Reagan's Resounding Re-Election

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Thirty years ago tonight, the nation witnessed its most recent classic national landslide when President Ronald Reagan won 49 of the 50 states against former Vice President Walter Mondale. When the numbers were counted, Reagan had more than 58% of the popular vote and more than 500 electoral votes.

Other presidential elections have been labeled landslide, but they weren't really. Not by the statistical definition of a landslide. The generally accepted benchmarks for a landslide have been when a candidate receives (1) at least 55% of the popular vote, (2) at least 400 electoral votes and (3) more votes than anyone else in at least three–fourths of the states.

In 1988, Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush came closest of anyone since Reagan's time to winning a true landslide. Bush won more than three–fourths of the states worth more than 400 electoral votes, but his popular vote tally was 53%. If he had won about 1.5 million votes that went instead to Democrat Michael Dukakis or other candidates on the ballot, Bush could have claimed a legitimate landslide.

Bill Clinton's victories in 1992 and 1996 have been mentioned as landslides, but Clinton never exceeded 50% of the popular vote, nor did he win at least 400 electoral votes or carry three–fourths of the states.

George W. Bush was the winner of two cliffhangers. Barack Obama's margins were larger than Bush's, but he didn't meet any of the three requirements for a landslide, either.

It isn't easy to win by a landslide. Frankly, it is hard enough for most candidates simply to win. But Reagan was one of those people to whom triumph seemed to come easily. But that was really misleading. Reagan had his share of setbacks earlier in his life. Most Americans — outside the Californians who knew him as their governor — only really knew him in his later years, when things really did seem to come easily to him.

Reagan had his issues, and there are those who claim to this day that, when he won his second term, he was already experiencing the early stages of the dementia that eventually took his life, but his electoral accomplishments are beyond dispute.

His first election had been impressive — beating an incumbent president by 10 percentage points and sweeping all but half a dozen states — but his second election was resounding. It left no room for doubt about who was preferred by the voters.

Back in the Saddle Again

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For two weeks, the pundits of 1984 spoke of little else but whether Ronald Reagan, at nearly 74, was too old to be president.

They did so primarily because of his performance in the first presidential debate with former Vice President Walter Mondale. What little traction Mondale did get following that debate was more or less halted a few days later when Vice President George H.W. Bush and Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro spent 90 minutes debating each other, and then neither was perceived to be the winner.

That meant that, to beat the already longshot odds against him, Mondale would have to beat Reagan decisively in the second debate, held 30 years ago tonight in Kansas City.

The debate was intended to be about foreign policy, and it started out that way with questions about Central America, the Soviet Union and regions that were crucial to American interests. The age issue didn't come up right away. It was the elephant in the room, though, that Henry Trewhitt of the Baltimore Sun finally confronted.

It was kind of hard to work in. Trewhitt tried to "cast it specifically in national security terms." Nice try. It served only as a straight line for Reagan.

"You already are the oldest president in history," Trewhitt said to Reagan. "And some of your staff say you were tired after your most recent encounter with Mr. Mondale. I recall yet that President Kennedy had to go for days on end with very little sleep during the Cuban missile crisis. Is there any doubt in your mind that you would be able to function in such circumstances?"

It took maybe 25 or 30 minutes to get to it, but, when it did, Reagan had a disarming response that he obviously had been holding for just the right moment.

"I want you to know that I will not make age an issue of this campaign," Reagan asserted. "I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

Everyone laughed, including Mondale, who must have realized that his last opportunity to seize the momentum was gone. Trewhitt gave Mondale an opportunity to speak about Reagan's age, and he did so, prefacing his remarks with his insistence that Reagan's age had not been made into an issue — which, of course, it had.

"What's at issue here," Mondale said, "is the president's application of his authority to understand what a president must know to lead this nation, secure our defense and make the decisions and the judgments that are necessary."

His argument wasn't terribly persuasive. I got the impression he knew that as he was giving his response.

