Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo who passed away on January 1st was 50 percent responsible for my decision to pursue a career in journalism and communication. Ronald Reagan was responsible for the other 50 percent. Both leaders sparked our collective imagination and reflected our struggles, hopes and dreams through their soaring speeches.
Like many others I first became aware of Mario Cuomo when he gave one of the greatest political speeches in history at the Democratic National Convention on July 16, 1984. Although he wasn’t his party’s presidential candidate, after the speech many people wish he had been the nominee. I was in high school at the time and I recall that my parents wanted to watch Cuomo speak because he was an Italian-American Catholic, as they were. I remember feeling goose bumps when Cuomo spoke and it’s only later—when I began studying communication theory—that I learned why. Mario Cuomo’s words, how they were crafted, and how they were delivered still hold up as an example of towering oratory.
Cuomo’s 1984 speech relied heavily on what Aristotle called pathos—emotion, storytelling. In this brilliant portion of the speech, Cuomo accomplishes two things in one paragraph—he establishes Ethos (credibility) and connects with the audience through Pathos, the story of his immigrant father.
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 his 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.
Pathos is effective when it’s specific, tangible, and concrete. The human mind doesn’t do well with abstractions. Stories that are more specific are often more persuasive. Here are other examples of Cuomo using short stories to establish an emotional connection with the audience.
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.
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.
Cuomo also used the rhetorical device called Anaphora. Anaphora is simply the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of a sentence or clause. It’s an effective device when a speaker wants to outline what he or she believes in or what an organization stands for. Cuomo used anaphora to highlight what Democrats believe in, their ‘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…
We believe in a government strong enough to use words like “love” and “compassion” and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.
We believe in encouraging the talented…
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.
In the following two paragraphs Cuomo used anaphora within anaphora, which is tough to pull off.
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.
In the following portion of the speech, Cuomo does a hat trick and accomplishes three things in one paragraph. 1) He attacks the ethos (credibility) of the current president, Ronald Reagan. 2) He established pathos through vignettes, or stories. 3) He uses anaphora to strengthen the delivery.
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.
There is much more to the speech than what I’ve described in this column. You can read the entire transcript of Cuomo’s speech and watch an 8-minute excerpt here. You’ll notice that Cuomo also used metaphors and analogies to make his case, two very powerful and effective rhetorical devices. Playing off of Ronald Reagan’s metaphor of the country a “shining city on a hill,” Cuomo said the nation was more like “a tale of two cities.” Cuomo used a “wagon train” analogy to point out the differences between Democrats and Republicans.
Looking back on the night I watched Cuomo’s speech, I recall thinking that the words a leader uses and how they deliver those words can move people to action. Aristotle believed that the ability of all citizens to speak persuasively was essential for a democracy to thrive. With that in mind, we need eloquent and effective speakers like Mario Cuomo on both sides of the political spectrum because both sides have very real solutions to the world’s problems. Both sides need strong spokespeople to carry the message so we, as citizens, can make truly informed decisions.