54 - Mario Cuomo: 'Speech about fairness' (3)

Mario Cuomo: ‘Speech about fairness’ (3)

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, people of every ethnic group, and native Americans - all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America.

For nearly fifty years we carried them to new levels of comfort, security, dignity, even affluence.

Some of us are in this room today only because this nation had that confidence.

It would be wrong to forget that.

So, we are here 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 a fear of a nuclear holocaust. . .

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 …

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 its people…

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 it.

We Democrats must unite so that the entire nation can. Surely the Republicans won’t bring the convention together, their policies divide the nation … into the lucky and the left-out, the royalty and the rabble.

The Republicans are willing to treat that division as victory.