"What about Mondale?" indeed: Walter Mondale.
Last edited Thu Jan 14, 2016, 09:00 PM - Edit history (3)
Since the DLC took over the the Democratic Party, the Party has used a meme to justify putting center right candidates up for election and also to justify the other activities in which the Democratic party engages that advantage center right candidates and/or disadvantage more leftist candidates. (See, for example, how donations to more leftist politicians get to centrists indirectly. http://www.democraticunderground.com/12778505)
That meme is that the USA is a center right to right nation in which liberals cannot be elected. This is false.
First, the majority of Americans are not center right or right. http://www.democraticunderground.com/12777036 Only their politicians are, of late, anyway. The most elected President in US history was, as to domestic economic policy, a populist, namely FDR.
FDR's coattails were so long that Democrats held a majority in at least one house of Congress for decades, notable exceptions being during the Eisenhower and Clinton administrations, beginning in 1994 and, of course, after the Clinton administration, culminating most recently in the disastrous midterms of 2010 and 2014. (Eisenhower, of course, was aided by being a World War II hero, as well as by the war tax that FDR had put into place to pay for World War II, as well as by implementing the national highway project that FDR had begun, but stopped because of the war.) Indeed, Clinton's own election and re-election were aided by Ross Perot and his re-election further aided by the advantage of incumbency. Also, both Clinton and Gore were from the South, which was a built in Southern strategy (albeit of a kind that is nowhere as evil as the Atwater kind).
Gore, a centrist, however, and his centrist running mater. lost to Dimson and Vader, something the center right faction of the Party doesn't mention, unless it using his loss as a club against Nader. It was not, however, Nader's fault--or Jeb's-- that Gore did not carry his own state.
As "proof" of that false meme, Third Way advocates cite the losses of McGovern and Mondale. However, that does not stand up to even superficial analysis.
A thread started by demwing entitled "This ain't 1972," both the OP and the replies, pretty much put to rest that McGovern lost the Presidential election of 1972 because he was a liberal. Not only were there many other reasons that he lost, but it was known before a Democratic nominee was ever chosen that war time incumbent Nixon was going to win that election. http://www.democraticunderground.com/12778825
However, falsehoods sometimes die hard on DU. So, once the meme about why McGovern lost the election was refuted, someone asked, "What about Mondale? That question prompted some OP's by me.
One of my OPs and the replies, illustrated, I hope, what a formidable candidate Reagan was in 1980.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12778872 ("What about Mondale?" indeed: Candidate Reagan)
Another of my OPs and the replies, I hope, illustrated the troubled administration of Carter-Mondale, baggage that Mondale carried as he tried to challenge incumbent Reagan in 1984, four years after the Carter-Mondale ticket had lost to Reagan.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12778873 ("What about Mondale?" indeed: 1976-1980)
A month after the 1980 election, Carter's approval rating was 34, same as Dimson's as Dimson's was exiting the Oval Office. Could Cheney have won in 2008 or 2012 against a formidable opponent? Meanwhile, when running against Mondale in 1984, Reagan was no longer a challenger, as he had been in 1980, but an incumbent, with the incumbent advantage
So, in 1980, we had a centrist President losing to a formidable candidate after a troubled 4 years. (This loss by a centrist who was also incumbent POTUS and a Southerner and a former Governor and a war veteran, is even tougher for centrists to explain than Gore's loss, so they conveniently blame it on a primary challenge, "conveniently" because centrists would also love to end primaries, especially primary challenges to incumbents. However, don't buy that anti-Democratic meme, either: the reason for the primary challenge was Carter's weakness, due to his troubled administration; and the reasons for 1980 loss were the troubled administration of Carter-Mondale and Reagan's strength as a candidate.
Then, in 1984, we had Mondale, carrying the baggage of both (a) the troubled Carter-Mondale administration and (b) the 1980 loss of the Carter-Mondale ticket, into a contest with an even stronger Reagan than centrist Carter had failed to defeat in 1980. Is it any surprise Mondale lost to incumbent Reagan when incumbents Carter-Mondale could not defeat Reagan when Reagan was only a challenger?
And what kind of candidate was Mondale? Dynamic? Charismatic? I don't know. But, when Wellstone died, Mondale did try to win his old Senate seat back and failed. A former Vice President could not win his own old Senate seat back. To me, that says a lot. And, I think most of us have seen video of the debate in which Reagan stopped Mondale dead in his tracks with the age comment and with "There you go again."
Those videos and more can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=reagan+mondale+debate+age+
Meanwhile, let's examine just how liberal Mondale was, which may just be THE biggest falsehood in this whole fairy tale:
In 1984, Mondale won the Democratic presidential nomination and campaigned for a nuclear freeze, the Equal Rights Amendment, an increase in taxes, and a reduction of U.S. public debt.
A nuclear freeze, when we had more than enough nukes to destroy the world doesn't seem terribly liberal. Limiting nukes was perhaps the signature achievement of Senator Obama, a New Democrat who said that, in the 1980s--when Mondale in fact lost to Reagan--he (Obama) would have been considered a "moderate Republican."
By 1984, the Equal Rights Amendment had already made it out of Congress and was in Constitutional amendment limbo. In fact, failure to get it adopted was cited as a reason why Carter Mondale may have lost in 1980: women were a large part of the traditional Democratic constituency. Besides, it's very hard to believe that Mondale's hope that more states would ratify the ERA played any role in Mondale's loss. Choosing Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate may have been considered too advanced for that time, but I can't say one way or the other.
Reducing debt. That can't have lost him any centrist voters. Increasing taxes--now, who on earth runs for the Oval Office on that? Sure, maybe you seek an increase when you do get elected, but to run on increasing taxes? Doesn't seem like a genius move.
But, what about Mondale's liberal reputation, you might ask. He had NONE. He had served as Vice President under a centrist Southern Democrat well after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had become "the law of the land." Mondale, in the Senate:
Policies
Mondale worked hard to build up the center of the party on economic and social issues. Unlike his own father, a fervent liberal, he (VP Mondale) was not a crusader for the New Deal. Instead he realized the Democratic base (especially ethnic blue collar workers) was gradually moving to the right and he worked to keep their support.[13] Mondale showed little or no interest in foreign policy until about 1974, when he realized that some knowledge was necessary if he had loftier aspirations than the Senate. He developed a centrist position, avoiding alignment with either the party's hawks (such as Henry M. Jackson) or its doves (such as George McGovern).[14] He took a liberal position on civil rights issues, which proved acceptable in Minnesota, a state with "a minuscule black population".[15] Mondale was a chief sponsor of the federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in housing and created HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity as the primary enforcer of the law.[16]
During the Johnson presidency, Mondale supported the Vietnam War, but after Richard Nixon became President in 1969, he began to oppose it and participated in legislation aimed at restricting Nixon's ability to prolong the war. Mondale is pro-choice on the issue of abortion. [3][17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mondale
See also, http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024967786 Losses of Presidential elections in the 1980s were due to centrism).
Bill Clinton, the nation's first centrist President and spreader in chief of the centrist gospel, appointed Mondale to several posts:
During the presidency of Bill Clinton, he was U.S. Ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996, chaired a bipartisan group to study campaign finance reform, and was Clinton's special envoy to Indonesia in 1998.id.
"What about Mondale?" indeed. The meme that Mondale lost to incumbent Reagan because Mondale was too liberal is perhaps the biggest fairy tale in the series of fairy tales that has been concocted in an attempt to take the nation further right.
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