I have a confession of sorts to make.
I don't know if it means anything to anyone but, if you've been reading TRH for a while, you've probably gotten the impression that I've always been a knee-jerk, very-left-of-center Democrat. And, if that's the case, I can't say that I blame you. Today, especially in the age of Trump, that's definitely the case. But, in no small part, that's because it is the age of Trump. In truth, if I had a default position, which could only exist in a perfect world, I would probably still be leaning to the left, but I'd also be more willing to listen to the other side. Once upon a time, they were worth listening to, because they trafficked less in personalities and more in issues.
In fact, back in the 1970s, my first meaningful decade of political engagement, I started out as a McGovern Democrat, and, after that particular debacle, became more of a middle-of-the-road Democrat, one who wanted to change the world for the better without scaring people who disagreed with me to death. Also, during this period, I made the mistake of becoming an evangelical Christian, a topic I've touched on lightly in previous posts, and may discuss more extensively in the near future. I mention it here mainly to help explain why, because of those two traits, Jimmy Carter appealed to me a great deal.
And so did his running mate, Walter Mondale.
Like Hubert Humphrey, his fellow Minnesotan and mentor, Mondale seemed like someone who was focused on results, and not on grandstanding. Like Carter, Mondale seemed to understand that politics, like football, is a game of inches, and that victory goes to those who stay the course long enough to put together enough inches. And, like both of them, Mondale understood that politics was meant for those who cared more about public service than power.
And that's why I was elated by the narrow victory Carter and Mondale eked out in the 1976 presidential election. And why I was bitterly disappointed by their defeat four years later, a defeat to which the defection of many fashionably liberal Democratic voters to John Anderson's independent candidacy contributed mightily. Spoiler? What's their to spoil? That's what Anderson asked voters, and a large chunk of votes that Carter and Mondale should have gotten gravitated to Anderson's doomed crusade. Instead, four decades of steadily regressive policies and politics have pushed the American experiment to the brink of extinction. The sad irony of this catastrophe is that, as conservatism began to successfully undo much of the New Frontier and even the New Deal, many of those same fashionably liberal voters would have killed to have even some of the Carter-Mondale proposals turned into reality.
So, as the 1980s began, I felt very much like a voter without a political home. I still cared deeply about politics. I still believed in the power of the political process to make other people's lives better. And I still believed that left-of-center approaches to political issues were the better way of achieving the results. But I also believed in the need to take small steps and, where possible, to do so in concert with a broad coalition.
The Democratic Party, however, didn't agree with me. Its leadership managed to learn exactly the wrong lesson from the 1980 debacle. The departure of so many liberal voters to the doomed Anderson campaign led those in charge of the party to decide that Carter-style centrism threatened its future success. At the same time, the success of conservative Democrats in winning back seats in the House of Representatives in 1982 convinced those conservatives that the party needed to keep up with the rightward lurch that Reaganomics had given the nation. And thus it was that the coalition of Blue Dogs and coastal liberals Carter and Mondale had managed to assemble fell apart, and the Democratic Party assumed its familiar posture: disarray.
By this time, my own life was in a similar posture of disarray. I was unemployed, and forced to move back from New York, a city I loved, to my parents' home in Maryland, a state that at the very least had blueness going for it, among other things. Professionally, personally, and even spiritually, my life had completely run aground, and my interest in politics was at an all time low. Not long after, however, I entered graduate school, and returned to some semblance of a normal life.
And, as I did, and began to pay attention to the 1984 presidential campaign, I began to notice that, as Mondale's own campaign for the White House moved forward toward the nomination, he began to move away from the moderate politics he had embraced for most of his career, trying to appeal to pure liberals at the expense of the less-than-perfectly liberal. My guess is that he concluded that this was the only way he could even come close to holding the party together for the fall election. To put it mildly, it didn't work: the Democratic Electoral College total went from 49 in 1980 to 13 in 1984. Mondale had rolled the dice toward the left--and lost. With that loss, America began its deepening slide into the morass of right-wing ideology.
