Mario Cuomo opened the Drum Major Institute with what lipris at The Albany Project called a barnburner of a speech. Well, they must burns barns more quietly in Albany than I am used to. (lipris has some favorite video of Cuomo here)

Cuomo, who's been a fiery orator in times past, delivered a learned (quoting Aristotle on the Middle Class), somewhat rambling lecture which began to smoke only as he critiqued "supply-side" (Voodoo) economics and Bush tax relief for the wealthy.

At the first panel, moderator Doug Muzzio, Bauch Public Affairs Professor tried to focus panelists on the lack of affordable housing and told his tale of fleeing to New Jersey. While two of the panelists, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs and Finance Commissioner Martha Stark were essentially silent on the issue, one former Giuliani-Bloomberg official, Jerilyn Perine was just wonderful. Smart, funny, focused, she presented excellent and well-thought-out concrete proposals for increasing the amount of actually affordable housing. Perine, who had been nondescript as Commissioner of HPD in both Mayoral administrations, was a smart as a whip and twice as funny. Nothing I saw in her record at HPD would have led anyone to have expected her performance Monday. if you ever get a chance to hear her, freed apparently of many political constraints (she's in the consulting business), grab it.

Playing left field for the panel Sarah Horowitz of the Freelancers Union had an interesting spin on her members' needs for home-work space and their needs for remedies more effective than small claims courtn in the event that employer don't pay. I'd certainly like to hear more from her, perhaps in conjunction with Barbara Ehrenreich who has been setting up what might be a competing or complementary group United Professionals .

Perhaps one of the problems with the first panel and the DMI event as a whole was that it was very, very broad. (At this point in the post I made a mistake attributable only to careless note-taking or a mental lapse: I mixed up two former Deputy Mayors: Dinkins' Deputy Barbara Fife, a long-time progressive activist and thinker worked on the conference (I had mistakenly remembered her as Giuliani Deputy Fran Reiter, for which goof, I apologize.)

Where Giuliani-Bloomberg officials were in the majority (as in the morning's first panel) and everyone apparently under orders to make nice, fireworks were fewer.