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45.Mario Cuomo: "A Tale of Two Cities"

On behalf of the Empire State and the family of New York, I 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 questions that should determine this election and that we
all know are vital to the American people.

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." And the president is right. In many ways we are a
shining city on a hill.

But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city's splendor
and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the
portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone
seems to be doing well. But there's another city; there's another part to
the shining the city; the part where some people can't pay their
mortgages, and most young people can't afford one, where students can't
afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams
they hold for their children evaporate.

In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in
trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it. Even worse:
There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there.
And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where
the glitter doesn't show. There are ghettos where thousands of young
people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug
dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you
don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city.
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.
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President. But I'm afraid not.

Because, the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how we were
warned it would be. President Reagan told us from very the beginning that
he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest.
"Government can't do everything," we were told. "So it should settle for
taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will
do the rest. Make the rich richer -- and what falls from their table will
be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to
work their way into the middle class."

You know, the Republicans called it trickle-down when Hoover tried it. Now
they call it supply side. But it's the same shining city for those
relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But
for the people who are excluded -- for the people who are locked out --
all they can do is to stare from a distance at that city's glimmering
towers.

It's an old story. It's as old as our history. The difference between
Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and
confidence. The 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. The strong, the strong they
tell us will inherit the land.

We Democrats believe in something else. 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.

So, here we are at this convention to remind ourselves where we come from
and to claim the future for ourselves and for our children. Today our
great Democratic Party, which has saved this nation from depression, from
fascism, from racism, from corruption, is called upon to do it again --
this time to save the nation from confusion and division, from the threat
of eventual fiscal disaster, and most of all from the fear of a nuclear
holocaust.

That's not going to be easy. Mo Udall is exactly right, it's not going to
be easy. In order to succeed, we must answer our opponent's polished and
appealing rhetoric with a more telling reasonableness and rationality.
We must win this case on the merits. We must get the American public to
look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship - to reality, to the hard
substance of things. And we will do that not so much with speeches that
sound good as with speeches that are good and sound. Not so much with
speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring
people to their senses. We must make the American people hear our "Tale of
Two Cities." We must convince them that we don't have to settle for two
cities, that we can have one city, indivisible, shining for all of its
people.

Now we will have no chance to do that if what comes out of this convention
is a babel of arguing voices. If that's what's heard throughout the
campaign - dissident voices from all sides - we will have no chance to
tell our message. To succeed we will have to surrender small parts of our
individual interests, to build a platform we can all stand on, at once,
comfortably - proudly singing out the truth for the nation to hear, in
chorus, its logic so clear and commanding that no slick commercial, no
amount of geniality, no martial music will be able to muffle the sound of
the truth. We Democrats must unite.