For my part, I can't say that I helped. In my own way, I wasn't much better than the Anderson liberals I castigated for abandoning Carter in 1980. I could not, would not, under any circumstances, vote for Reagan, but I succumbed to a purity test of my own. I could not, and did not, vote for a party with no ability to put the brakes on its liberal tendencies even when those tendencies might benefit from a good set of breaks. So, for the one and only time in my life, I did not vote for a Democrat in a presidential race. I wrote in a Republican: Mark Hatfield, a liberal Senator from Oregon who was, like me, an evangelical. I did so knowing that I was throwing my vote away, but I didn't care; at that point, I felt the need to inflict my own purity test on the outcome.
It was not too many years later that I realized that, like the Anderson Democrats, I had in fact betrayed the sort of tactical moderation I thought I was advocating with my write-in vote. Had I voted for Mondale, it would have had no effect on the outcome. But I knew that a lot of moderate Democrats voted for Reagan because they somehow saw him as less extreme than what Mondale was offering, even if that was more a question of voting for style rather than substance. Rather than throwing away my vote, or sitting the election out, what I should have been doing was reminding everyone that, even though Mondale's rhetoric may have moved toward the left, he had not fundamentally changed in temperament or tactics, that he was still the same game-of-inches guy that Carter had felt comfortable with.
Putting it simply, I should have forgot about looking for perfection in the highly imperfect world of politics, and thought tactically. I didn't. Many of us didn't. And all of us were the losers for it.
And, frankly, Mondale deserved better. We all deserved better. He was a decent human being, who genuinely believed in public service and in the possibility of building a better world. That Reagan defeated him, and launched our current descent into madness in the process, only underscores the tragedy of his defeat, and the losses that every American has endured as a result.
And so, I began to refine my political thinking. My goals, as a result, are still idealistic, but my thoughts about how to advance those goals are far more tactical in nature. Indeed, this is why I have moved much further to the left, almost to the point I occupied in my McGovern days. I have done this not because I feel it is absolutely necessary to move the country that far in that direction, but because I see this as the only way to counter-act the most egregious effects of the Reagan era. We may not need perfect liberalism, but we definitely need a great big whopping dose of it. Maybe, just maybe, if we're lucky, we'll need to put the brakes on liberalism. But we're nowhere near close to being at that point.
You don't need me to give you a list of Mondale's accomplishments. You can get that out of his New York Times obituary, which, whether you lived through his career or not, is well worth perusing. I will take a little space here to emphasize two major contributions to the office of the Presidency that outlasted him and benefited all of us: the partnership he created with Carter that gave future Vice Presidents a meaningful role in the government, and his selection of Geraldine Ferraro as his 1984 running mate. Both of these accomplishments are reflected today in the presence of Kamala Harris as the nation's second-in-command.
And, despite losing to a candidate who was falsely being lionized by conservative evangelicals as the one true Christian running for the Oval Office, Mondale, the son of a preacher, consistently demonstrated the one character trait that matters more in the practice of Christianity, perhaps in the practice of any faith, than any other: humility. There could be no greater illustration of that humility, in the service of a moment that would be sheer agony for many a lesser politician, than the grace and humor that he demonstrated on January 6, 1981, when, as Vice President, he announced the results of the Electoral College vote in the 1980 election--in effect, presiding over his own bitter defeat. On the day after his birthday, no less.
And yet, in the process, finding humor in doing so. The response was a bipartisan standing ovation from a joint session of both houses of Congress. You need only compare that January 6 to the horror show we all watched on that date this year to see how much our politics, and we as a people, have lost in the past 40 years.
Despite the lesson that I learned from my failure to support him in 1984, I still feel a deep sense of regret that I didn't vote for him. It didn't change the outcome. It didn't affect him personally; we never met, so he had no idea of what I was doing in the voting booth. And, in spite of the mistakes I made, and that all of us have made, we are still striving together toward a more perfect Union, still overcoming tremendous obstacles, still working toward a reckoning with our deepest sins, still trying to find enough divine grace to bless not only each other, but the whole word.
But Fritz Mondale, a man who embodied the best of what this nation has to offer, and a man who absolutely deserved my pulling the lever for him back in that lonely voting both in College Park, Maryland, deserved better from me. He deserved better from all of us. For that matter, all of us deserved better.
So here it is, Fritz. Here's my vote for you. Even if it's too late to shape an election, I know it's not to late to set the record straight on who you were, and how you will be remembered.
Rest in power, sir.
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