In 1984, there was immense pressure on Walter Mondale to select a woman for his vice presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket. In running strongly for the Democratic nomination, Reverend Jesse Jackson had shown America that a black man could get a significant number of votes in the Democratic primaries. It began to seem inevitable, logical and equitable that there be a balanced ticket – that at least one member of the ticket be someone other than a white man, for a change.
THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE REV. JESSE JACKSON
The first significant challenge to the all white-male presidency in America came in 1984, when the Reverend Jesse Jackson showed the leadership and courage to contest an office that white men had been assumed, first by law and then by custom, to be the exclusive province of white men.
In the primaries, Jackson, who had been written off by pundits as a fringe candidate with little chance at winning the nomination, surprised many when he took third place behind Senator Gary Hart and former Vice President Walter Mondale, who eventually won the nomination. Jackson garnered 3.5 million votes and won five primaries, all in the South . . . He had gained 21% of the popular vote . . .
Jesse Jackson’s success in the primaries greatly increased the pressure for reflecting the composition of the Democratic Party on the national ticket. Ironically, this greatly increased the chances that a white woman – member of the Democrats’ largest single constituency - would be chosen for the second spot.
But, after the Rev. Jesse Jackson was eliminated,
The presidential campaign of 1984 had all the earmarks of being a dull one. After a bruising primary fight with Colorado Senator Gary Hart, Walter Mondale limped towards the Democratic Convention trailing incumbent president Ronald Reagan in the polls -- and trailing significantly. A Gallup poll released July 1, 1983 showed him losing to Reagan by 19 points, and a New York Times/CBS poll was only slightly less discouraging, showing Reagan with a 15 point lead. Gary Hart was refusing to concede the nomination, and Jesse Jackson was wielding the black vote over Mondale's head like a Sword of Damocles. The consensus in the Mondale camp was that the candidate needed to make a bold, unorthodox move to energize his followers and excite the voting public -- a move like choosing the first black or female vice-presidential candidate (on a major party ticket) in American history. EIGHTIES CLUB
THE HISTORICAL ABSENCE OF WOMEN
At the time, there were far fewer women elected officials than there are now, at all levels of government, and no prominent and respected woman had actually run for the Presidency in 1984, perhaps because of the enduring national belief that, although we were all “equal”, no woman could ever win the US Presidency or Vice Presidency. PHILLY ENQUIRER ON THE FEMALE PRESIDENT At that time, in fact, no woman had proven her ability to win a significant number of votes in the national Democratic primaries, and very few had even done so in a statewide election.
WALTER MONDALE SELECTS CONGRESSWOMAN GERALDINE FERRARO
Right before the Democratic National Convention, Walter Mondale, the Democratic Presidential Nominee, nominated Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro to be his running mate.
Ferraro was elected to the House of Representatives from New York's Ninth Congressional District in Queens in 1978 and served three two-year terms, compiling a generally liberal voting record on social and economic issues. While in Congress she served on the Public Works Committee, the Budget Committee, and the Post Office Committee. She also served a term as the Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus. She was the Chairwoman of the Platform Committee for the 1984 Democratic National Convention. WIKIPEDIA: GERALDINE FERRARO
Aside from the fact that she was a woman and a very liberal Congressperson, it was never clear why Mondale had chosen Congresswoman Geraldine Ferrraro. The moment when he announced her name was the first time that many of us had ever heard of her.
Normally, the two major considerations in selecting vice presidential candidates are the number of electoral votes the candidate will bring, and how he or she meshes with the presidential candidate's policies. But sometimes additional factors enter the calculation, such as a candidate's appeal to particular demographic segments, name recognition, issue expertise and access to funding networks. SALON ON WOMEN AND THE EXECUTIVE OFFICE
According to CNN,
During her three terms in the House, she championed the Equal Rights Amendment and sponsored the Women's Economic Equity Act. Her unabashedly liberal voting record frequently put her at odds with the Reagan administration.
However, many of us, particularly those who had fought hard for Jesse Jackson in the primaries, wanted (if not Jesse Jackson) then a woman who had been a nationally-known leader. Politically, we wanted someone with an identifiable constituency and a national base of supporters whom she could draw to the polls – not just any woman.
But, Ferraro was largely unknown to Democratic regulars nationally and, without any particularly strong national constituency, it seems possible that Mondale chose her simply because she was a woman Congressperson and was in the room at the time that the decision was being made.
