Brian Rosenberg, president of Macalester College (MN), writes:   Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, stepped into a mess last August when he declared at a public bill-signing event that America "was never that great." That statement was, to put it mildly, inartful, given the quasi-religious standing of patriotism in the United States.  What Cuomo meant, I assume, was that some of us are too often nostalgic for a past that wasn’t perfect or even preferable to the present, particularly if you were a woman in the work force, or a person of color, or gay, or poor. I suspect he would have attracted fewer headlines if he had said exactly that.