Opinion

Mama D’Amato, 1915-2014

Long before Dante de Blasio’s TV ad rocked his father’s mayoral campaign, there was Antoinette D’Amato, the woman who elected her son senator and who died Thursday at age 99.

It’s tempting to say Mama D’Amato was one of a kind, but she wasn’t — and that was the secret of her success. She could have been anyone’s mother, so even voters who didn’t necessarily like her son loved Mama D’Amato.

It started in 1980, after a bruising GOP primary that saw Alfonse D’Amato emerge victorious but stuck with huge negatives from his attacks on Sen. Jacob Javits. Enter Mama D’Amato. In one of the most effective political ads of all time, she was seen carrying grocery bags while walking home, talking about the problems facing the middle class and urging viewers to “vote for my son Al. He’ll be a good senator.”

As Al D’Amato later wrote: “It was short, simple and brilliant. I was no longer the evil ogre from Long Island. I was somebody’s son, a human being again.” Soon, she was campaigning on her own. She became so recognizable that she was even portrayed in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

In the 1986 campaign, she handed out “Recipes for the Forgotten Middle Class,” and would go on to write cookbooks and market her own brand of tomato sauce, donating much of the proceeds to breast-cancer research. And her son would serve three terms as a United States Senator.

Most New Yorkers never knew her first name, but they all recognized Mama. Antoinette D’Amato may be a footnote in the long history of New York politics, but she was an unforgettable one. RIP.