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Mario Cuomo was the most important Democratic officeholder during the Reagan era. The three-term governor of New York was also a famously eloquent defender of the Democratic Party's progressive legacy even as conservatives gained political power across the nation. As liberalism's most powerful and eloquent defender of the New Deal's legacy, he found a wide and receptive audience well beyond his home state of New York. Yet he never ran for president. Why? Saladin Ambar's American Cicero traces Cuomo's rise from the rough-and-tumble world of New York City politics to liberal champion, and a central question threads throughout the narrative: was he a symbol of liberalism's long decline in twentieth-century American politics, or a prophet in the wilderness, heralding the rise of a new progressivism? Moving from his youth in an immigrant neighborhood in Queens to his final years in Albany, Ambar argues that Cuomo kept the spent embers of liberalism alive in an era of conservative dominance.