CLEVELAND — Darkness fell in Cleveland. 
 
 Ronald Reagan, the candidate Donald Trump most aspires to be, cheerily conjured the image of “Morning in America” in both of his winning presidential campaigns, blunting the edge of the harder-edged conservatism of his earlier career. On the first night of Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention — personally stage-managed by the nominee — a blackout curtain of unrelenting gloom was lowered on the Quicken Loans Center in service of his slogan “Make America Safe Again.” 
 
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 A majority of Americans see the country on the wrong track, for sure, but polls don’t illustrate a population gripped by widespread death-metal doom. Yet for about two prime-time hours, viewers were hit with a relentless recitation of death, anger, danger, helplessness, blood, murder, fear and terror — graphic stories about Benghazi, crimes committed by illegal immigrants and out-of-control terrorism abetted by Hillary Clinton. 
 
 It was no surprise, given the country’s-on-fire tone of Trump’s primary message (his campaign book was titled “Crippled America,” after all) and to some extent it was an unconventional rendition of a conventional convention tactic: vividly illustrating the perils so that the nominee, who speaks on Thursday, can offer his white-horse optimistic solution to the nation’s problems. 
 
 Still, laying out the case for Trump in such stark terms illustrated the weakness of a campaign he calls “a movement” bigger than himself. There’s a fragility to Trumpism in the absence of Trump’s personal presence — what a bummer it was hearing all that lousy news without the leavening of the candidate’s offbeat humor and the power of his personality. 
 
 Here are five takeaways from a first day filled with convention-floor conflict, poor stage management, flashes of powerful anti-Hillary messaging and Melaniagate. 
 
 1. Trump is an apprentice at running a convention. There were moments of clarity and power (Sheriff David Clarke delivered a clarion message for “Blue Lives Matters” — and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani talked about the candidate’s “big heart”), but for the most part, the shaggy program wasn’t up to the production standards of Trump’s TV shows. 
 
 This is not a small matter. 
 
 Trump, who has run his campaign on a shoestring and is only now hiring a professional staff, has made the convention a litmus test of his managerial competence. He is supposed to be good at entertaining, and he promised to make this RNC more watchable than the typical speech-and-policy snooze-athons. 
 
 Yet for a candidate obsessed with branding, Trump seemed oblivious to the stagecraft Reagan paid such close attention to. Even his big entrance was botched. The band was halfway through “Brown Eyed Girl” — when the sound guy cut off the mics to blare “We Are the Champions” so he could stride on stage to introduce his wife and declare, “We are going to win so big!” 
 
 Patricia Smith, mother of one of four Americans killed in Benghazi, was choking back tears, talking about her suffering, and placing responsibility on the former secretary of state. "I blame Hillary Clinton, I blame Hillary Clinton personally for the death of my son,” Smith said. 
 
 At that moment, Trump was calling in to Fox News to tell Bill O’Reilly, “I’m probably the least racist person there is.” 
 
 And Joni Ernst — a rising star in the GOP whose post-primary endorsement of Trump was critical in spurring consolidation of his support — was stuck in an 11 p.m. slot when most of the audience inside and outside the arena was long gone. 
 
 2. Melania was the most effective speaker of the evening (since Michelle Obama). Trump’s wife did something no other speaker (with the exception of Clarke) managed to do: Deliver a concise message about her husband’s character and compassion without straying from the script or lapsing into rambling self-indulgence. 
 
 Despite apparent impediments (lack of political experience, a thick Slovenian accent and an insistence on calling the man she lives with “Donald J. Trump”), she attempted to soften his image — and laid out a vision of inclusiveness the candidate himself often neglects to project. 
 
 “Donald intends to represent all of the people, not just some of the people,” she added, striking one of the few conciliatory notes in a strident night. 
 
 Of course, none of that matters if she plagiarized the first lady's speech. 
 
 3. A house divided. The band played on, and on, and on. 
 
 For most of Monday afternoon, the many hundreds of reporters wandering the Quicken Loans Arena trawling for conflict were, instead, treated to what amounted to live hold music, courtesy of former “Saturday Night Live” bandleader G.E. Smith. 
 
