Mondale: The lessons of '84

[davidnc76]

MINNEAPOLIS -- 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."


More:

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/35424

[Faygo Kid]

1. He had no chance in '84. Plus, he was saddled with Ferraro.

Geraldine Ferraro had no place on a national ticket in 1984, any more than Quayle in '88 or (sadly) Edwards in '04. None of them did anything for the top of the ticket.

It was "Morning in America" in 1984, and nobody was going to beat Reagan. Of course, his second term was a disaster, but that's another story.

[Ken Burch]

6. I understood the push for a women on the ticket, but why DID so many women Dems want Ferraro?

After all, she'd been chairing the platform committee prior to that and had fought hard to remove the ERA endorsement from the platform.

And how is it that nobody vetted her about her husband's financial shit?

[nevergiveup]

2. In 1984 Ronald Reagan

had several "senior moments" in his debates with Mondale. The media ignored them. No one cared. Sound familiar?

[davidnc76]

3. In 1984

I was 8 years old. I recall my grandmother watching the convention in her kitchen... For me it was my first real memories of the Democratic Party...

[depakid]

4. Mondale was a LOSER from the outset and should never have gooten the nomination

[Kire]

5. He seems to have come to terms with it...

good for him

[Ken Burch]

8. His nomination seemed, in fact, to be as much about keeping the regulars in control of the party

(as opposed to the insurgents supporting both Hart and Jackson)as it ever was about actually winning the election.

There was no significant voter registration effort in the fall.
There was no effort to connect with and mobilize the strong and very popular antinuclear and anti-Central American war movements, when allying the party with those groups might have made the race much closer.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. That's quite true: I was involved in both those movements

and nobody from the Dems reached out to us. Nobody even threw us a scrap.

Meanwhile, the Republicanites were feeding the fundamentalists a veritable banquet of promises, and the MSM were clearly on Reagan's side.

A Minneapolis newspaper cartoonist caught the spirit of the era perfectly. As many of you know, Reagan was referred to as the "Teflon candidate," in that no criticisms ever seemed to stick and quickly dropped out of media attention. In contrast, Mondale was the "Velcro candidate," whose every weakness was constantly discussed and hashed over.

On top of that, Mondale was an inept campaigner. Whoever told him to say "I'm going to raise your taxes" on national television and do so while looking gleeful, doomed him from the beginning.

After 1984 and Dukakis' disastrous bid in 1988, it appeared to me as if the Dems were throwing these elections on purpose, deliberately nominating weak candidates from the more liberal wing of the party so that the DLC would be able to get their golden boy in.

[Ken Burch]

12. That's long been my conviction as well.

Otherwise, why would the party have NEVER fought back against the smears on their beliefs and their integrity?

I mean, c'mon, nobody even THOUGHT of rapid response until El Perro Grande declared his candidacy?

[Ken Burch]

7. One of the biggest problems was that Mondale had been Carter's VP

At the time, 'ol J.C. was still a massive figure of hatred and derision(the GOP had been able to paint him, incredibly, as OUR version of Herbert Hoover), and Mondale gave them another chance to run against him.

Another huge mistake was Mondale's decision to run as a president who could "get along with Congress", thus letting Reagan paint him as the establishment candidate while allowing Reagan himself to run as "the President" and yet at the same time a person who had nothing whatsoever to do with "the government".

Finally, Mondale was a lively, witty figure when vice president, but for some reason decided that he had to act as dreary and bland and humorless as possible when seeking the presidency. This let Reagan run(to use a high school metaphor)as the winning football coach while Mondale himself looked like the principal who cancelled the pep rally and made the team forfeit the championship.

[hedgehog]

10. I remember being enraged at Mondale. All my info came from one

of the three big networks or the Syracuse paper. The image I received was of someone who campaigned on the premise that America's best times were over, that we were doomed by the energy crisis. It seemed that Mondale was urging us to accept that poverty and every other problem were always going to be with us and were just going to get worse because there was no money to take of things. I think I learned that he lived in a gated community in Minnesota. Why would anyone have to hide from the poor if they lived in Minnesota! My image was of the petty noble telling us serfs to suck it up while he retired behind the castle walls.

IMO, he ran in denial of everything the Democratic PArty has stood for since FDR's New Deal. No wonder he lost!

[bemildred]

11. Yeah, he ran to lose.

And our "Free Press" already knew how to do the swiftboat thing. "Willie Horton" ring a bell?

[Ken Burch]

14. And I distinctly remember that in 1984, "Harpers's" actually ran a story entitled

"Why the Democrats don't care about this election."

[Ken Burch]

13. And no wonder he couldn't hold Wellstone's seat in 2002.

That whole candidacy was about nothing more than demoralizing the liberals and the left.