Fritz

I have a confession to make. I cast my first presidential vote against Walter Mondale in 1984.  At the tender age of nineteen, I was politically green, and I don't mean I supported an environmentalist third party.  I was very persuadable, not set in an ideology and not cognizant enough of what was going on in the country at the time (must have been because all of that hyper-patriotism form the Los Angeles Olympics). So, yes, I voted for President Ronald Reagan for a second term.  Hey, the economy was doing so well, right?  However, I could have just as easily voted for Gary Hart had he been the 1984 Democratic presidential nominee, and had it been a Reagan-Hart campaign, I might have decided at the last minute, so nonpartisan was I at the time.  But Mondale?  Nah, he just didn't come over as a guy I could see as President.  He was . . . meh.

Walter Mondale, who died last week at 93, was probably the most vindicated politician of the 1980s.  The former Vice President in the Carter administration and onetime U.S. Senator from Minnesota famously said that the growing budget deficits would collapse the economy onto itself.  That it did, at least after President Reagan was out of office.  He also said that Gary Hart was a man of all style and no substance who lacked warmth and compassion - and the events of May 1987 pretty much proved that. But then, Minnesota Fritz called things like he saw them.  He was an avatar for truth and fairness in politics, an early champion of civil rights and economic equity who didn't shirk away from reality.  He famously assessed what to do about the growing economic imbalance of the 1980s and told us straight what needed to be done about it when he accepted the 1984 Democratic nomination.  "Mr. Reagan will raise your taxes, and so will I," he said.  "He won't tell you.  I just did." He was honest, truthful, and blunt.  And it led to his 49-state loss in the general election.  (His association with President Carter at a time when people still had bad memories of Carter's years in office didn't help either.)  But he was right.  I can certainly see that now.

That Mondale was a man of substance was evident in how he worked with President Carter to develop a new definition for the Vice Presidency, an office regarded as a political afterthought to accommodate different regions of the country.  (Like the first Vice President, John Adams, Mondale was the Northern half of a balanced ticket.)  He set out a list of responsibilities that the Vice President ought to take in the administration, working as presidential adviser and a problem solver for the President and having an office in the West Wing.  Indeed, Mondale's own expertise as a Washington insider made it possible for Carter, who had only served in state public office back home in Georgia, to govern as well as he did.

It's because of Walter Mondale that his vice presidential successors have been more integral to the executive branch and served in the style of a vice president of a company.  This was in stark contrast to most of his predecessors in the office, including his most immediate one, Nelson Rockefeller, who famously said that he never wanted to be vice president of anything.  Like Rockefeller, though, Mondale was thwarted in his efforts to gain the Presidency, but his efforts to make the Vice Presidency a substantial job and his downright honesty in dealing with the issues are his two greatest legacies.  RIP.