We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can unite because surely
the Republicans won't bring this country together. Their policies divide
the nation - into the lucky and the left-out, into the royalty and the
rabble. The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory.
They would cut this nation in half, into those temporarily better off and
those worse off than before, and they would call that division recovery.
We should not, we should not be embarrassed or dismayed or chagrined if
the process of unifying is difficult, even wrenching at times. Remember
that, unlike any other party, we embrace men and women of every color,
every creed, every orientation, every economic class. In our family are
gathered everyone from the abject poor of Essex County in New York, to the
enlightened affluent of the gold coasts at both ends of the nation. And in
between is the heart of our constituency. The middle class -- the people
not rich enough to be worry-free, but not poor enough to be on welfare.
The middle class, those people who work for a living because they have to,
not because some psychiatrist told them it was a convenient way to fill
the interval between birth and eternity. White collar and blue collar.
Young professionals. Men and women in small business desperate for the
capital and contracts that they need to prove their worth.
We speak for the minorities who have not yet entered the mainstream. We
speak for ethnics who want to add their culture to the magnificent mosaic
that is America. We speak, we speak for women who are indignant that this
nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule
"thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple -- I was going to
say, and I perhaps dare not but I will, it's a commandment so simple it
can be spelled in three letters -- E.R.A.!
We speak for young people demanding an education and a future. We speak
for senior citizens who are terrorized by the idea that their only
security - their Social Security - is being threatened. We speak for
millions of reasoning people fighting to preserve our environment from
greed and from stupidity. And we speak for reasonable people who are
fighting to preserve our very existence from a macho intransigence that
refuses to make intelligent attempts to discuss the possibility of nuclear
holocaust with our enemy. They refuse. They refuse, because they believe
we can pile missiles so high that they will pierce the clouds and the
sight of them will frighten our enemies into submission.
Now we're proud of this diversity as Democrats. We're grateful for it. We
don't have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in
Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor. But
while we're proud of this diversity as Democrats, we pay a price for it.
The different people that we represent have different points of view. And
sometimes they compete and even debate, and even argue. That's what our
primaries were all about. But now the primaries are over and it is time
when we pick our candidates and our platform here to lock arms and move
into this campaign together. If you need any more inspiration to put some
small part of your own differences aside to create this consensus, all you
need to do is to reflect on what the Republican policy of divide and
cajole has done to this land since 1980.
Now the president has asked us to judge him on whether or not he's
fulfilled the promise he made four years ago. I believe that as Democrats,
we ought to accept that challenge. And, just for a moment let us consider
what he has said and what he's done. Inflation is down since 1980. But not
because of the supply- side miracle promised to us by the president.
Inflation was reduced the old-fashioned way, with a recession, the worst
since 1932. We could have brought inflation down that way. How did he do
it? Fifty-five thousand bankruptcies. Two years of massive unemployment.
Two hundred thousand farmers and ranchers forced off the land. More
homeless than at any time since the Great Depression in 1932. More hungry,
in this nation of enormous affluence, the United States of America, more
hungry. More poor - most of them women - and he paid one more thing, a
nearly $200 billion deficit threatening our future.
Now we must make the American people understand this deficit because they
don't. The president's deficit is a direct and dramatic repudiation of his
promise to balance our budget by 1983. How large is it? The deficit is the
largest in the history of this universe; President Carter's last budget
had a deficit of less than one-third of this deficit. It is a deficit
that, according to the president's own fiscal adviser, may grow as high as
$300 billion a year for "as far as the eye can see."
And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a debt so large that as much as one-half
of our revenue from the income tax goes just to pay the interest. It is a
mortgage on our children's future that can be paid only in pain and that
could bring this nation to its knees.
Now don't take my word for it - I'm a Democrat.
Ask the Republican investment bankers on Wall Street what they think the
chances of this recovery being permanent are. You see, if they're not too
embarrassed to tell you the truth, they'll say that they are appalled and
frightened by the president's deficit. Ask them what they think of our
economy, now that it has been driven by the distorted value of the dollar
back to its colonial condition - now we're exporting agricultural products
and importing manufactured ones. Ask those Republican investment bankers
what they expect the rate of interest to be a year from now. And ask them,
if they dare tell you the truth you will hear from them, what they predict
for the inflation rate a year from now, because of the deficit.
Now, how important is this question of the deficit.
Think about it practically: What chance would the Republican candidate
have had in 1980 if he had told the American people that he intended to
pay for his so-called economic recovery with bankruptcies, unemployment,
more homeless, more hungry and the largest government debt known to
humankind? Would American voters have signed the loan certificate for him
on Election Day? Of course not! That was an election won under false
pretenses. It was won with smoke and mirrors and illusions. And that's the
kind of recovery we have now as well.
And what about foreign policy? They said that they would make us and the
whole world safer. They say they have. By creating the largest defense
budget in history, one that even they now admit is excessive. By
escalating to a frenzy the nuclear arms race. By incendiary rhetoric. By
refusing to discuss peace with our enemies. By the loss of 279 young
Americans in Lebanon in pursuit of a plan and a policy that no one can
find or describe.
We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we
lie about it. We have been less than zealous in support of our only real
friend, it seems to me, we have in the Middle East, the one democracy
there, our flesh and blood ally, the state of Israel. Our foreign policy
drifts with no real direction, other than an hysterical commitment to an
arms race that leads nowhere - if we're lucky. And if we're not, it could
lead us into bankruptcy or war.
Of course we must have a strong defense!
Of course Democrats are for a strong defense. Of course Democrats believe
that there are times when we must stand and fight. And we have. Thousands
of us have paid for freedom with our lives. But always - when this country
has been at its best - our purposes were clear. Now they're not. Now our
allies are as confused as our enemies. Now we have no real commitment to
our friends or to our ideals - not to human rights, not to the refuseniks,
not to Sakharov, not to Bishop Tutu and the others struggling for freedom
in South Africa.
We have in the last few years spent more than we can afford. We have
pounded our chests and made bold speeches. But we lost 279 young Americans
in Lebanon and we live behind sand bags in Washington. How can anyone say
that we are stronger, safer, or better?
That is the Republican record.
That its disastrous quality is not more fully understood by the American
people I can only attribute to the president's amiability and the failure
by some to separate the salesman from the product.

