlev Vagts, a law professor who ran the program for more than 30 years.

Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments and Freddie Mac, was a year ahead of Mr. Romney in the program. “Back then, people were trying to save the world,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Because I was interested in business, and doing well economically mattered to me, and I didn’t think the country was controlled by evil people, the law school students did think of me as a little different.”

Both schools were overwhelmingly male in those days, and Mr. Vagts, said it took several years before the dual-degree program had its first female student.

Far more graduates have gone into business than law; many, like Mr. Wasserstein, switch to business.

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Obama Camp Pushes Romney to Disclose Finances

The president’s campaign and his surrogates are accusing the presumptive Republican nominee of hiding the sources of his multimillion-dollar fortune and of refusing to release multiple years of his tax returns. On Monday, they also mocked Mr. Romney’s weekend fund-raisers at glamorous estates in the Hamptons.

In an interview with a New Hampshire television station on Monday, Mr. Obama added his voice to the criticism of his rival, saying that Americans should “know who you are and what you’ve done and that you’re an open book. And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.”

Senior aides to Mr. Obama’s campaign say the intent is not to attack the rich, or even the fact of Mr. Romney’s wealth. Instead, the focus on Mr. Romney’s personal fortune is part of a broader plan, they say, to disqualify Mr. Romney’s economic credentials in the eyes of voters.

“It’s about the fact that Governor Romney, who could be the first president in history to keep his finances offshore, has defied precedent and kept his tax returns secret even though they could prove whether or not he avoided paying taxes,” said Ben LaBolt, a spokesman for Mr. Obama.

Amanda Henneberg, a spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, called questions about the Republican’s wealth an “unfounded character assault” and said it was “unseemly and disgusting.”

The aggressive push by Democrats comes just days after another mediocre jobs report provided new ammunition for Mr. Romney’s criticism of the president’s economic policies. Just 80,000 jobs were added in June, capping the worst quarter since the summer of 2010 for job creation.

Mr. Obama sought a quick change of subject on Monday with his call for an extension of middle-class tax cuts, saying that the fate of similar cuts for the wealthy would be resolved by voters in November’s election.

“My opponent will fight to keep them in place,” he said. “I will fight to end them.”

Meanwhile, the president’s advisers and allies are intensifying their focus on Mr. Romney’s financial holdings, seizing on reports by the news media that some of the Republican’s personal money is kept in overseas bank and investment accounts. The reports added new details about the status of Mr. Romney’s finances.

The existence of a Swiss bank account was first disclosed in January, when Mr. Romney released his 2010 tax returns. Advisers have said the account was closed that year.

But an article in Vanity Fair magazine published last week added new details about other holdings in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, which served as complex investment holdings for partnership income that Mr. Romney continued to receive for years after leaving Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded two decades ago.

The article said Mr. Romney has financial interests of at least $30 million in 12 funds in the Cayman Islands.

Kevin Madden, a spokesman for Mr. Romney’s campaign, said on Fox News Sunday that the Republican candidate “hasn’t paid a penny less in taxes by virtue of where these funds are domiciled.” He added, “His liability is exactly the same as if he held the fund investments directly in the U.S.”

But that answer has not stopped Democrats and Mr. Obama’s campaign from attacking. The Democratic National Committee created a video on Sunday highlighting reports of bank accounts in offshore institutions.

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program on Monday, Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama’s campaign, bluntly accused the Republican candidate of not giving voters the information they need to make a decision about his wealth.

“Release the tax returns,” Mr. Gibbs said. “Put all this to rest. If Mitt Romney is not hiding something in Bermuda and Switzerland and the Caymans, it will be in the tax returns.”

Dan Senor, an adviser to Mr. Romney, on the same “Morning Joe” episode, said that Mr. Gibbs was being “stunningly dishonest” in his attacks. “The reason we know about these accounts, as Robert knows, is because they are in the tax returns that Mitt Romney released,” Mr. Senor said.

The Obama campaign is walking a fine line — trying to make Mr. Romney seem out of touch while not appearing to question the value of being a wealthy businessman. That kind of message could backfire, especially with moderate voters in battleground states.

“It’s not about wealth,” Mr. LaBolt wrote in an e-mail. “There have been other wealthy candidates, nobody is out to demonize wealth.”

