Mario Cuomo, who has died aged 82 of heart failure, was a populist Democrat of the old school. He was born in the New York borough of Queens, above the grocery shop owned by his family, illiterate immigrants from south of Naples. He grew up to be a professional baseball player; a lawyer good enough to turn down an offer of a place on the supreme court; a Catholic intellectual who dared to take on his church over abortion; a tireless campaigner against the death penalty; an orator who thrilled his party with one famous speech; and a politician who deeply disappointed it by twice backing away from running for president.
In 1984, as the keynote speaker at the Democratic national convention that nominated Walter Mondale to run for president, Cuomo had the nerve to mock Ronald Reagan’s favourite image of America as “a shining city on a hill”. It was more a tale of two cities, he told a wildly cheering auditorium in San Francisco. There was another city, he said, where people “stared from a distance at the shining towers” of Reagan’s rhetoric. In the places Reagan did not visit, Cuomo said, people could not afford a mortgage; they slept in the gutter. The Reagan Republicans, he said, had divided America “between the lucky and the left-out, the royalty and the rabble”.
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