"We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things" (Mario Cuomo, 1984)

We saw and heard a snatch of Mario Cuomo's 1984 Democratic National Convention keynote speech earlier this evening. This clip is still only 7:48's worth, but that's 7:48 of what remains one of the great American orations. You can find a complete transcript here.

"The outpouring of praise for Cuomo speaks to a purposeful and centered life that didn't need the Oval Office or jurist's robes to be revered."
-- Jonathan Capehart, in a washingtonpost.com PostPartisan post, "In praise of Mario Cuomo"

by Ken

"On behalf of the great Empire State and the whole family of New York," then-NYS Gov. Mario Cuomo began that July night in San Francisco,

let me thank you for the great privilege of being able to address this convention. Please allow me to skip the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric. Let me instead use this valuable opportunity to deal immediately with the questions that should determine this election and that we all know are vital to the American people.

"I remember exactly where I was when I understood I was a Democrat," the Washington Post's Jonathan Capehart writes in a piece called "In praise of Mario Cuomo." "I was sitting in my then-step-grandmother’s television room in Wildwood, N.J., watching New York Gov. Mario Cuomo deliver the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco."

He listened for nearly 40 minutes, Jonathan says, as "the unabashed liberal delivered a stirring rebuke of the policies of Republican President Ronald Reagan while spelling out the ideals of his party." And he quotes a couple of memorable chunks:

In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation-- Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a “Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”

Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe-- Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.

We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees-- wagon train after wagon train-- to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family; lifting them up into the wagon on the way; blacks and Hispanics, and people of every ethnic group, and native Americans-- all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

And Jonathan takes it one perhaps dangerous step farther. "Cuomo's 'we believe' oration on who Democrats were then," he says, "is still who Democrats are today." Alas, Jonathan, that's some Democrats -- only some. This is the depressing reality we live with here at DWT every day. The rest, well, they're either living obliviously and fearfully in Mr. Reagan's Shining City or at least pretending they do. Maybe a Democrat could get away with saying some of the things Mario Cuomo' said in that 1984 keynote at a DNC today, but it wouldn't likely be a keynote. It would be slipped in somewhere, secure in the knowledge that no one would be paying attention.

Jonathan concludes his remembrance:

Cuomo would not rise higher than governor. Not only did he forgo a presidential run, he also withdrew from consideration in 1993 for a Supreme Court seat many thought for sure President Bill Clinton would offer and he would accept. But the outpouring of praise for Cuomo speaks to a purposeful and centered life that didn’t need the Oval Office or jurist’s robes to be revered.

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