To his credit, Reagan was more on top of things when he gave his closing statement than he had been when he made his closing statement in the first debate. It wasn't a meandering mess like the last one; it was the folksy kind of anecdote for which Reagan was famous. He told a story of how he was asked to write a letter that would be placed in a time capsule that would not be opened for 100 years.

Reagan spoke of driving along the California coastline, trying to organize his thoughts. It was made more complex, he said, by the fact that those who read the letter would know all about Reagan's time and whether the people of that time had met the many challenges they faced. He transitioned into a plea for another four years "to complete the new beginning that we charted four years ago."

Reagan ran out of time and was cut off before finishing his closing statement, but it was a huge improvement over the statement he made at the end of the first debate.

When the debate was over, both sides claimed victory. But both sides knew the truth. In the first Gallup Poll following the debate, Reagan's approval rating stood at 58% — precisely the share of the vote he would receive on Election Day, Nov. 6, 1984.

A First in Presidential Politics

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"Let me just say, first of all, that I almost resent, Vice President Bush, your patronizing attitude that you have to teach me about foreign policy."

Rep. Geraldine Ferraro
Oct. 11, 1984

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Thirty years ago tonight, a woman participated in a vice presidential debate for the first time.

Actually, that isn't really as impressive as it sounds. There had been only one vice presidential debate prior to that — between then–Sen. Walter Mondale and then–Sen. Bob Dole in 1976. If Geraldine Ferraro had not been a participant, the debate probably never would have garnered the attention it did.

But it was part of the historic nature of the 1984 campaign. Ferraro, after all, was the first woman to be nominated to a major party's national ticket. Minor parties had nominated women before, but few of them managed to win even 1% of the popular vote. Most were mere footnotes in the annals of presidential politics. Even the first women to seek a major party's presidential nomination — Republican Margaret Chase Smith in 1964 and Democrat Shirley Chisholm in 1972 — were treated more as oddities than legitimate candidates.

Conventional wisdom holds that, in any election, a Democrat can count on winning one–third of the vote, a Republican can count on winning one–third of the vote, and the election will be decided by what that final one–third — the undecided, the uninformed and the easily swayed — choose to do. Consequently, Ferraro knew she would receive more votes for a national office than any woman before her — although, as it turned out, the Democrats lost that last one–third of the vote by a wide margin.

Conventional wisdom also holds that most people don't vote for the running mate. They vote for the candidate at the top of the ticket.

Now, personally, I have never been a big fan of vice presidential debates. What is there to debate? Vice presidents don't make policy. In fact, it is only in the last 40 years that the vice president has been treated as a legitimate and contributing member of the executive branch — but the transition has been a work in progress. Vice presidents still serve, as they always have, as the designated national representatives at foreign weddings and funerals. Vice presidents also preside over the Senate and cast votes when needed to break ties.

(That is why the distinction is made in this year's midterm elections that Republicans need to control 51 seats to take over the Senate whereas the Democrats need to control 50 seats. The decisive vote in a tie in the Senate belongs to the party in the White House because the vice president presides over the Senate.)

Otherwise, their chief responsibility is to stay awake during tedious Senate debates, even if they are battling jet lag from having just returned from a funeral halfway around the world.

But if vice presidential debates focused only on those experiences that qualify a person to be vice president, no one would tune in. After all, who wants to hear people talk for 90 minutes about their experience attending funerals or weddings or how they managed to stay awake through tedious legislative debates?

So vice presidential debates focus on issues that presidents are able to influence — sometimes — and other times are not able to influence. In short, a vice presidential debate is predicated on the assumption that one of the participants will one day become president, by assassination or election or maybe even resignation, and, consequently, it is necessary to know the candidates' views on abortion and guns.

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Actually, the notion that it is inevitable that a vice president will one day be president is absurd. Forty–seven men have served as vice president; fourteen went on to become president. That's less than 30% — and most of them became president following the death of the incumbent. It is by no means certain that they would have been elected president on their own. Five only served out their predecessors' unexpired terms, then faded into obscurity. Only four (that's less than 9%) were elected to the presidency without the benefit of having ascended after the death or resignation of someone else — and two of them were elected before presidential elections started involving a popular vote in the early 19th century.

