9th
The party’s mild mannered presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, echoed Cuomo later in the campaign, again trying to wrestle Winthrop from Reagan, calling for the country to end the “selfishness” and “greed” of the previous four years. “Winthrop said,” remarked Mondale, that “to be a shining city on the hill, we much strengthen, defend, preserve and comfort one another. We must rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together. We must be knit together by a bond of love.”
So, which Winthrop did Americans elect—the suffering blues singer in mourning or the pop star from the shining city? The only state Mondale won was Minnesota, where he was from. Reagan swept the other forty-nine.
In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. That is why the “city on a hill” is the image from Winthrop’s speech that stuck and not “members of the same body.” No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of “mourn together, suffer together.” City on a hill, though—that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that’s why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that’s why we are Ronald Reagan.