Mondale is said to have considered but bypassed much better-known and nationally respected male and female Democratic politicians such as Henry Cisneros, then mayor of San Antonio, and Dianne Feinstein, then Mayor of San Francisco. WIKIPEDIA: FERRARO
Also mentioned at the time were two black mayors, Tom Bradley of Los Angeles and Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, as well as Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. EIGHTIES CLUB In retrospect in light of the 1988 elections with Governor Michael Dukakis at the top of the ticket, it seems that the result would have been very much the same in 1984 if Mondale had chosen Michael Dukakis instead of Geraldine Ferraro. Like Mondale, neither attracted much enthusiasm from the voting public, Democratic or Republican. So, Geraldine Ferraro and fellow Democrat Walter Mondale were defeated in a landslide by the re-election campaign of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush in the 1984 election. WIKIPEDIA: FERRARO
UNFAMILIAR CANDIDATE BRINGS UNFAMILIAR BAGGAGE
Chosen at the last minute and without sufficient time for vetting, the Democratic Party was blind-sided by ethics concerns about Ferraro’s husband that the public had not had time to evaluate or digest.
Within a matter of weeks following the Democratic convention, Ferraro was in trouble. The media wondered why she had consistently avoided listing the business interests of her husband, a New York developer, on congressional financial disclosure forms. Then The Washington Post reported that John Zaccaro was renting warehouse space to a company that distributed pornography. Ferraro promised full income and tax disclosures, but later had to inform the press that her husband refused to comply, leaving the impression that he had something to hide. The press besieged her with questions, while the Mondale camp sent an army of attorneys and accountants to peruse all relevant documents. As she was quickly becoming a liability, there was some discussion in the Mondale camp of taking Ferraro's name off signs and bumper stickers -- though removing her from the ticket was never a serious consideration. That would have spelled doom for Mondale EIGHTIES CLUB
What went wrong with the Ferraro nomination? When called upon to complete the Presidential ticket with someone other than a white male, Walter Mondale chose a running mate who had very little national name recognition and no proven ability to bring the voters - even of one entire state - to the polls. He unfortunately chose a woman who was no better a candidate than the mediocre white men whom he might otherwise have chosen – a candidate who lacked the ability to generate intense support in any of the Democrat’s base communities. As the final election results showed, women, Italians and fellow New Yorkers simply would not vote for the Mondale/Ferraro just because Ferraro was a female Italian New Yorker.
Worse, Mondale hastily chose a candidate whose family background had never before been vetted by the national media. The news cycle feeds on revelations, and with the unknown Ferraro and her previously unknown husband every new tidbit was news. To avoid distraction, Mondale should have chosen a candidate about whom everything was known and nothing was news – someone whom the public knew intimately and liked anyway.
There is no reason for such a mistake to be repeated by Democrats in the 21st Century. For example, when Mondale chose Rep. Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, she was one of only 24 women in the House. Today, there are 56 and more in the US Senate.
"There is a significantly greater pool of qualified women to pick from than there was in 1984," said Ellen Malcolm, director of EMILY's List, an organization that helps elect pro-choice, Democratic women.
With more well-qualified women available, the parties won't have to settle for someone unknown to the public.
"No one can afford a Geraldine Ferraro -- or a Dan Quayle for that matter," says Rich Galen, Republican strategist and a former Quayle press secretary. No one is going to "pluck someone out of obscurity." SALON
MONDALE LOSES BY TRUMPETING LIBERAL ORTHODOXIES
Regardless of his running mate, Mondale’s 1984 presidential chances were probably doomed from the start; he and his Party full-throatedly clarioned too many disquieting liberal orthodoxies in a country that was becoming increasingly conservative.
We Democrats were noisily pro-abortion, pro-civil rights, pro-arms control, pro gun-control, pro-women’s rights, pro-peace, pro-ACLU, pro rights of the accused, pro-gay, pro-environment. We were convinced that America would adopt all of our ideas if we just shouted them loudly enough. There was nothing wrong with our ideologies, but many of us refused to keep our mouths shut long enough to get elected so that we could actually begin to implement our ideas.