The vice presidency simply never has been the stepping stone to the presidency that you might think it would be.

Many vice presidents have gone on to seek the presidency on their own. Many failed to win their party's nominations — and all who did win the nomination after 1836 and before 1988 were defeated (with the exception of 1968, when Richard Nixon, running as a former vice president, won both the Republican nomination and the general election).

George H.W. Bush, of course, had sought the presidency before — in 1980, he had been Ronald Reagan's top rival for the Republican presidential nomination before being chosen to be Reagan's running mate. Ferraro, however, never had sought the presidency. She had barely sought the House seat she occupied, having won three terms, and was barely known outside her district.

So why was it important? It was important for Democrats to keep the momentum going after Mondale's first debate with Reagan. The polls showed the Democratic ticket trailing the Republican ticket by a wide margin — correctly, too, as it turned out — and the Democrats' hopes for victory depended on a perception of sustained momentum.

Bush's objective was simple — halt the Democrats' momentum, then Reagan could close the deal in the rematch with Mondale later that month.

My memory of that night is that neither candidate was the clear winner — which, in some ways, was a victory for Bush because it supported opposition arguments that the Democrats' momentum had stalled. If Bush had been the clear loser, the Democrats would have had momentum decisively on their side when Mondale faced Reagan in their second and final debate a week and a half later. But the absence of a clear winner changed the conversation.

For the next couple of decades, women were frequently mentioned as potential running mates for presumptive nominees — but such talk was mostly to appease women voters. A vice presidential debate has been part of every presidential election since 1984, but Ferraro remained the only member of the club of major–party female nominees for almost a quarter of a century.

It was a week shy of 24 years later — on Oct. 3, 2008 — that a female nominee participated in another vice presidential debate. That was the day that then–Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the first female nominee on a Republican ticket, and then–Sen. Joe Biden met in their only debate of the 2008 campaign.

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Once again, the conclusion was that the debate had been a draw. As nearly as I could tell, the 2008 vice presidential debate, like the one in 1984, had no influence on the outcome of the race.

Savoring a Short-Lived Triumph

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"I would rather lose a campaign about decency than win a campaign about self–interest."

Walter Mondale
Oct. 7, 1984

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On this night 30 years ago, Walter Mondale's presidential campaign seriously began to entertain thoughts of winning the election.

In hindsight, of course, such thoughts were ludicrous. On Election Day, Ronald Reagan won a 49–state landslide. No one has won the presidency with such a sweeping landslide since.

Mondale had struggled since the summer convention to be regarded as a plausible alternative to Reagan, but he hadn't gotten much traction. After their first debate on this night in 1984, though, it was said that Mondale's campaign staff had been "tap dancing down the aisle" of Mondale's campaign plane.

Why were they so enthused? Because Reagan, at the time the oldest man to be nominated by a major party for the presidency, had appeared confused and disoriented on that stage in Louisville with Mondale.

He had not been the sharp Reagan everyone had expected; instead, he more closely resembled the tired, disengaged old man his critics had said he was. But many people had dismissed that as political gamesmanship.

The first debate focused on domestic issues, an area where the Reagan campaign believed it had a clear advantage — as could be seen in the famous "Morning in America" advertisement that boasted of the economic progress that had been made in Reagan's first term.

When they saw with their own eyes, disbelief gave way to dismay for many, and, in the two weeks between debates, the Mondale campaign began to think and act like a campaign that might not lose after all. Mondale himself began to sound and act like a candidate whose fortunes were turning — who just might be able to achieve what had previously been thought to be impossible.

Nearly everyone who saw the debate 30 years ago tonight had to agree that Mondale was the winner. And that made news because Reagan was so far ahead in the national polls. Like Barack Obama in his first debate with Mitt Romney, Reagan didn't need to be perceived as the winner; his opponent did. And it gave his campaign a much–needed boost. The next day, when Mondale participated in New York's Columbus Day parade, thick crowds lined the street. When he had been there to kick off his campaign a month earlier, attendance was sparse.

