Hamlet on the Hudson
Daniel Finkelstein has an interesting take on Mario Cuomo, the so-called 'Hamlet on the Hudson' who was made famous by just one, admittedly electrifying, speech to the Democratic National Convention back in 1984.
Now the politics of America and the UK are very different for all kinds of reasons, but if Finkelstein is correct the Labour Party will end up on the wrong side of history in the 2015 general election because its left-wing political rhetoric fails to draw any connection between collective and personal responsibility.
For example, is obesity the responsibility of the 'state' via an ever expanding NHS budget or do individuals who are far too heavy have the responsibility for controlling their own weight?
Most people, I suspect, can see a sensible balance between individual and collective responsibility as there is over smoking tobacco where public resources are available to those who want to quit the habit, but ultimately the decision to stop requires the kind of willpower that no third party can provide.
This tale of two cities will doom Labour
By Daniel Finkelstein - The Times
Mario Cuomo’s speech about inequality 30 years ago could be delivered by Ed Miliband today – with the same result
It almost didn’t happen. It nearly joined the many great things in Mario Cuomo’s political life that could have been but weren’t. For this was a man who raised indecision to an art form.
This was the perpetual presidential candidate who never quite ran for the White House; the pol who left a jet idling on the runway while he agonised, with hours left, over whether to dash to New Hampshire to register his candidacy and then said that, after all, he wouldn’t; the governor who was always “still working” on his New York state budgets when the deadline for them came and went; the statesman who was offered a seat on the supreme court and dithered about it until the offer went away.
So it is perhaps little surprise to learn that when Mario Cuomo was offered the opportunity to give the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, his impulse was to turn it down.
Cuomo’s son spent hours watching footage of previous addresses. People yawned, they chatted, they dozed, they walked in and out. Who wanted to give a speech in which, as Andrew Cuomo put it, “the people who love the process enough to wear foam fingers, patriotic hats and donkey ears look bored”?
But the presidential nominee Walter Mondale wouldn’t take no for an answer. He called Cuomo personally and repeatedly and finally the New York man agreed to speak.
Last week Mario Cuomo died. And I was amazed to note, in all the many tributes to this celebrated man, to this man who had been one of the most famous political figures in America, how little there was to say. In the end, although he had been governor of New York for 12 years — three terms — he hadn’t achieved much. There was, even he admitted, almost no legacy. And his failure to run for higher office was an enigma. People liked him well enough, some (a few) even claimed that they loved him. But the accounts of his life were puzzlingly empty.
Save for this. There was the speech. His great speech to the 1984 convention, the one he almost didn’t give, towered over everything else in his life. It had been electrifying, magnificent. It had made him. It was him. Little else, politically, of Mario Cuomo has endured but this has, and this will.
And I think it is interesting to consider why. In 1984 Ronald Reagan was at his peak. There had been difficult times, but the president was able to run a sunny, optimistic campaign for re-election that suited his personality. “It’s morning again in America”, his adverts proclaimed. And he talked of America, in the biblical language of the pioneers, as “a shining city on a hill”.
The Democrats felt downbeat about their prospects, correctly as it turned out. But Cuomo lifted them.
He said that America was less a city on a hill, more a tale of two cities. While Reagan saw prosperity from the White House, out there, in the places the president didn’t go, people were suffering. There was another city where people couldn’t pay their mortgages, where steel workers were unemployed, where people were without a job or education.
Then, addressing the president, he said that there was another America where people were denied help to feed their 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”.
It’s an old story, said Cuomo, “it’s as old as our history . . . The same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighbourhoods. But for the people who are excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.”
And as he spoke, those Democrats didn’t yawn, or doze, or walk in and out. They stood. They cheered. They kept cheering for the rest of Mario Cuomo’s life.
They are still cheering. You see, Cuomo made the Ur-left speech. The arguments haven’t changed in decades. Thirty years after Cuomo’s ovation you would only have to change some of the references for Ed Miliband to be able to read the whole thing out (from an autocue, I suggest). And it has lasted not just because his words were well chosen, his images vivid. It was because there was something powerful in his point.
Here’s why. Cuomo’s tale of two cities is powerful because it is basically true. He is correct, the left is right, that capitalism produces not just a shining city on a hill, but two cities. That some people struggle while others soar. That homeless people are forced to warm themselves on the grates outside luxury apartment blocks.
This is a challenge to every progressive, including (especially) those of us on the right with the greatest faith in a liberal enterprise economy. And it becomes more so as automation shifts economic rewards towards the already well-off.
His speech should be celebrated as a statement of this point and of its consequences. It is justly famous for this. Yet his tale of two cities was not just the best of speeches, it was the worst of speeches. Its very clarity and force shows the weakness of the case as it projects its strengths.
One obvious weakness is political. Walter Mondale lost in almost every state and in 1988, his successor as Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, lost too. There grew up an idea that had Cuomo — the Hamlet on the Hudson — overcome his indecision and run on either occasion, he would have won.
Yet this is a myth. He would not have done. The tale of two cities puts the left, however honourably, on the side of the fringe and the excluded against the mainstream. Most people see themselves in Reagan’s shining city. They may find the bills hard to pay, they may worry about crime and the neighbourhood, but they don’t see themselves as losers.
