Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York who died on New Year's Day, has been remembered as a liberal lion and a great orator. Many of the remembrances and obituaries have mentioned his speech at the Democratic convention of 1984.
"A hundred years from now, if there is one speech that people will study and remember from a Democratic politician in the last quarter of the 20th century, it will rightly be Cuomo's 1984 address," argued Andrei Cherny, who has himself written speeches for Democratic politicians.
Even conservatives can admire Cuomo's willingness to stand for his principles when they weren't especially popular — even if we are mostly glad that they weren't popular. It must be said, though, that his convention speech hasn't aged well. To read it now is to see why Cuomo had such an electrifying effect on liberals, and why liberalism in his era was so hopeless.
It is also to see that Cuomo's undoubted oratorical gifts were sometimes merely demagogic ones. The theme of his speech was that the United States in the years of President Ronald Reagan was not the "shining city on a hill" of Reagan's speeches but rather "two cities," and that Reagan had no concern for the one mired in poverty. Cuomo introduced that theme with a distortion:
"Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn't understand that fear. He said, 'Why, this country is a shining city on a hill.' "
In the actual speech Reagan had given 10 days earlier, he had neither "admitted" that many people were worried about their economic condition — which would not, of course, have been much of an admission — nor expressed bafflement that they might be. He had instead said that Americans shouldn't be fearful about the future in general, and about the Cold War in particular.
The distortion allowed Cuomo to segue into a shopworn caricature of conservatism, which on his telling amounted to "social Darwinism." "Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class."
He then provided a history of the Republican and Democratic parties that would make Parson Weems blush at its simple-mindedness. "The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence," he said. Republicans "believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail." Democrats, by contrast, "believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once." Maybe the governor should have reviewed his party's history from the 1850s through the 1880s to see just how inclusively it defined the American family.
