Walter Mondale, San Francisco 1984

Picking a woman as running mate, making Hail Mary passes, leveling with voters all good, he says, but he could have been more optimistic.

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published August 15, 2008 at midnight

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Photo by Chris Schneider © The Rocky

Walter Mondale, Democratic presidential nominee in 1984.

Photo by Ron Edmonds © AP file photo

President Ronald Reagan, left, and rival Walter Mondale shake hands at the start of their second debate. At this event, Reagan said: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

The handwriting was on the wall in 1984.

Correction, Walter Mondale says: “The writing was not on the wall. It was all over the wall and on the floor. No, no, no. It was clear. Anybody who lived around 1984 knew that this was going to be a tough one.”

A tough election for a challenger to win, he means. And that, perhaps, is also an understatement.

The former vice president smiles while sipping coffee in a conference room at his law office in downtown Minneapolis. He has long since come to grips with the drubbing he took from incumbent President Ronald Reagan that year.

It was a “whuppin’ ” for the ages. Reagan won by 18 percentage points in the popular vote. The Electoral College split 525-13.

Mondale did win his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. That’s something.

But, well, it was a tough year to try to unseat The Great Communicator, he says.

“I knew that I was in for it with Reagan,” Mondale says. “Reagan was very popular. We weren’t at war. The economy was in good shape. He was everybody’s favorite grandfather. And I was not going to win this election if I just ran another old Democratic Party campaign.”

It was a time to throw Hail Mary passes, make bold moves, say big, bold things, maybe try just leveling with people. And then, well, hope for the best.

Nah, it didn’t work out.

But 24 years later, Mondale’s droopy eyes still brighten when he thinks back to that summer’s Democratic National Convention in San Francisco.

“We had a real good convention. One of the best conventions I think the Democratic Party ever had,” he says proudly.

How can he say that? Because, well, they took a shot at making history. They gave it a shot.

“When we started that convention, we were down about 20 points in the polls. And every day our public support jumped 4 or 5 points until, when we left, people were really amazed at that range of speakers and what they had to say and the new directions,” he said.

For a few moments after his acceptance speech, even Mondale thought he had a chance. Well, maybe a small one anyway, he says.

“So we came out of there, I think, with a lot of zip,” he says. “But I never kidded myself.”

It was tough.

* * *

The year George Orwell warned us about, 1984, had a far different electoral landscape than the country has today.

The self-styled Westerner in the White House was riding high in the saddle, not threatening to drag down the Republican Party with low approval ratings, as many analysts say is the case today.

From the start, Mondale was the establishment figure in the Democratic field vying to take on President Reagan that fall.

He had the big resume and the most insider endorsements, but he faced a serious challenge through the primaries from a young insurgent, Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson also broke barriers as the first black candidate to wage a coast-to- coast campaign.

Mondale won the first contest, the Iowa caucuses, but Hart raised eyebrows with a surprising 16 percent showing. After Hart went on to score a stunning upset in New Hampshire, it set up a head-to-head matchup between the old guard and the new that dragged all the way to the doorstep of the convention that summer.

Mondale famously questioned the substance behind Hart’s new ideas during a debate, when he dismissively asked the question from a Wendy’s hamburger ad that was popular at the time: “Where’s the beef?”

In the end, Mondale’s financial advantages, labor connections and backing from the newly created “superdelegate” class helped him secure the nomination.

As the 2008 presidential campaign approached, analysts often compared Sen. Barack Obama’s fledgling campaign, its youth movement and outsider appeal, to Hart’s campaign. Last October, when Hart made a cameo appearance back in Iowa, he was asked if he saw similarities between his 1984 campaign and Obama’s in 2008.

“I would be the first to say that had I had Sen. Obama’s $75 million (in campaign fundraising to that point), I might well have been not only the Democratic nominee but also president of the United States. That’s the big difference,” Hart said.

But the party went with experience over youth. It picked Mondale.

* * *

During the primaries, as Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” campaign tried to attract millions of new voters to the process, the reverend made a campaign pledge that was unprecedented at the time.

As Jackson recalled in a recent interview, he told a crowd: “Well, if a woman can guide India, Indira Gandhi, if a woman can guide Israel, Golda Meir, if a woman can guide Britain, Margaret Thatcher, why shouldn’t a woman be on the ticket?”

Out on the campaign trail, in private, Mondale said he had a similar thought.

