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Walter Mondale, RIP
The news that Walter Mondale was
in extremis had circulated a few days ago, and blurted out, predictably, by Jimmy Carter, about whom Mondale said on many occasions after 1980, “I never understood how Carter’s political mind worked. Carter’s got the coldest political nose of any politician I ever met.”
It is still not well known that Mondale considered resigning as Vice President during Carter’s infamous navel-gazing Camp David retreat in July 1979 that gave us the awful “malaise” speech. Mondale was conventional enough to know Carter had lost his grip.
Mondale was, to be sure, an old New Deal/Great Society liberal, and it is easy to arrange a catalogue of things he was wrong about. In 1971 Mondale said that “The sickening truth is that this country is rapidly coming to resemble South Africa,” which is ridiculous, but would fit in well today with the required Black Lives Matter slogans. But in other respects he was a moderate, and in person