Reason to Believe.

• Author: Miller, Matthew

The party needs more of Cuomo's liberal idealism. But it also needs something he's missing: a sense of where the liberal dogma is wrong

Call me a sucker for moral fervor and stinging rhetoric, but I'll admit it: Reading the first half of Mario Cuomo's new book, Reason to Believe, I wished he were running for president. Cuomo is an unapologetic, full-throated liberal who insists that government can improve society. Among other unfashionable beliefs, Cuomo says there's no reason to be defensive about a safety net that "relieve[s] the palpable suffering of human beings who are taking a beating," that Americans are bound together to such an extent that our obligations can't end at our doorstep, and that, current exile aside, being a Democrat matters because the party believes life is about more "than waging the war for maximum personal liberty."

Cuomo's book can't help but evoke the void in American politics: What prominent elected Democrat is making such moral appeals now? Republicans are stripping away minimal guarantees for the poor while leaving untouched the windfall entitlements that benefit the well-off. Plus tax cuts. In response, Democrats can only demonize constructive (though imperfect) proposals on Medicare. Who, besides the Pope and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is raising a whisper of outrage about the new attack on the poor? Certainly not Bill Clinton.

This is the problem, though. Just as the former New York governor reminds us where Democrats have lost their voice, when it comes to solutions, Cuomo comes up empty--showing us exactly why the Democrats are in a crisis.

The first half of Reason to Believe is a passionate and convincing polemic against the "New Harshness" that Cuomo says characterizes the GOP's ascendancy. The Contract With America, he writes, was "designed by distilling the bitterest juices from the people's anger, bottling them as legislation, and then offering it all back as a magic elixir." Cuomo concedes that Republicans have earned their turn at the plate thanks to Democratic complacency and hubris, but he argues that their plan "offers us catharsis but not a cure." Beneath the GOP's trickle-down redux, welfare and immigrant bashing, and anti-regulatory zeal, Cuomo detects a disturbing "new mythology that insists the strongest among us are sufficient unto themselves and the rest of us aren't worth the bother."

Cuomo predictably has a field day cataloguing GOP hypocrisies and deceits. Bob Dole wants Hollywood to...