“I had a lot of time to think about it. I was on the trail there for almost two years, and you do a lot of thinking about how you want to be seen, where you want to take the country that was important,” Mondale said. “You start also calculating the nature of the opposition and the difficulties that you have. And I looked at several really good candidates (for running mate). But I decided I wanted to include among them women this time.”

It was a big step for the country, and Mondale’s reasoning was complex. He said he was looking for the best person, man or woman, but he or she had to be able to speak to “new ideas and change and breaking up the old mold.”

“Number one, the women’s movement had grown to maturity. It was now a significant force in America, and I felt that it was a real national need to try to open that door,” he said.

And, he added, it was no small consideration that it would take something big, something historic, to try to jostle the popular president out of the lead.

Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro of New York, who created controversy earlier this year when she suggested to an interviewer that Obama wouldn’t have gone as far as he had if he was “a white man.”

In a Fox News interview later, she defended the statement, adding: “Let me also say, in 1984 — and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times — in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president.”

Twenty-four years later, Mondale said he was just looking for the best person. And he picked Ferraro because she was well-liked, tough, had a good political sense and was highly competitive. “And she brought me not only those qualities of leadership, but she also was a new idea in America,” he said. “Instead of just looking at 50 percent of America’s talent, look at 100 percent. And put that gender issue behind us. That was the big thing on my mind.”

There were a few speed bumps for Ferraro later, when she came under pressure to release her family’s financial papers — which she did. But her stirring acceptance speech also had the desired effect of energizing the convention, giving Mondale a significant, if short-lived, bounce in the polls.

“Tonight,” Ferraro told the crowd at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, “the daughter of a woman whose highest goal was a future for her children talks to our nation’s oldest party about a future for all of us.”

Thus, she put the first big crack in “that highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke about in 2008.

* * *

If Ferraro’s speech took women to new heights, then you might say Mondale’s speech took America to the dentist office.

“Yeah, I probably was more ‘root-canal’ than was needed,” Mondale conceded with a laugh, after a long discussion of what went into his speech.

Again, knowing he had to do something bold, Mondale tried something not always attempted in prime time, nationally televised speeches. He leveled with the people.

“I had a fairly pessimistic idea (about) where America was unless we got our act together,” Mondale explains. “We had this kind of happy-talk government. We were running further and further in debt. We could see deficits of 300 or 400 billion dollars a year. I have been in the Senate. I knew that was not going to last long. And the longer it lasted, the things I believe in would pay the highest price: education, health care, the environment. They’d be the first to go.”

So he made a blunt prediction about what waited at the end of the election: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes; and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Sen. Ted Kennedy had just introduced Mondale before his speech, and he was seated below the riser with his long-time speechwriter, Bob Shrum.

“He got to this paragraph about taxes and Kennedy looked at me and said, ‘What did he say?’ ” Shrum recalls. “I mean, it was like we were stunned . . . And it was done so baldly. But in his defense, I would say that he was so far behind, he was so unlikely to win that he was trying to be bold.”

Republicans hung the new-taxes pledge around Mondale’s neck for the rest of the campaign. To this day, Mondale doesn’t think it made that much difference — and he says history has proved him correct about deficits and taxes.

Still, fairly or unfairly, part of the contest came down to Reagan’s eternal optimism and Mondale’s perceived pessimism.

“It did, it did,” Mondale says. “And that was one of Reagan’s great talents. He exuded this optimism, and he would fix the facts to fit his vision. And I was trying to talk about real things . . . People didn’t feel under threat. The things I was talking about were one step away, remote. He was comforting and positive . . . And so he was able to catch, you know, ‘It’s morning in America . . .’ ”

And buried in that 1984 contest, the one lots of Democrats would rather forget, is a lesson for Sen. Barack Obama and the folks who are about to gather in Denver.

Mondale is asked what sort of acceptance speech he’d give this year. In large measure, he outlines a candid address very similar to the “New Realism” speech he gave in 1984. He talks about the even bigger problems the country faces today — a bigger deficit and national debt, two costly wars, unmet needs at home.

But as he describes the speech he’d give today, he slips in a word that might have been buried a bit in 1984: “optimism.”

“Not just optimism, but realistic optimism based on our strengths . . . how we must build on those strengths,” Mondale says.

So this is it. When he takes the stage in Denver, Obama will get one chance to talk to most of the country all at once, uninterrupted and on his own terms.

No pressure, but Mondale advises, “It ought to be the best speech ever made.”

sprengelmeyerm@shns.com

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