 Yet behind the scenes (while the cameras focused on 50-something conventioneers awkwardly waltzing to Rush’s prog-rock classic “Limelight”) real drama was taking place: a last-ditch, doomed effort by anti-Trump dead-enders to roll back a rule that blocks pledged delegates from ditching the party’s nominee and voting for someone else. 
 
 Ultimately, Smith flicked off the amps and politics spilled, sans soundtrack, out into the cable-broadcast open, with much shouting and very little lasting impact. When the chairman called for a voice vote, Trump’s happy army shouted the gloomy Never Trump-ers down, the demand for a roll call was ignored, and the opposition shrugged, collected their iPhones, and headed out to consider their shriveling options. “Norma Rae” it wasn’t. 
 
 But the incident (and the incidental music intended to mask it) revealed the underlying tension of a convention that threatens to break through the veneer of the mundane, cohesive normalcy of most conventions. The Never Trump movement, led by Virginia delegate Ken Cuccinelli and Utah Sen. Mike Lee (an ally of runner-up Ted Cruz), shocked the less-than-efficient Trump political operation by garnering nearly enough votes to force a roll call vote on the floor; and while the insurrection was quelled, bad feelings lingered, unsoothed by the nominee’s staff or G.E. Smith’s Telecaster. 
 
 4. Kasich, and tired. Standard political practice would have dictated that a presidential nominee would avoid provoking civil war on the eve of his own coronation — especially with the symbolic host of his party’s convention. Ha. Ha. Ha. 
 
 The sun had barely risen on Day One when Paul Manafort (Trump’s designated Adult in the Room) slammed Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who has refused to endorse his party’s nominee or even set foot in the arena with him. “He’s embarrassing his party in Ohio,” Manafort said of Kasich, declaring the move “a dumb, dumb, dumb thing.” 
 
 5. Gay-friendlier GOP? The Republican Party’s 2016 platform remains as socially conservative as always, thanks to the work of religious conservatives allied with Cruz. It includes no mention of LGBT rights or protections and enshrines the concept of marriage as “a union between a man and a woman” despite polls showing that most Americans support same-sex marriage. 
 
 The head of the Log Cabin Republicans, the party’s most influential gay, lesbian and transgender rights group declared the language “the most anti-LGBT platform in the party’s 162-year history. ... Opposition to marriage equality, nonsense about bathrooms, an endorsement of the debunked psychological practice of 'pray the gay away' — it's all in there.” 
 
 But there was virtually no mention of social issues on Monday and several of the most prominent speakers — including Giuliani and Clarke — went out of their way to include diversity of sexual preference as something they think their party should stand for. As important: The audience seemed to take it all in stride. ||||| Long before Bill de Blasio summoned the ghost of Charles Dickens, long before the phrase “income inequality” became part of the political lexicon, long before shimmering castles rose in the Midtown sky in celebration of a new gilded age, there was Mario Matthew Cuomo, son of immigrants, child of the New Deal, keeper of his party’s conscience. 
 
 Cuomo became a political sensation through a medium thought to belong to another era: words. Beautiful, poetic, meaningful words, spoken in a strong, clear voice, with a cadence that turned even a clumsy phrase into a baroque masterpiece. 
 
 He was reared in a household of Italian speakers; English, his greatest companion and most formidable ally, was his second language. 
 
 It was hardly a wonder that embedded in all those beautiful words there was a palpable love of American possibilities. Where else, he might have asked, could an Italian-speaking kid from Queens become not just an orator but a philosopher whose texts will be read for as long as American political thought matters? 
 
 Cuomo was a relative political unknown in 1984, when the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, asked him to deliver the keynote address at the party’s national convention in San Francisco. Mondale had heard something about Cuomo’s use of the English language, heard something about a speech he gave in Albany on January 1, 1983, after taking the oath of office as governor of New York. On that first of 4,380 days he would spend in residence on Eagle Street, Mario Cuomo spoke of “the idea of the family, mutuality, the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all.” 
 
 “There is an ideal essential to our success,” he said, “and no family that favored its strong children or that in the name of even-handedness failed to help its vulnerable ones would be worthy of the name.” 
 
