Secretary Cuomo’s father, Governor Cuomo, joined the editors of The New York Sun for lunch over the summer, reminding us of what an articulate and enjoyable sparring partner he is. His agenda, if he had one, was to advance the cause of his son in the hope that these columns might endorse his candidacy in the Democratic primary. We don’t mind saying the thought occurred to us, particularly after the younger Cuomo delivered, in May at the Cooper Union, a speech throwing down the gauntlet on an issue, taxes, on which Governor Pataki had, presumably, thought he was unassailable.

Mr. Cuomo, we noted at the time, dealt with the tax issue only briefly in the course of a long disquisition on the situation after September 11. But, we said, his paragraph on taxes was something a lot of people had been waiting for a Democrat to say. He noted that the Empire State has the largest combined state and local tax burden in the nation and said that taxes must begin to come down. “We cannot infuse new energy into our economy unless we remove the weights that drag our economic actors down,” said Mr. Cuomo. “We cannot be the economic engine of the nation if we are the tax capital of the nation.”

Now that was a startling and encouraging assertion, even en passant, from the son of Governor Cuomo (our editorial of May 16 ran under the headline “Cuomo v. Cuomo”). The former secretary of housing and urban development didn’t offer a lot of specifics, but, we observed at the time, the campaign was young. By our lights, the right wing is the undervalued stock in the Democratic Party, and we hoped Mr. Cuomo might place his bet on the issues that are lying there. In the subsequent weeks, however, we were disappointed as little differentiation on these issues emerged between Messrs. Cuomo and McCall — a fact that left many New Yorkers figuring that all things being equal, Mr. McCall was the more deserving of the honors of the season.

Having failed to press in the run-up to primary day issues like the one Mr. Cuomo spoke of at Cooper Union, neither Democrat would have had an easy time plumping for tax cuts in a general election campaign against Mr. Pataki, though the Republican governor himself has left this issue fallow. But Mr. Cuomo is young, and this issue is not going to go away. On the contrary, the government’s share of the economic pie has been running at near record levels in both the Empire State and America. Whether Andrew Cuomo will, in his defeat, explore these ideas and make them his own, time will only tell. But if he decides to do so, he may yet have a future in politics.