The Republicans took the opposite tack. They carefully used “red meat” symbolic issues to fire up their base while carefully obscuring, denying and even simply lying about real intentions that the public would find unacceptable or unconvincing. On Election Day, Ronald Reagan won, again, in a landslide all of our oh-so-important Democratic “pro-issues” were cast down and trod upon by the executive for another four years.
The liberal Democratic defeat ritual was performed once again in 1988, this time with the white male Governor Michael Dukakis and white male southerner US Senator Lloyd Bentsen at the V.P. fore. The Republican George Herbert Walker Bush trounced yet another white male liberal ticket, (effectively proving that nominating Geraldine Ferraro four years earlier contributed little if anything to Mondale’s failure). Mondale failed because the country saw his liberal laundry list and didn’t want to wash Mondale’s clothes for him.
CENTRIST BILL CLINTON CAPTURES THE PRESIDENCY
By 1992, after 12 years in the forest, we Democratic squirrels became willing to experiment with radical solutions to once again crack the nut of the US Presidency. Governor Bill Clinton from Arkansas entered the Democratic primaries and challenged us as a Party to decide between trumpeting our orthodoxies in the streets or whistling them in the halls of the White House. In light of the previous 12 years of painful experience, the joy of whistling rather than trumpeting suddenly began to take hold within the Democratic Party. He was a charmer who knew what incited the snakes and what calmed their nerves. He studiously calmed them rather than excite them, at least until he was elected to office. (That’s when he proposed national health care and equal rights for gays in the military.) William Jefferson Clinton convinced the Democratic Party to calm its trumpets and cool its clarions just enough to assemble a winning plurality.
CLINTON DISCIPLINED OUR INTEREST GROUPS
We interest groups (pro-abortion, pro-peace, etc.) did not understand conservative aesthetics and really did not care learn, but Bill Clinton had spent 16 years in Arkansas politics, cracking the nut of the Republican, independent and conservative Democratic minds. He understood the Democratic behaviors and ethos that most inflamed them and he set about to discipline us for the national role of leadership that we all wanted to play.
He publicly slapped the Black gangster rappers for anti-police lyrics and thereby neutralized the conservatives’ anti-black rapper vote while advocating symbolically a hard-line in favor of the enforcement of laws. Clinton expressed reluctant but firm support for the death penalty and thereby neutralized or won votes from the “I wanna put somebody to death today” constituency. He spoke of “personal responsibility” and thereby neutralized or won over the “welfare is ruining America” vote. He promised to “put more police on the street”, and thereby shared the “law and order” voters with conservatives while winning over some policemen’s unions.
CLINTON'S EMPATHY TOUCHES VOTERS' HEARTS
When Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain”, he really had labored to understand the motivations of even the most backward conservatives with whom he fundamentally disagreed. He used his amazing intelligence and perceptive powers not to condescend or lecture to America but rather to comfort, relax and seduce even those conservatives with whom we, as a Party, most disagreed.
POLLING MAKES PERFECT
This sort of microscopic surgery could not be successful without the high-powered imaging tools the Republicans employed. So, Bill Clinton and his election team used incessant polling and focus groups, not merely to measure who favored and opposed him, but also to understand precisely why and why not. Because he had begun this preparation well in advance of the primaries, he was able to formulate primary positions in a way that prepared and positioned him carefully for the general election.
Stanley Greenberg was the Clinton's chief pollster. "Much of Stanley Greenberg's responsibility after major policy speeches or announcements lay in convincing the media to interpret different events or speeches with a particular "spin" (Greenberg). He was armed with the survey research data that he collected and could immediately reiterate the message of the speech or announcement to the press." Importantly, as Medic and Dulio Point out in "The Permanent Campaign", "polling [was] used to craft messages and shift priorities, not to create policy positions out of whole cloth." THE PERMANENT CAMPAIGN
Bill Clinton did not fall into ideologically defeating traps partly because he knew where they were, based on extensive empirical testing. As a result, not only did he "feel our pain", but he understood precisely the parts of our psyche from which it emanated, with national and demographic particularity. He promised to salve our wounds based on a thorough examination conducted in private by his pollsters. The Republicans ridiculed his extensive polling at first and then envied it at last.
In 1992,
Clinton defeated President Bush and upstart independent Ross Perot in 1992 after besting a large field of fellow Democrats for the nomination. As President-elect, Clinton vowed to focus on economic issues like a "laser beam," working especially to overcome the sluggish growth of the American economy. He also sought to remake the Democratic Party by focusing on issues supported by the middle class, such as government spending to stimulate the economy, tough crime laws, jobs for welfare recipients, and tax reform that shifted the burden to the rich.