 There are people with us still who vividly remember that speech not only because of the words and not only because of the power of the man who spoke them, but also because nobody else in public life spoke like that. Not in 1983. 
 
 The age belonged to Ronald Reagan, the onetime New Dealer who preached the gospel of self-reliance and regaled the nation with anecdotes about individuals who made themselves rich, or, if already rich, then even richer. The age belonged to Reagan’s ideological sidekick, Margaret Thatcher, who said there was no such thing as society. 
 
 And here was this man from Queens, Mario Cuomo, all but saying that these powerful people were peddling lies. 
 
 “It has become popular is some quarters,” he said, “to argue that the principal function of government is to make instruments of war and to clear obstacles away from the strong. It is said that the rest will happen automatically. The cream will rise to the top. … Survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, but a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order, one which tries to fill the cruel gaps left by chance, and by a wisdom we don’t fully understand.” 
 
 From his listening post in Washington, New York Times columnist James (Scotty) Reston announced that “the governor may be on to something.” 
 
 Hoping that Reston was right, Mondale arranged for Mario Cuomo to face the nation on a July evening in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. 
 
 Today, at a time when the president of the United States bears the name Barack Hussein Obama, it is quite impossible to appreciate the impact of a man named Mario Cuomo speaking on behalf of a presidential candidate to a national television audience numbering in the tens of millions. Covering that convention, I recall a man from the South—Texas, I seem to remember—reminding us Northerners that all those vowels in the governor’s name might not sit well with his America. He at least pronounced Cuomo’s last name correctly. There were many in that convention hall in San Francisco who seemed to believe the governor was related to the old crooner, Perry Como. 
 
 He came to the podium, waved, and then excused himself from the usual preliminaries, “the stories and the poetry and the temptation to deal in nice but vague rhetoric.” 
 
 Instead, he offered a polite but passionate assault on Ronald Reagan’s America, his shining city on a hill. 
 
 “A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well,” Cuomo said. “But there's another city; there's another part to the shining city; the part where some people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one; where students can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate. … There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city. In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation—Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a ‘Tale of Two Cities’ than it is just a ‘Shining City on a Hill.’" 
 
 Mario Cuomo said these things in 1984, to a nation that was in thrall to Reagan and his narrative of an America reborn and resurgent. Cuomo continued with phrase upon devastating phrase, asking the president to consider those left behind, pleading with the American people to see the poor and the disenfranchised not as failures and losers, but fellow citizens of the same city, of one city and a single nation. 
 
 To be in that hall on that night 30 years ago was to be in Chicago in 1896, when a former congressman named William Jennings Bryan called on his fellow Democrats to hear the voices of those left behind, to prevent their crucifixion on a cross of gold. He was nominated for president on the spot. 
 
 The rules of politics had changed since Bryan’s time; Mario Cuomo could be no more than a surrogate for the party’s duly anointed candidate, Mondale. But the delegates left San Francisco knowing they had nominated the wrong man, a fine man no doubt, but a man who could not stir the soul. 
 
 Mario Cuomo would never run for president, even though the party saw him as a savior after Mondale lost 49 states—all but Minnesota—that year. 
 
 Cuomo chose not to run in 1988, and the Democratic consolation prize was Michael Dukakis. He chose not to run in 1992, when a plane was waiting to take him from Albany to New Hampshire to file late-minute paperwork for the state’s primary. Cuomo said he could not run for president because he had to figure out the state’s budget, a curious explanation he would reiterate in years to come, no matter how bizarre it seemed. 
 
 For Democrats who had never forgotten the San Francisco speech, for hundreds of patronage holders and reporters in Albany, Cuomo’s announcement, made 90 minutes before a 5 o’clock filing deadline, was one of the great could-have-beens in modern political history. 
 
 William Faulkner once said that for young white men in the South, it is always a few minutes before two o’clock on July 3, 1863 in Gettysburg, and General George Pickett and his men “are in position behind the rail fence … waiting for Longstreet to give the word.” 
 
 For those who worked for or who covered Mario Cuomo a generation ago, there are times when it once again is 3:15 p.m. on Friday, December 20, 1991. A small plane is warming up, bound for Manchester, N.H., and Governor Cuomo’s office has just scheduled a press conference on the second floor of the state Capitol. 
 