And, now it's up to us. Now it's now up to you and me to make the case to
America. And to remind Americans that if they are not happy with all the
president has done so far, they should consider how much worse it will be
if he is left to his radical proclivities for another four years
unrestrained. Unrestrained.
If July brings back Ann Gorsuch Burford - what can we expect of December?
Where would another four years take us? Where would four years more take
us? How much larger will the deficit be? How much deeper the cuts in
programs for the struggling middle class and the poor to limit that
deficit? How high will the interest rates be? How much more acid rain
killing our forests and fouling our lakes? And, ladies and gentlemen, the
nation must think of this: What kind of Supreme Court will we have? We
must ask ourselves what kind of court and country will be fashioned by the
man who believes in having government mandate people's religion and
morality?
The man who believes that trees pollute the environment, the man that
believes that the laws against discrimination against people go too far.
The man who threatens Social Security and Medicaid and help for the
disabled. How high will we pile the missiles? How much deeper will the
gulf be between us and our enemies? And, ladies and gentlemen, will four
years more make meaner the spirit of? the American people?
This election will measure the record of the past four years. But more
than that, it will answer the question of what kind of people we want to
be.?
We Democrats still have a dream. We still believe in this nation's future.
And this is our answer to the question, this is our credo:
We believe in only the government we need but we insist on all the
government we need. We believe in a government that is characterized by
fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels,
that doesn't distort or promise things that we know we can't do.We believe
in a government strong enough to use the words "love" and "compassion" and
smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival
of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of
evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.
Our government should be able to rise to the level to where it can fill
the gaps left by chance or a wisdom we don't fully understand. We would
rather have laws written by the patron of this great city, the man called
the "world's most sincere Democrat" - St. Francis of Assisi - than laws
written by Darwin.
We believe, we believe as Democrats, that a society as blessed as ours,
the most affluent democracy in the world's history, one that can spend
trillions on instruments of destruction, ought to be able to help the
middle class in its struggle, ought to be able to find work for all who
can do it, room at the table, shelter for the homeless, care for the
elderly and infirm, and hope for the destitute. And we proclaim as loudly
as we can the utter insanity of nuclear proliferation and the need for a
nuclear freeze, if only to affirm the simple truth that peace is better
than war because life is better than death.
We believe in firm but fair law and order. We believe proudly in the union
movement. We believe in privacy for people, openness by government, we
believe in civil rights, and we believe in human rights. We believe in a
single fundamental idea that describes better than most textbooks and any
speech that I could write what a proper government should be. The idea of
family. Mutuality. The sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of
all. Feeling one another's pain. Sharing one another's blessings.
Reasonably, honestly, fairly - without respect to race, or sex, or
geography or political affiliation.
We believe we must be the family of America, recognizing that at the heart
of the matter we are bound one to another, that the problems of a retired
school teacher in Duluth are our problems. That the future of the child in
Buffalo is our future. That the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to
survive, and live decently, is our struggle. That the hunger of a woman in
Little Rock is our hunger. That the failure anywhere to provide what
reasonably we might, to avoid pain, is our failure.
Now for 50 years, for 50 years we Democrats created a better future for
our children, using traditional Democratic principles as a fixed beacon,
giving us direction and purpose, but constantly innovating, adapting to
new realities: Roosevelt's alphabet programs; Truman's NATO and the GI
Bill of Rights; Kennedy's intelligent tax incentives and the Alliance for
Progress; Johnson's civil rights; Carter's human rights and the nearly
miraculous Camp David Peace Accord.
Democrats did it, Democrats did it - and Democrats can do it again. We can
build a future that deals with our deficit. Remember this, that 50 years
of progress under our principles never cost us what the last four years of
stagnation have. And, we can deal with the deficit intelligently, by
shared sacrifice, with all parts of the nation's family contributing,
building partnerships with the private sector, providing a sound defense
without depriving ourselves of what we need to feed our children and care
for our people.
We can have a future that provides for all the young of the present, by?
marrying common sense and compassion. We know we can, because we did it
for nearly 50 years before 1980.
And we can do it again. If we do not forget. If we do not forget that this
entire nation has profited by these progressive principles. That they
helped lift up generations to the middle class and higher: gave us a
chance to work, to go to college, to raise a family, to own a house, to be
secure in our old age and, before that, to reach heights that our own
parents would not have dared dream of.
That struggle to live with dignity is the real story of the shining city.
And it's a story, ladies and gentlemen, that I didn't read in a book, or
learn in a classroom. I saw it, and lived it. Like many of you. I watched
a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day.
I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who
came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me
all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of
his example. I learned about our kind of democracy from my father. And, I
learned about our obligation to each other from him and from my mother.
They asked only for a chance to work and to make the world better for
their children and they asked to be protected in those moments when they
would not be able to protect themselves. This nation and this nation's
government did that for them.
And that they were able to build a family and live in dignity and see one
of their children go from behind their little grocery store in South
Jamaica on the other side of the tracks where he was born, to occupy the
highest seat in the greatest state of the greatest nation in the only
world we know, is an ineffably beautiful tribute to the democratic
process.
And, ladies and gentlemen, on January 20, 1985, it will happen again. Only
on a much, much grander scale. We will have a new president of the United
States, a Democrat born not to the blood of kings but to the blood of
pioneers and immigrants. And we will have America's first woman vice
president, the child of immigrants, and she, she, she will open with one
magnificent stroke, a whole new frontier for the United States. Now, it
will happen.
It will happen - if we make it happen; if you and I can make it happen.
And I ask you now - ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters - for the
good of all of us - for the love of this great nation, for the family of
America - for the love of God. Please, make this nation remember how
futures are built.

Thank you and God bless you.

　