He had, at least offstage, a frankness and a sense of self-awareness not all that common among politicians. In many ways, Mondale was a man fully prepared for the presidency, not just by experience but by character and personality. Al Gore began his political life as a centrist, much in the model of Clinton. Four years later, Michael Dukakis declared that “this election is not about ideology, it is about competence.” In the next cycle, Bill Clinton declared himself “a different kind of Democrat” and jettisoned some of his party’s positions about crime and welfare. That historic defeat may be one reason why Mondale was the last Democratic nominee to run a campaign with a New Deal flavor. Mondale suffered no such open defection from within his party rather, it was the voters who, enjoying fair economic winds, saw no reason to choose a candidate without a compelling message just because their own party was telling them to. Usually when a candidate suffers a 20-point popular vote loss and manages to win only one state (his own, barely), it’s because the party is split in two, as happened to Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. And the most striking aspect of that election, in retrospect, wasn’t all campaign missteps: It’s that Mondale suffered one of the most crushing losses in political history despite having a unified party. Even before the incumbent president got lost in a rhetorical fog, Mondale was hammering him for breaking promises about health care and other issues. For one thing, Mondale didn’t actually lose that first debate with Reagan he dominated it. There’s a common judgment about what doomed Mondale’s chances: his pledge to raise taxes his choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, a historically significant but politically vulnerable choice and that clever Reagan quip. Were it not for a snarky remark from Hart about visiting a “toxic waste dump” in New Jersey-his capacity for self-destruction would return with a vengeance in the next cycle-Mondale might well have faced a genuinely contested convention. But even when Mondale’s coalition of traditional Democrats put him into the lead, his victory was tight. What saved Mondale were victories in Alabama and Georgia, where the Black voters of Atlanta and Birmingham turned out and salvaged his campaign. Indeed, Hart won that day in Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. To the shock of the entire political establishment, he beat Mondale in New Hampshire by 10 points beat him in Vermont and Wyoming and seemed headed for a virtual sweep on the first Super Tuesday. In his talk of military reform and entrepreneurship, in his ads that featured high-tech graphics, Hart was in effect saying the Democratic Party was no country for old ideas. He was as cool (or cold) as Mondale was ebullient and in his politics, he was at pains to define himself as something different (“we’re not all a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys,” he once said). He was only eight years younger than Mondale, but he looked and talked like someone from a different generation. On the “strength” of a distant second-place showing in Iowa (16 percent to Mondale’s 50 percent), he had become The Alternative. On the eve of that first primary, the New York Times reported that Mondale had the biggest lead in public opinion polls of any non-incumbent in history.Īnd then Hart showed up. “The sweetest primary in history,” Mondale called it as it began, and after his landslide sweep of the Iowa caucuses, it seemed as if the contest would be over by the time the polls closed in New Hampshire. While Mondale did not embrace the full-throated liberalism of Humphrey, his power was solidly rooted within the community of Black leaders, labor unions and big city Democrats a community that seemed ready to deliver the nomination to Mondale with barely a ripple. It was in this arena that the political structure built by FDR, Truman and Kennedy, that had already shown its weakness in the flight of Southerners and working-class whites, demonstrated its vulnerability even within the Democratic Party itself. By 1984, he was the presumptive nominee of his party long before the campaign began. Every position he attained was by appointment: attorney general at 32, senator (to replace Hubert Humphrey) at 36, picked as vice president on the 1976 presidential ticket by Georgia’s Jimmy Carter for geographical and political balance. Born in the town of Ceylon, (“The Biggest Little Small Town in Minnesota”), graduate of the state’s university and law school (the latter thanks to the GI Bill of Rights), he didn’t so much ascend the greasy pole of politics as he was elevated by the kindness of others. Mondale’s steady rise to political power was something out of a Garrison Keillor tale without the darkness.
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