At the same time, Clinton stood firm on certain traditional liberal goals such as converting military expenditures to domestic purposes, gun control, legalized abortion, environmental protection, equal employment and educational opportunity, national health insurance, and gay rights. AMERICAN PRESIDENT.ORG
WINNING BY MUTING THE TRUMPETS
Bill Clinton plays saxophone. But when playing the Democratic symphony for the nation, he was willing to “tone it down” and play the crowd-pleasers, because otherwise he would not be invited to play at all. That is how the Democrats won the Presidency in 1992 and kept it in 1996. With Bill Clinton, We Democrats didn’t get all we wanted – far from it - but at but we were spared much of that which we most feared. In retrospect, we were spared much of what we were unable even to imagine.
In 2008, with another Clinton running for President, the mainstream media will inevitably remind us of another woman who ran on the Democratic ticket, Geraldine Ferraro. They are unlikely to mention this crucial difference: That in 2008, Hillary Clinton will be nominated, if at all, because in state by state primary the American voters and the Democratic Party faithful made it so.
2008 will not be like 1984, 1988, 2000 and 2004 if the Clintons have anything to say about it. In 2008, the Democrats will have the opportunity to elect a liberal woman President who has won the right to represent her Party by winning the most delegates in the Democratic primaries. (If not, she will stand down.) She will be a 2-term US Senator with near universal name recognition in addition to being highly regarded by Democrats generally. She wears the mantle of soldier for national health care while three quarters of the American public favors health care for all.
THERE IS NO "WOMEN'S VOTE"
There really is no uniform women’s vote in America that can be counted to go to one candidate or the other in a block, and particularly not because of the gender of the candidate. But there are issues that appeal to women in their roles as laborers, professionals, parents and patriots. In 2008, Hillary Clinton will a winning majority of middle America by hearing our heartfelt concerns, just as she won over New York State this year, with 30% of its Republican vote, listening and showing she cares.
But Senator Clinton will not abandon her base constituencies. She will contribute to the efforts to end the Iraq War in a way that increases Democrats’ chances of being elected in 2008. And she will have the strong and enthusiastic support of African-Americans and Latinos, who have come to regard the Clintons very highly. Her Methodist spiritual background will resonate for all those who seek the values that transcend our cotidian experience.
A SUCCESSFUL MODERATE TICKET
But what of her running mate? A successful ticket might include US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton the moderate liberal front-runner, plus US Senator Russell Feingold, who earned lefty credentials by voting against the Iraq War Resolution, against the Patriot Act, and who – like Senator Clinton - voted against the amendment to ban burning of American flag. Such a ticket would offer America the Clinton centrism that appeals to the independent and more liberal Republican voters, while also uniting the ticket and the Party behind progressive ideals. In that way, such a ticket would help us to overcome the "liberal" epithet that helped to doom the re-election of Jimmy Carter as well as the candidacies of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Edwards.
Or, the Democrats could make repeat the mistakes of the Mondale ticket, uniting an unalloyed lefty at the top of the ticket with another unalloyed lefty side-kick and leaving conservative Democrats and independents out in the cold, to enter the warm embrace of the Republican Party, again. We call these fleeing Democrats of 2008 the “McCain/Giuliana Democrats”, but they’re not fleeing yet.
Our best chance to win the presidency may lie in choosing the candidate about whom Democrats are most enthusiastic (as shown by fundraising, national organizational strength, the polls and actual primary votes), and then going with a running mate who demonstrably connects with additional voters who are ideologically within our own key demographic target groups.
Hillary’s strategy is the right one today, positioning herself to win some of the conservative Democratic and independent votes with whom Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Edwards were not sufficiently successful. It’s not going to be an easy job, but it’s one the Clintons have done in the past.
THE CLINTONS' CENTRISM IS WINNING FOR 2008
What is certain, after the failed elections of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry and Edwards, is that a centrist woman with a Clinton strategy will have much more chance to win than a liberal with a Mondale-like laundry list of leftist dogma that alienates the political middle and incites the conservatives. In 2008, a woman with the right positions, carefully directed Clinton-style toward the American center politically, will be more successful than yet another white male with a dogmatic liberal laundry list.