Perhaps sensitive to this contrast, Mario Cuomo began our conversation by discoursing on the senselessness of political labels, a theme on which he has been riffing for 25 years. Then he meandered his way to an assessment of both Clinton and Obama, whom he said he admired for their shared brand of “benign pragmatism.” Cuomo said he agreed, for instance, with the deal Obama cut last December to keep the Bush tax cuts in place while extending unemployment benefits. “That was the so-called triangulation that sometimes annoyed people like me,” Cuomo said. “And I think that’s where Obama is. Obama’s not a liberal. He’s not a conservative. He’s a very practical guy who’s playing it a shot at a time.”

Did that mean, I asked, that Mario Cuomo, who strongly opposed Clintonian compromises like the welfare-reform law of 1996, had come at last to appreciate triangulation?

“No,” he said quickly, shifting a bit in his swivel chair. Then, more softly, “I’m still a liberal, I guess.”

For the next half-hour or so, Cuomo ran through a series of stories, many of them from his first campaign for governor, populated by New York characters like Ed Koch and Rupert Murdoch and Abe Rosenthal, the former Times editor. (Even now, at 78, Cuomo could read a patent application and make it seem vastly entertaining.) Having now asked all of two questions, and with my time running out, I suggested that I could hang around until there was another chance to talk, maybe pass the afternoon in some conference room where I wouldn’t get in the way of anyone’s billable hours. Cuomo surprised me by leaning back for a moment and wincing, as if something I’d said had just stung him.

“Go ahead,” he said after a moment. “Let me have some of your questions.”

Cuomo’s most repeated quote holds that you “campaign in poetry” but “govern in prose.” The prose of Cuomo’s time in office, like that of most governors, reflected a good deal of ideological flexibility. It was the poetry, really, a body of oration unrivaled in contemporary politics, that made Cuomo a liberal hero. The most enduring of his speeches, and the one that introduced him to most Americans, was the keynote address to the Democratic convention in San Francisco in 1984, in which Cuomo took millions of viewers on a rhetorical tour of what Ronald Reagan called his “shining city on the hill” — its slums, its homeless shelters, its shuttered plants. Fifteen years later, a survey of more than 100 scholars nationwide ranked Cuomo’s address the 11th-best American speech of the century. By comparison, Ted Kennedy’s “dream shall never die” speech came in 76th, while Bill Clinton’s eulogy at Oklahoma City landed at No. 92. (Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” was No. 1.)

“I have never thought of it as a really great speech,” Cuomo said of his convention address. “What happened was that the message was perfectly suitable to the listeners. What they wanted to hear was exactly what they heard.” Cuomo looks back more fondly on those speeches in which he told audiences what they didn’t necessarily want to hear, like the one, a few months after that convention, when he defended his support for abortion rights in front of the Catholic clergy at Notre Dame. “The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history,” Cuomo said then, “to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.” The same historians ranked that one 61st.

In most of his memorable orations, Cuomo connected the promise of liberal government to the story of his own uneducated parents, of the father whom he saw “literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet” after a long day at work. “Of course, we should have only the government we need,” he said in his first inaugural address and many times after, “but we must have, and we will insist on, all the government we need.” Contrast this with what Andrew Cuomo said in his inaugural address in January, when he called for a cap on property taxes, vowed to “rightsize” the bureaucracy and declared: “The state government has grown too large. We can’t afford it.”