Everyone remembers former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo's famed speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. Even me (and I was 5).  In it he said:  "President Reagan told us from the very 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 the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class."

The speech could have just as easily been delivered in 2007 as 1984. So as the country plunges into another Presidential election cycle, Governor Cuomo, a practitioner and one of the left's most eloquent voices, once again asks to candidates to step back and examine their governing philosophy and the challenges the country faces, arguing that pat answers and rhetoric are insufficient to address them.

Governor Mario Cuomo is posting a series of essays on DMIBlog this week, the reading of which is well worth your time.

The current essay, "Campaign in Poetry, Govern in Prose" poses a challenge to the Democrats running for the Presidency.

It’s hard to recall a time in the modern history of presidential elections when we had before us as many vital issues. That makes it more regrettable that some of the leading candidates for President are avoiding being specific about how they intend to deal with those issues.

The proliferation of candidates, the reluctance of leaders in the polls to engage in meaningful probing debate and the extraordinarily early primary season, threaten to give us another primary campaign of sound bites, elusive responses and negativism with dominant roles being played by polls, the power of money and the unpredictability of situation-altering incidents and co-incidents.

Governor Cuomo had the great hall of Cooper Union in stitches yesterday with one of his famous extemporaneous speeches, prompted by the fact that the evening's featured speaker, John Edwards, was delayed by traffic.

Mario Cuomo at the Lincoln Lectern

As is the way of such things, the audience got an earful, including a polished critique of the Reagan years; a wonderful human being himself, the man, with some accomplishments, but also the cause of much that is wrong in America today, and the initiator of not one, but seven, one two three four five six seven, tax hikes. Mario Cuomo, as an aside, seems to be coming into his own as the elder statesman of New York Democrats; it's not an overstatement to say that waves of affection spilled over that stage.

The real meat, however, was in Cuomo's remarks on the Presidential race.