On the Sidelines but Still a Player : He’s a talk-show host and author. We haven’t heard the last from Mario Cuomo.

The caller from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is named Deveen--a high school student who stumbles a bit over her words but manages to get out the question that hangs over the airwaves like frost over Central Park.

Mario Cuomo, why aren’t you in the ’96 presidential race--if not as a challenger to President Clinton, at least as his running mate?

Very kind of you, Deveen. Very flattering. But President Clinton already has a terrific running mate, Al Gore. Now let me ask you a question. Are you Jamaican? I’m Jamaican too--from South Jamaica, Queens. Did you know that my Jamaica is older than your Jamaica? Anyway, here’s my question. Were you hoping that Colin Powell would run? Yes? Why? Uh-huh, because we need a change. I understand.

The Cuomo Sidestep now completed, Deveen is soon off the line, and Cuomo is on to other callers to his weekly radio show. Again, the public has been properly distracted from the question that has hovered almost since newscasters first struggled to pronounce “Mario Cuomo” (MAH-ree-o KWO-mo).

And, again, it was not answered.

Defeated as he sought a fourth term as governor of New York last year, Cuomo sits on the sidelines during the Great Game of Politics, Election Year ’96 version. He practices a little law with a large Manhattan firm. He makes some speeches. He does a few snack food commercials.

Each week he sails an urgent missive into center court via his syndicated radio show (36 affiliates, including San Diego, New York and Washington, D.C.). The only ground rule, he insists, is that all callers be “open-minded.”

In October, he released a long-range game plan: “Reason to Believe” (Simon & Shuster), a 179-page retort to Newt Gingrich & Co. that takes on the “contract with America” point by point and offers a more humane alternative.

Is that enough?

The book, which has garnered mixed reviews, is full of Mario-isms. There’s advice from his wise Italian-born mother, who died in the spring. There’s an embrace of the values of hard work and compassion, developed in the neighborhood grocery store where his mother, father and the Cuomo children worked. There are political philosophies that favor the underdog and the working slob. Most of all, there’s the belief that government is evil only when it does evil or when it is guilty of neglect.

Give the guy credit: In these days of shifting political beliefs and even shiftier values, he has been consistent. In one of the earliest speeches to place him in the national eye, his 1974 address to the then-fringy New Democratic Coalition, he pleaded the case of the middle class and argued for fairness and compassion in government.

It was those same ideas that led to mention of him as a potential president--the result of his simple yet compelling “tale of two cities” speech to the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984, a keynote address that nearly obliterated Walter Mondale from the hearts and minds of delegates.

Ideas, plans, visions--that’s Cuomo.

Doing--ah, there’s the rub.

At 63, he remains enigmatic to the point of exasperating. All potential and too little actuality, he has frustrated, ticked off and finally angered the old-style Democrats and liberals he so visibly and eloquently represents.

It was not Republican George Pataki who won the governorship in New York last year; it was Cuomo who lost. People were just tired of him--tired of his lofty rhetoric, tired of being let down. Analysts can blame the loss on his opposition to the death penalty, the Republican tidal wave, anti-tax fervor. The real reason is the presidency. If he wasn’t going to solve New York’s problems, the least he could do was run for president--make all New Yorkers proud.

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Sitting in his corner office in the law firm of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, high in the Citicorp Building in Manhattan, Cuomo puts aside his legal work for a few hours to talk about his book, his career, his plans.

Through the window behind him, the East River glimmers in the sun, the 59th Street Bridge (feeling groovy!) buzzes with traffic and his beloved Queens stretches flat and predictable clear to the Atlantic Ocean.

A words warrior with an advanced degree in intimidation, bullying, patronizing and charm, this day he is subdued, philosophical, open. He berates the “New Harshness” in the nation. He argues for community, love, a national agenda that doesn’t boil down to Us and Them. He quotes the French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and worries that Americans have lost their ability to focus on the “sweetness of life.”

He is a man of high intelligence and ideas. His radio show is filled with animated discussions about deficit versus debt, the budget-making process, the welfare dilemma--topics those kings of the airwaves Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh touch on only in tirades of name-calling and ridicule.

But when push comes to shove, Cuomo splits. Here’s his telling of the night of the 1984 keynote address:

“Gradually as you went along you could see on their faces, not revelation, not ‘Oh, I never heard of that before,’ not ‘Wow. . . .’ but what you saw on their faces was, ‘He’s saying what I’m thinking. My God, this guy thinks just the way I do. . . .’ ”

It wasn’t the greatest speech, Cuomo says. Honestly, it wasn’t. But he explains the enthusiastic reaction to his anti-Reagan rhetoric this way:

“If the moment is exactly right, and the lights are exactly right and the wine was perfect and the music is perfect and her perfume is perfect . . . when you put your hand on her hand, then you hear violins and you fall in love. If the moment is wrong, it’s your cold fingers on her sweaty palm.