At a rally, Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, introduced Mondale as "the new heavyweight debater of the world, Fighting Fritz Mondale!" For his part, Mondale was eager to tell the voters, "Today we have a brand new race."

It was preferable to acknowledging the facts — it was the same old race with a new twist.

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Well, not exactly.

Reagan still had a big lead in the polls. All the debate did was give the shaky elements of Reagan's coalition reason to give Mondale a second look. The twist was temporary at best. All that was needed on the incumbent's end was a little tweaking, a little fine tuning.

A big part of Reagan's problem had been a rambling, incoherent closing statement. At a point in the debate when a candidate needs to be as warm and appealing and visionary as possible, Reagan didn't use his folksy approach that had served him so well in the past.

Mondale took advantage of his opportunity. "The question is our future," he said. "President Kennedy once said in response to similar arguments, 'We are great, but we can be greater.' We can be better if we face our future, rejoice in our strengths, face our problems and, by solving them, build a better society for our children."

And Reagan's campaign staffers were pointing fingers at each other. Reagan had been overprepared, some argued. He had been mismanaged. His head had been crammed with facts and figures — when he was at his best communicating with the viewers in his folksy way. Let Reagan be Reagan, many said.

Reagan and Mondale would meet again in their second and final debate two weeks later. Ferraro and Vice President George H.W. Bush would meet in the second–ever vice presidential debate in a few days, and the momentum Mondale had gained in his first debate with Reagan would begin to fade.

Happy 90th Birthday, Jimmy Carter

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I have been studying the presidency practically since I learned to read (really), and one of the first things I discovered in my very early studies was that only two American presidents had lived to the age of 90 — John Adams and Herbert Hoover.

They lived in different centuries so there is no way they could have run against each other.

I remember being very sad when Harry Truman died. He was within two years of making it to 90, and I was pulling for him. As a devotee of American presidential trivia, I hoped he would join that exclusive club.

It isn't that exclusive anymore. People live longer now than they used to. Not everyone does, of course, but, by and large, each generation does live longer than the one that came before. And among American presidents, the 90–and–Over Club has now added its sixth member, Jimmy Carter. He was born on Oct. 1, 1924.

Earlier this year, George H.W. Bush celebrated his 90th birthday. The other two men to join that club were Ronald Reagan in 2001 and Gerald Ford in 2003.

Considering how the club has grown, I began thinking about various firsts that these milestone birthdays created. For example, the first election in American history that featured two major party nominees who would both live to be 90 was the 1976 campaign between Carter and Ford. (Ford's running mate, Bob Dole, turned 90 last year, and Carter's running mate, Walter Mondale, is 86. If he lives until January 2018, the '76 campaign will be the first to feature four nominees who all lived to be 90.)

It will always be the first such election because all the major party nominees who preceded Ford and Carter are deceased.

Carter's milestone made him the first president to run against two candidates from the opposing party who both lived to be 90; he beat Ford in '76 and lost to Reagan in '80.

If Mondale lives until January 2018, Reagan will become the second president to run against two nominees from the opposing party who lived to be 90. He will be the first man to run against candidates who were destined to live to 90 in three consecutive elections — he challenged Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976.

We'll have to wait awhile to find out if Bush ran against someone who lived to be 90. The candidate he defeated for the presidency in 1988, Michael Dukakis, is 80 and won't turn 90 until November 2023 — and the candidate who defeated Bush four years later, Bill Clinton, won't turn 90 until 2036.

Of course, if Clinton lives to be 90, the 1996 campaign will join the list of elections that featured nominees who reached the 90th–birthday milestone since Clinton's opponent in that campaign was Bob Dole.

Carter has already set a record for the longest post–presidency — more than 33 years now. He surpassed Hoover in September 2012.

I figure that record is safe. Bush is his nearest competition, and he would have to live another 12 years to claim that record. Of course, if he does, he'll be the first American president who lived to be 100.