So far, Mr. Obama’s campaign has focused more directly on Mr. Romney’s role as a business executive, suggesting that his career was a boon to the wealthy and that he did not have the interests of workers at heart.

Now, Democrats are hoping to contrast Mr. Obama’s refusal to extend tax cuts for the wealthy and Mr. Romney’s desire to cut taxes for people like him.

Mr. Romney’s advisers believe that the effort will misfire. They argue that voters want the candidates to talk about how they will turn around the economy.

Polling suggests they may be right. A Washington Post/ABC News poll in April found that 71 percent of those surveyed did not consider Mr. Romney’s wealth to be a major reason to support or oppose him. Among those who said it was a major factor in the decision, his wealth was more likely to be a negative.

For the most part, Mr. Romney’s advisers intend to ignore the attacks on his personal wealth. On Monday, they focused on Mr. Obama’s renewed call to let the tax cuts for the wealthy expire.

“Americans are struggling in a ‘zombie economy,’ and President Obama’s only answer is to pass one of the largest tax hikes in history,” Ms. Henneberg said.

Dalia Sussman contributed reporting.

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Sidebar: An Unexpected Alliance in a Same-Sex Marriage Case

It is a rematch between the main lawyers in the health care case, and it replays some of the same themes. But now the issue is same-sex marriage.

The question, again, is whether a federal law — this time the Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA — passes constitutional muster. The law says the federal government must deny benefits to gay couples who are married in states that allow such unions. The law excludes same-sex spouses from benefits like Social Security payments, health insurance and burial services.

“Until DOMA is repealed or invalidated,” explained Walter Dellinger, who was acting United States solicitor general in the Clinton administration, “no gay couple is fully married.”

(It is worth pausing to point out what the new case is not about. It does not concern the law’s other main part, the one that says states need not recognize same-sex marriages from other states. It is also not about the more ambitious arguments made in a suit filed in California by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies, which seeks to establish a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.)

The federal appeals court in Boston on May 31 struck down the part of the marriage law that concerns federal benefits, saying there was no good reason to treat some married couples differently from others.

On June 29, Paul D. Clement, who had learned the day before that he had largely lost the health care case, was back at the Supreme Court. He asked the justices to hear an appeal from the Boston decision and uphold the marriage law.

Four days later, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who had successfully defended the health care law, agreed that the new case warranted review. But he said the justices should strike down the marriage law.

The appeals court ruling in Boston was largely based on equal protection principles. But there was a dash of federalism in it, too, one reminiscent of arguments in the health care case.

Marriages have traditionally been governed by state law, Judge Michael Boudin wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the appeals court, raising federalism concerns that warranted a close look at whether the marriage law was justified.

The trial judge, Joseph L. Tauro, had gone further, saying the marriage law overstepped Congress’s power to attach conditions to federal grants to states. For instance, Judge Tauro wrote, the Department of Veterans Affairs had threatened to take back some $19 million from Massachusetts if it allowed the burial of a veteran’s same-sex spouse in a cemetery that had been built and maintained with federal money.

Most people did not take that part of Judge Tauro’s opinion very seriously, and the appeals court rejected it. But that was a month before the Supreme Court limited the health care law’s Medicaid expansion along similar lines.

The important point about federalism, said Mr. Dellinger, the former Clinton administration lawyer, is that two interests that are sometimes at odds in cases about same-sex marriage line up here. “Gay rights and states’ rights are on the same side of the case,” he said.

Mr. Verrilli, for his part, finds himself in an awkward position. It is ordinarily the job of the executive branch to defend laws enacted by Congress, and the Justice Department did defend the marriage law early in the Obama administration. Last year, though, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced an about-face, saying he and President Obama had concluded that the law was unconstitutional.

The administration would continue to enforce the law, Mr. Holder said, but would no longer defend it in court.

After the administration’s move, House Republicans intervened in the case to defend the law. They turned to Mr. Clement, who sometimes seems to be handling every important case on the Supreme Court docket.

In his Supreme Court petition, Mr. Clement wrote that the justices should hear the case because legislators were not equipped to litigate. “The House has been forced into the position of defending numerous lawsuits challenging DOMA across the nation,” he said. “That is a role for which the Justice Department — not the House — is institutionally designed.”