 Mario Cuomo’s hold on the imagination of his fellow Democrats was all about soaring rhetoric and political poetry. But it was the governor himself who noted that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. And as a governor, Cuomo’s record was more prosaic than many Democrats and journalists from outside the state realized. 
 
 He built more prisons than any other governor in the state’s history. He and his legislative colleagues couldn’t deliver a budget on time. He cut taxes but didn’t raise the state’s minimum wage until 1990, after he had been governor for seven years. By 1994, as he tried in vain to win a fourth term, he found himself talking about improvements made to Thruway rest stops during his watch. Hardly the stuff of poetry. 
 
 His principled stand against capital punishment—which he shared with his predecessor, Hugh Carey—won him accolades from liberals tired of Democratic compromises and cave-ins. His nuanced defense of abortion rights, brilliantly argued in a speech at the University of Notre Dame in 1985, earned him the support of powerful activists who policed the party’s pro-choice orthodoxy. 
 
 Combined with his wonderful speeches, those two positions earned Cuomo a reputation as the Democratic Party’s leading liberal spokesman at a time when liberalism was banished to the political wilderness. But it was, in many ways, an illusion. 
 
 If Bill Clinton is credited with the political gymnastic known as triangulation, Mario Cuomo deserves recognition for embracing a form of political bifurcation even if party diehards insisted that he was the true liberal they had been yearning for since Adlai Stevenson led them to principled disaster twice in the 1950s. 
 
 Cuomo disdained the term “liberal,” preferring to describe himself as a pragmatic progressive or a progressive pragmatist. The rhetorical sleight of hand was evident even in some of the speeches that sent liberal heart aflutter. 
 
 “We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need,” Cuomo said in his San Francisco speech. 
 
 On other occasions, he noted that government required both a head and a heart, of the need to provide jobs as well as justice. Conservative. Liberal. Pragmatic progressive. Progressive pragmatist. 
 
 This careful attention to linguistic detail could be exasperating for those looking for simple, straightforward answers. People like, well, reporters. 
 
 Along with others who covered Cuomo far more closely, I knew that the right question phrased the wrong way would lead only to a Cuomo verbal assault and a non-answer. He’d attack the question. He’d question the attacker. I can hear his voice now: 
 
 Governor, other Democrats are saying you should raise the minimum wage. 
 
 Who? 
 
 I can’t tell you that, governor. 
 
 How can I answer the question if I don’t know who is saying these things? Why do you allow people to hide behind a veil of anonymity? Is this the way you always operate? The issue here is not the minimum wage but the people who are making statements without putting their names to those statements. That’s the real issue here. 
 
 This imaginary conversation was pretty close to daily reality for Albany’s press corps, although visiting journalists from the Beltway generally were spared the full Mario treatment. That accounted for the disparate narratives: Mario the Poet versus Mario the Lawyer. 
 
 In 1994, as he sought to become only the second New York governor to win a fourth four-year term (the first one was Nelson Rockefeller; Al Smith won four two-year terms), Cuomo published a collection of his speeches, reminding so many of his supporters why they adored him. The volume was called More Than Words. 
 
 It is a suitable epitaph for a politician who used words to inspire, to probe, to critique, and to provoke. Yes, he will be remembered best as an orator, but there was something more about him, something more than the pretty pictures he painted with the English language. 
 
 He was unafraid to challenge a comforting narrative with impertinent questions at a time when others preferred to simply go along and get along. Yes, that required more than words. That required ideas, that required courage, and that required intelligence. 
 
 Mario Cuomo had all three. 
 
 CORRECTION: The original version of this article stated incorrectly that Walter Mondale won Massachusetts in 1984, rather than Minnesota.
– A Republican made his way onto the speakers' roster Thursday night at the Democratic convention, but it soon became clear why. Former Reagan administration official Doug Elmets explained that he'll be voting Democratic for the first time in his life, and he used his own version of a now-famous political quote to do so, notes the Atlantic: "I knew Ronald Reagan. I worked with Ronald Reagan. Donald Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan.” He also said of Trump: "I shudder to think where he'll lead this great nation."