“The message was exactly right for those people at that moment. It is what those people believed.

“I just gave them back their own words, their own beliefs. They were cheering for themselves. They didn’t know who Como was, Cucomo was. . . . Some kind of Italian name.”

But instead of taking the hands of the American people, looking deep into their eyes and beginning a relationship with them--”I got confused. And then I took off. I got out of the hall, back to the hotel and then I got the red eye and came back. . . . There was no good could have come out of any of that. I was there for Walter Mondale.”

By ‘91, he insists, he was ready to run for president.

“And I said so. And Ralph Marino [a Republican, then the New York State Senate majority leader] wouldn’t make a budget.” Couldn’t leave the state until he had a budget, Cuomo insists. So, in his version, the Republicans denied him. “It’s in the clips.”

Later, Clinton dangled an open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court before him, and that time “my stomach said take it. The Supreme Court for life, nobody will ever be able to touch you, you’ll never have to account for anything, you won’t have to explain it to anybody, you write your opinion and waft it out there--if they want to read it, they’ll read it.

“You’ll have health care for a lifetime and you won’t even have to buy a pair of pants; wear a robe. And--it’s so pretty and so private and so secure and also so self-indulgent for a guy like me, it would be the ultimate excess. I just always wanted to be in a monastery and now I’m in a monastery.”

But his answer was no.

For a man who lives for an argument (his wife, Matilda, once told a reporter that a family dinner with her husband is like a “loud affidavit”), for a man who once played pro baseball (until he was beaned), for a man who is all elbows and shoving and pure drive, even in his 60s, during his weekly allegedly friendly basketball games--Cuomo is, in the words of Princess Diana, a “nonstarter” on the political field.

*

Of course, there have always been “the rumors.” They’ve dogged Cuomo not because there’s any evidence of wrongdoing or “association”--New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the nation’s top Mafia fighter when he was a U.S. attorney, not only found no evidence of criminality in Cuomo’s background, he jeopardized his own political career by crossing party lines and endorsing the Democratic governor for reelection last year.

Bimbo eruptions? Just the mention of his wife’s name and Cuomo’s eyes light up.

He’s no Colin Powell, either. The Cuomo family is becoming a political dynasty of its own, with eldest son Andrew an undersecretary in the Clinton Department of Housing and Urban Development and married to Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert F. His sons-in-law include the shoe designer Kenneth Cole, known for his political ads, and video producer Howard Maier, known for “Abs of Steel” and “Buns of Steel.” This is not a military-type family, hiding on the home front.

So, what is it? Is it merely that only fools run for president nowadays--and Mario Cuomo is clearly not a fool?

Despite Cuomo’s insistence that he has explained it all, no one understands why. Maybe not even Mario Cuomo.

On the night Powell made his announcement not to run, there was Cuomo being interviewed on New York television, offering his spin. Powell, he said, “may never fully understand” why now, despite the public’s insistence, was not the time to run for president.

“Oh, sure, of course.” Part of decision-making he says, is intellectual. But there also has to be chemistry.

“Chemistry is intuitive, it’s not emotional. . . . It’s something else, you can’t explain it. . . . Some things just don’t feel right. I just don’t feel right about it.”

So, Cuomo has settled. For his law practice, where he handles international clients and packages business deals; for his speeches, where he can move believers to tears and opponents to fury; for his book, which he sees as “useful . . . it’s written to give people a basis for a dialogue and a discussion and even a debate with the [GOP] contractors.”

But is it enough?

“No. You have to do. That’s the frustration of not being in public service. In public service, you have your shoulder to the stone and you’re pushing it and every once in awhile it moves a little. On the outside, you’re writing about the guys and gals who are trying to push the stone. So I miss that.

“I do not miss the personal parts of it. Campaigning is terrible, the raising of money is just unbelievable, the lack of privacy. . . . One thing I have cherished since I was a small kid behind the store is, I like being alone. There’s nothing negative about it or antisocial. I love human beings one at a time.”

Still, he says, bridging the gap between ideas and doing is “very hard. It’s easier to settle for the rhetoric. But I’m too reasonable to be able to kid myself into thinking that that’s what matters. . . . It’s important, it’s useful and if that’s all you can do, maybe you ought to do it. And that’s where I am now. But it’s not the same as getting in there, fighting, to see that the tax laws are correct and the welfare laws are correct.”

So how are you going to do that?

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

Pause. He lifts his head and his voice.

“So why is the Los Angeles Times interested in me?”