"I'm not a terrific candidate," Mario Cuomo once said about his presidential prospects in 1984. "I gave two good speeches."

Self-deprecation aside, those two speeches, delivered within a 60-day period in the summer of 1984—the first at the Democratic National Convention, the second at Notre Dame—were arguably the most potent defenses of liberalism delivered by an American politician in the last 30 years. Their significance is still being unearthed, but on an immediate level, Cuomo reached the average person in ways that belied his erudite manner. "He made you feel good, dammit," is the way Joe Grandmaison put it to me over the phone.

It was Grandmaison, a former state chairman of the Democratic Party, who was holed up at a Ramada Inn Hotel in Concord, New Hampshire awaiting word from Governor Cuomo's staff on December 21st, 1991. There was to be an imminent announcement that Grandmaison could file to enter the New Hampshire primary on Cuomo's behalf. Instead, the plan was shut down when a call came a little after 3:00 pm. Cuomo, embroiled in a budget dispute with Republicans in Albany, decided that he couldn't abandon the State at such a time. Cuomo's restraint always struck some as strange—perhaps even nefarious. Few today can understand the limits of ambition in a powerful man.

That image of Cuomo about to enter the 1992 presidential race, with two airplanes on the tarmac in Albany ready to go, has haunted progressives hungry for someone on the left to make an unapologetic plea for the cause of liberalism—with intelligence and grit—ever since. Cuomo had both. He had governed and served longer than any other Democrat in New York in the 20th century. He was a man of deep convictions, but also playful—I ran into him once in New York City and was chided for my Georgetown degree: "Jesuits!" he mocked, as we finally parted, the proud St. Johns alum laughing a hearty Vincentian laugh. But of course, Cuomo's Catholicism was no trite matter. He spoke at Notre Dame in support of a woman's right to an abortion, even though he personally was against it—because, he argued, the public square was not the place to bring about moral change. If it couldn't be done in communion with fellow citizens and families where people lived and breathed every day—in private life—than the failing was a human one and government had no business attempting to convert the unwilling. His brilliance at Notre Dame is often forgotten because his speech in San Francisco was so good.

It was there that Cuomo attacked the real "culture of me" as he saw it—Reaganism that left the poor, the destitute, and the downtrodden, behind. Cuomo took his theme from "A Tale of Two Cities" in rejecting the nascent conservatism launched by Reagan. Firing back against one-sided and privileged notions of American exceptionalism, Cuomo brought Democrats to their feet and many around the nation to tears. Reminding his audience that July night of Reagan's message, he said "We must ask ourselves what kind of court and country will be fashioned by the man who believes in having government mandate people's religion and morality; the man who believes that trees pollute the environment; the man that believes that the laws against discrimination against people go too far; a man who threatens Social Security and Medicaid and help for the disabled." In truth, we have lived in that nation now for many of the past thirty years.

Of course, not all Democrats applauded. Bill Clinton, representing a different perspective, and a rising governor in his own right, was reported to have said to a fellow governor gushing over the speech "Come on. What did it really say about the issues we're trying to raise?" Then, as now, the Democratic Party remains divided. Cuomo's voice was a powerful bridge between the two wings. He had the credentials of a liberal, but also those of a conservative—a man deeply religious, morally conscious, and community-oriented. There hasn't been another voice like his in an age of triangulation and corporate-friendly centrism. Cuomo belongs to the long line of New York's progressive and reform governors—one that goes back to FDR, Charles Evans Hughes, Teddy Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, and Samuel J. Tilden. Others have tried to claim such a mantle, but Cuomo was the last of the line of the great Hudson progressives.

Today, as we enter a new political season of presidential speculation, many will consider the Cuomo legacy, and many more, certainly those who knew him best, will speak to his dignity and character. But for now, we may do best to let his voice hang there, reasoning, imploring, but never condescending. Cuomo somehow could bring Augustinian thought to Queens and Albany. He could fight for black housing rights in Forest Hills, seat-belt laws, and a woman's right to choose—and do so with grace in the face of gnashing teeth from onlookers.

Who today, can think—and fight—like hell? Like Mario Cuomo?

Saladin Ambar teaches political science at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. He is the author of How Governors Built the Modern American Presidency (University of Pennsylvania Press 2012), Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era (Oxford University Press 2014) and the forthcoming book, American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of Liberalism in America. Let the record note he is from Queens, NY.