The seven same-sex couples and three surviving spouses actually challenging the law have yet to be heard from, and they will presumably urge the Supreme Court to deny review. But there is every reason to think the court will agree to hear the case, or a similar one from California, shortly after the justices return from their summer break, with arguments around January and a decision by June.

Both sides will be looking for support in the principles that animated the health care decision. In his petition, Mr. Clement quoted an observation from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s touchstones, that “judging the constitutionality of an act of Congress is the gravest and most delicate duty that this court is called on to perform.”

Mr. Verrilli went his adversary one better, actually citing the five-day-old health care decision, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, in what was probably its first appearance in a Supreme Court brief. In the health care case, Mr. Verrilli reminded the justices, they appointed lawyers to argue positions that neither party had embraced. In the marriage case, where both the plaintiffs and the Justice Department now agree that the law is unconstitutional, Mr. Verrilli said, it would similarly be sensible to allow Mr. Clement to have his say.

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In Framing Touchy Election Issues, Party Leaders Take Risks

At the White House, Mr. Obama announced his proposal of a one-year extension in the Bush-era tax cuts for people earning under $250,000, which threatened to put him at odds with some Democrats who have supported extending the cuts for everyone earning up to $1 million. While most party leaders fell into line with Mr. Obama’s message, several rank-and-file members said they remained opposed to any tax increases.

The No. 2 House Democrat, Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, indicated that he would be open to a $1 million income threshold, while Senator Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat who is retiring at the end of this session of Congress, called that a bare minimum. “My druthers are to extend all of the tax cuts to continue the economic recovery,” he said. “But if this leads to a compromise, Congress should at least extend the cuts for everyone under $1 million.”

At the same time, House Republicans forged ahead with their plans to vote on a repeal of Mr. Obama’s health care law, even as some members expressed unease about voting to abolish politically popular elements of the law. Others expressed fears that the Republicans would be hurt politically for appearing to refight the health care battles of two years ago, after the Supreme Court had upheld the law and many voters had moved on.

The divisions underscored the stakes for the president and the Republicans as they battle for control of the political debate — each choosing as their weapon a complex public policy issue with broad ripple effects. With four months left until Mr. Obama and Congress face the voters, these choices have become even more fraught, as lawmakers worry about alienating people who like expanded health coverage or tax cuts.

Mr. Obama, flanked by supporters chosen to represent the taxpayers who would benefit from his proposal, made the case that putting money in middle-class pockets would foster economic growth more than wealthy ones.

“These tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are also the tax cuts that are least likely to promote growth,” Mr. Obama said in a ceremony in the East Room. “We don’t need more top-down economics,” he said. “We have tried that theory. We have seen what happened. We can’t afford to go back to it.”

He said 98 percent of households and 97 percent of small businesses would receive a tax cut under his plan. But Republicans said the president’s proposal would amount to a broad tax on small businesses because many business owners report their profits as personal income.

While the fault lines between Republicans and Mr. Obama were clear, the president’s move provoked anxiety among some Democrats who either favor across-the-board tax relief or argue that putting the threshold for expiration at $1 million is more politically potent than $250,000. Mr. Obama may have added to that perception by campaigning for the Buffett Rule — named for the billionaire investor Warren E. Buffett — which would impose a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on anyone who earns $1 million or more.

Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, reiterated his position that no income taxes should be raised, while Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of Mr. Obama’s toughest critics within his party, declared in a statement that “the people of West Virginia are tired of temporary solutions to our long-term problems.”

Mr. Hoyer, speaking at the Center for American Progress, a research and advocacy group, reacted with ambivalence. He said he supported Mr. Obama’s $250,000 cutoff, but he added, “A million dollars will be, I think, a metaphor for Republicans who will not support increasing revenues on any persons in America, no matter how much they make.”

White House officials, led by the chief of staff, Jacob J. Lew, began meeting with Democratic leaders last month to prepare them for Mr. Obama’s move, according to a senior Senate Democratic leadership aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

At those meetings, a leading advocate of the $1 million cutoff, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, warned that Republicans had stoked concerns among middle-income voters that their taxes could increase next year. The $1 million threshold created a “bright line” that would decouple middle-class families from the truly rich, he said.

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