The other great weakness of the Ur-speech, the more important one, is that it lacks a credible solution to the problem it identifies. It posits only faith in government, as if that faith means that no one will be unemployed, no one unable to pay their mortgage.
He leaves no room to examine the tension between collective responsibility to ensure no one is excluded and people’s own responsibility. As if there was no such tension and nothing to say on it.
For good and for ill, in this election year, for Labour as for the Democrats in 1984, Cuomo’s tale of two cities remains the text.
Mario Cuomo’s speech about inequality 30 years ago could be delivered by Ed Miliband today – with the same result
It almost didn’t happen. It nearly joined the many great things in Mario Cuomo’s political life that could have been but weren’t. For this was a man who raised indecision to an art form.
This was the perpetual presidential candidate who never quite ran for the White House; the pol who left a jet idling on the runway while he agonised, with hours left, over whether to dash to New Hampshire to register his candidacy and then said that, after all, he wouldn’t; the governor who was always “still working” on his New York state budgets when the deadline for them came and went; the statesman who was offered a seat on the supreme court and dithered about it until the offer went away.
So it is perhaps little surprise to learn that when Mario Cuomo was offered the opportunity to give the keynote address at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, his impulse was to turn it down.
Cuomo’s son spent hours watching footage of previous addresses. People yawned, they chatted, they dozed, they walked in and out. Who wanted to give a speech in which, as Andrew Cuomo put it, “the people who love the process enough to wear foam fingers, patriotic hats and donkey ears look bored”?
But the presidential nominee Walter Mondale wouldn’t take no for an answer. He called Cuomo personally and repeatedly and finally the New York man agreed to speak.
Last week Mario Cuomo died. And I was amazed to note, in all the many tributes to this celebrated man, to this man who had been one of the most famous political figures in America, how little there was to say. In the end, although he had been governor of New York for 12 years — three terms — he hadn’t achieved much. There was, even he admitted, almost no legacy. And his failure to run for higher office was an enigma. People liked him well enough, some (a few) even claimed that they loved him. But the accounts of his life were puzzlingly empty.
Save for this. There was the speech. His great speech to the 1984 convention, the one he almost didn’t give, towered over everything else in his life. It had been electrifying, magnificent. It had made him. It was him. Little else, politically, of Mario Cuomo has endured but this has, and this will.
And I think it is interesting to consider why. In 1984 Ronald Reagan was at his peak. There had been difficult times, but the president was able to run a sunny, optimistic campaign for re-election that suited his personality. “It’s morning again in America”, his adverts proclaimed. And he talked of America, in the biblical language of the pioneers, as “a shining city on a hill”.
The Democrats felt downbeat about their prospects, correctly as it turned out. But Cuomo lifted them.
He said that America was less a city on a hill, more a tale of two cities. While Reagan saw prosperity from the White House, out there, in the places the president didn’t go, people were suffering. There was another city where people couldn’t pay their mortgages, where steel workers were unemployed, where people were without a job or education.
Then, addressing the president, he said that there was another America where people were denied help to feed their 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”.
It’s an old story, said Cuomo, “it’s as old as our history . . . The same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighbourhoods. But for the people who are excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.”
And as he spoke, those Democrats didn’t yawn, or doze, or walk in and out. They stood. They cheered. They kept cheering for the rest of Mario Cuomo’s life.
They are still cheering. You see, Cuomo made the Ur-left speech. The arguments haven’t changed in decades. Thirty years after Cuomo’s ovation you would only have to change some of the references for Ed Miliband to be able to read the whole thing out (from an autocue, I suggest). And it has lasted not just because his words were well chosen, his images vivid. It was because there was something powerful in his point.
Here’s why. Cuomo’s tale of two cities is powerful because it is basically true. He is correct, the left is right, that capitalism produces not just a shining city on a hill, but two cities. That some people struggle while others soar. That homeless people are forced to warm themselves on the grates outside luxury apartment blocks.
This is a challenge to every progressive, including (especially) those of us on the right with the greatest faith in a liberal enterprise economy. And it becomes more so as automation shifts economic rewards towards the already well-off.
His speech should be celebrated as a statement of this point and of its consequences. It is justly famous for this. Yet his tale of two cities was not just the best of speeches, it was the worst of speeches. Its very clarity and force shows the weakness of the case as it projects its strengths.
One obvious weakness is political. Walter Mondale lost in almost every state and in 1988, his successor as Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, lost too. There grew up an idea that had Cuomo — the Hamlet on the Hudson — overcome his indecision and run on either occasion, he would have won.
Yet this is a myth. He would not have done. The tale of two cities puts the left, however honourably, on the side of the fringe and the excluded against the mainstream. Most people see themselves in Reagan’s shining city. They may find the bills hard to pay, they may worry about crime and the neighbourhood, but they don’t see themselves as losers.
The other great weakness of the Ur-speech, the more important one, is that it lacks a credible solution to the problem it identifies. It posits only faith in government, as if that faith means that no one will be unemployed, no one unable to pay their mortgage.
He leaves no room to examine the tension between collective responsibility to ensure no one is excluded and people’s own responsibility. As if there was no such tension and nothing to say on it.
For good and for ill, in this election year, for Labour as for the Democrats in 1984, Cuomo’s tale of two cities remains the text.
