Leading liberal suffered landslide defeat to Reagan
US politician
WALTER MONDALE was a leading liberal Democratic voice of the late
20th century who was US vicepresident under Jimmy Carter and lost in a landslide to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.
He died on April 19, aged 93. Mondale, the first major US party presidential nominee to pick a woman running mate, believed in an activist government and worked for civil rights, school integration, consumer protection and farm and labour interests as a US senator and vicepresident during Carter’s troubled oneterm presidency from 1977 to 1981.
He also served as US ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996 under Bill Clinton.
Widely known as ‘‘Fritz’’, Mondale was the Democratic nominee in 1984 against Reagan, a popular incumbent Republican who had beaten Carter four years earlier, and selected New York Democratic US congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his vicepresidential running mate.
Despite the historic selection of a woman, Mondale suffered one of the worst defeats in a US presidential election, losing in 49 of the 50 states and carrying only his native Minnesota as well as Washington, DC
It was the first of two times that Mondale was sent into political retirement by a crushing defeat.
Eighteen years later, grieving Minnesota Democrats beseeched Mondale, then 74, to run for the Senate after Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash 11 days before the 2002 election. Mondale lost narrowly to Republican Norm Coleman, who depicted him as the greying representative of a bygone era.
During his race against Reagan, Mondale promised Americans he would raise their taxes, a vow that did little to help his candidacy.
‘‘I mean business. By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by twothirds,’’ Mondale said during his speech in San Francisco accepting the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. ‘‘Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.’’
Mondale served in the Senate from 1964 until he was elected as vicepresident in Carter’s 1976 victory over incumbent Republican Gerald Ford.
He played a key role in buttressing the sometimes frayed relationship between Carter’s White House and the Democraticcontrolled Congress.
He did not always agree with Carter, as when he privately opposed Carter’s preachy 1979 speech in which the president told Americans, besieged by a bad economy, that they were suffering from a ‘‘crisis of confidence’’. Mondale even considered resigning over the speech.
Carter increasingly looked like a weak president as he struggled with a hostage crisis in Iran, a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and tough economic times at home.
The CarterMondale ticket lost in 1980 against Reagan and his running mate, George H.W. Bush. Mondale, still associated in voters’ minds with Carter, faced the daunting task of trying to defeat a popular incumbent amid economic prosperity in 1984.
The contest between Mondale and Reagan presented Americans with a clear choice between liberal and conservative candidates and doctrines.
Mondale’s loss and a similar thrashing of fellow liberal Michael Dukakis in 1988 opened the way for more centrist Democrats such as Bill Clinton to assert themselves in the party.
Born in Ceylon, Minnesota, on January 5, 1928, Walter Frederick Mondale was the sixth of seven children. His father was a Methodist minister, his mother a music teacher.
Mondale married wife Joan in 1955. She died in 2014. They had three children, Eleanor and sons Theodore and William. — Reuters