Two seminal moments capture Walter Mondale’s long-shot 1984 Presidential bid, which I covered as a neophyte reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The first was his effect on a cavernous campus gym in the Midwest filled with cheering supporters. The place was crammed to the rafters with college students who had been raucously awaiting Mondale’s arrival and were primed for excitement. The crowd applauded wildly as the former Vice-President strode onto a stage festooned with festive bunting and balloons. But, when Mondale launched into his stump speech, he told the eager young students that not all of them would go out into the world and succeed. Many of them, he warned, would find that life could be hard, and that they might have setbacks. He predicted that some members of the audience would someday need the help of government services, and that, in the future, many would rely on Social Security. When I looked out across the room, it was as if a field of wildflowers was wilting before my eyes. One could feel the crowd’s optimism plummet, as soon-to-be college grads pictured themselves as needy old folks waiting for their government checks. Everything Mondale said was true. But it was not what American voters wanted to hear.
The second instance was more famous. It was a moment during his acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention when, to the shock of many, Mondale chose to deliver the bad news that, if elected, he would raise taxes. At the time, Ronald Reagan, who was seeking a second Presidential term, was promising “morning again in America,” with a series of gauzy television ads featuring white picket fences and golden sunrises. But Mondale refused to peddle the magical thinking of Reaganomics—the phony claim that slashing taxes would produce an economic boom so great that it would make up for the lost tax revenue. To the contrary, Mondale accurately argued, it was instead producing vast federal deficits, degraded social services, and runaway economic inequality. Rather than endorsing the ostensibly pain-free path of “supply-side economics,” Mondale declared that something had to be done to reduce the mounting federal deficit. “Let’s tell the truth. It must be done. It must be done,” Mondale declared, during the most important speech of his life. “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”
At the Convention, there was the usual partisan boosterism, but there was also an unmistakable undertow of gloom. One Democratic pollster, Patrick Caddell, told me that night that he thought Mondale’s candor was suicidal. And, indeed, Mondale was defeated soon after, in a landslide. Mondale carried only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia.
But, looking back, it’s hard not to admire how honorable Mondale—who died on Monday, at the age of ninety-three—was during that campaign. He was the last Presidential nominee of either party to respect the American public enough to tell it the hard truth about economic realities. Reagan and the Republican Party, in contrast, embraced deceptive economic claims. The Party’s right wing never forgave George H. W. Bush for dismissing Reagan’s supply-side theories as “voodoo economics,” during the 1980 Republican primaries. Democrats were hardly better. After Mondale’s defeat, they were so intent on avoiding the “tax and spend liberal” label that they, too, rarely demonstrated the courage of their convictions. Instead, their mantra sounded like a weak echo of Reagan, with Bill Clinton declaring, in his 1996 State of the Union address, that the era of big government was “over.” By the time that Donald Trump was elected, lying to the public had become a daily pastime—and not just about the taxes required to run a functional federal government but about virtually every aspect of governing.
After retreating to his law practice in Minneapolis following his 1984 loss, Mondale continued to speak candidly even when it meant criticizing his own party. He took jabs when he thought Obama Administration officials were exceeding the limits of executive power by overstepping Congress. And he told the truth that others were too polite or deferential to admit about what he believed were the infirmities of his former opponent Reagan. In interviews in 2010 and 2011, Mondale told me that he believed that, during the 1984 Presidential campaign, Reagan may already have been suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. He recalled that, during one of their Presidential debates, Reagan became so confused, and so completely lost his train of thought—while describing a drive down the California coast—that Mondale became alarmed. “I was scared he’d fall down,” Mondale told me. “I think, when you look at that performance, there’s some question whether he wasn’t beginning to lose it.”
Despite his aversion to sugarcoating pronouncements, which was in keeping with his upbringing as the son of a minister in Minnesota’s flinty Norwegian-American community, Mondale came off to those of us who covered him as warm, jovial, and occasionally quite funny. I was a complete novice when the Wall Street Journal assigned me to report on his campaign, and, despite my obvious inexperience, he humored me. At one point, when I nearly missed the campaign plane’s takeoff, I ran across the tarmac in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and tried to flag it down. Waving my arms in front of the cockpit as the engines revved, I caught the eye of the pilot. The plane stopped, and the gangplank-like stairs plopped down. As I sheepishly scampered aboard, I was greeted personally by Mondale, who stood there laughing.
American politics isn’t kind to losers. But Lawrence Jacobs, the director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, at the University of Minnesota, believes that history may vindicate Mondale. After decades of Democrats trying to placate Republican neoliberals, he suggested, the Party may be swinging back. For years, Jacobs co-taught a course with Mondale at the University of Minnesota, and remained close with him. In a phone conversation on Sunday, Jacobs said that, even though he decisively lost the 1984 Presidential campaign, Mondale hoped that his liberal policy ideas would gain support in the future. “Mondale was putting down a marker for a more just America. It would involve higher taxes, and programs that really help people tangibly in their lives,” Jacobs said.
It remains to be seen whether Americans are more willing today to accept hard truths about the taxes that it takes to sustain such spending. The track record since 1984 isn’t reassuring. But the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has undoubtedly gained strength since Mondale’s day, and polls suggest that there is strong public support for the Biden Administration’s vast pandemic-relief program and proposed infrastructure plan—and, perhaps more important, for paying for it by raising taxes on the rich. “Mondale was very conscious of campaigning for the future,” Jacobs told me. “And now, with Biden, the future has caught up.”
