Mario Cuomo's Famous 1984 Speech - Essay Example

Mario Cuomo's famous 1984 speech remains persuasive, on an intellectual level at least, even when stripped down. The full text of the speech was much more convincing, and especially elicited a strong emotional response. Cuomo does an excellent job painting a picture for the listener, which engaged senses other than simply the ears, and ideas that stir the heart as much as the mind. He creates images of different Americas: “A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch” compared to an America where “people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and the middle-class parents watch the dreams of their children evaporate.

” This imagery elicits a strong emotional response. Furthermore, he uses other rhetorical devices, such as repetition, to build a rhythm that contrasts his vision strong from the vision that he paints of Ronal Reagan.  The passage where he describes a “credo,” connecting his ideas with religious connotations, then moves into something that sounds almost like a sermon. “We believe,” he says twelve times, trying elaborate on differences between the Republicans and Democrats.

These descriptions also get progressively shorter and shorter, allowing Cuomo to build a rhythm that moves from very specific, long details to short but powerful statements, such as “we believe in civil right, and we believe in human rights” – statements that raise the hairs on one’s skin and create an incredible emotional response. Based on the above observations, it seems that logic and rhetoric are not inherently connected; rather that rhetoric can augment an already sound logical argument.

I firmly believe that if Cuomo’s speech was absent from logic the stripped down version would not be persuasive at all, and the full text would be less persuasive, but possibly still convincing on emotional grounds. It seems that rhetoric can add an emotional layer to a logical argument that would otherwise be absent, which convinces someone not just of the validity of one’s arguments but about the fundamental righteousness of one’s goals and mission. Also, it seems that the rhetorical devices that Cuomo employs would have been just as potent even if they were not overlaid on top of an already logical framework.

The “we believe” section is almost entirely absent from the cut down version that eliminates much of the rhetorical language, show that much of that was simply imagery and rhetoric without much argument. And the imagery he uses in describing the two different visions of America can almost always be used – I doubt there has been a presidential nominee that has failed to use this rhetorical device in the past twenty years.