The Bear in the Woods

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"There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?"

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(Yesterday I wrote about Ronald Reagan's domestic–policy commercial from the 1984 campaign, informally known as "Morning in America.")

The Reagan campaign commercial of which I wrote yesterday is the one that most people remember from that campaign. Economic issues played such a critical role in Reagan's victory in 1980, and an advertisement illustrating how much better things were (by comparison) four years later was quite effective.

But I have always thought the better commercial was the one on foreign policy called "The Bear." It very cleverly illustrated the differences in thought regarding Russia (symbolized by a bear since at least the 17th century) and how much of a threat it was to the United States.

Again, Reagan's opponent wasn't mentioned by name.

But it very neatly summarized Reagan's philosophy of "peace through strength:"

"Since no one can really be sure who's right," adman/narrator Hal Riney said, "isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?"

That is the kind of question that never really seems to go out of style. America is today the world's last remaining superpower, but it has been cutting back on its active military. Consequently, many Americans live in fear that a rogue country like Iran or a terrorist group will gain possession of nuclear weapons.

I think it is safe to say that, if the party in the White House chooses to run a foreign policy commercial in the eight weeks before this year's midterm elections, it will not focus on the president's foreign–policy successes with crises brewing on virtually every continent on the globe — even though the president is not on anyone's ballot this year.

Anyway, the 1984 advertisement did seek to define Reagan and his foreign policy record, and it did so quite well. It reassured skittish voters that Reagan was not the reckless warmonger his critics made him out to be, that he favored a strong defense as a way to keep the peace, that such an approach was prudent in the world of 1984.

That sounded reasonable to voters, who had reached their own conclusions on whether Reagan was reckless after nearly four years of his leadership. Available evidence suggested otherwise to them.

The 1984 campaign really was the most rare of opportunities for an incumbent, it seems to me. Conditions were so much better than they had been four years earlier that Reagan could define himself instead of allowing his opponent, former Vice President Walter Mondale, to define him, and frame the debates in ways that were favorable for that definition.

The "Bear in the Woods" ad is a perfect example of that. In almost every modern political campaign for an office in the federal government, an advertisement on foreign policy — by candidates in either party — will be designed to reinforce negative perceptions/stereotypes about the opposition. But in 1984, the Reagan campaign was able to focus on political philosophy and explain to voters why the president believed his policy was the wisest choice.

It really was a brilliant piece of political advertising.

The Reagan camp had months to prepare the ads, too. There was no opposition to Reagan's bid for renomination so his staff was able to fine–tune the advertisements for the fall campaign under virtually no pressure — at least by campaign advertising standards.

When It Was Morning in America ...

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"It's morning again in America. Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future. It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?"

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(Tomorrow I will write about Ronald Reagan's foreign–policy commercial from the 1984 campaign, "Bear in the Woods.")

I often hear people — on both sides of the political fence — lamenting the absence of civil, positive campaign advertising (by which they almost always mean TV advertising). On Sunday, I wrote about what I feel was the first of the negative ads used in a presidential campaign, Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy girl" commercial in 1964.

That was the Pandora's box that unleashed all the negative advertising that most voters lament today. They aren't exaggerating. It is true that ads are decidedly negative today. Campaign advertising almost always promotes a negative image of a candidate's opponent, seldom a positive image of the candidate himself (or herself). Candidates from both sides of the aisle apparently believe the only way to win is to tear down the opponent. It's been that way for a long time; sometimes it seems it has never been otherwise.

That is the ironic part of all this, isn't it? Candidates believe they can't win without attacking their opponents, and voters say they are turned off by such a spectacle. For the time being, at least, I am inclined to believe that we will continue to be overwhelmed by negative advertising — at least until such tactics are clearly repudiated at the ballot box.

Political advertising on television, of course, is a comparatively new form of advertising, newer than radio, much newer than print. It's been around since 1952, but, in many ways, it was still evolving when Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale faced off in the 1984 presidential campaign.

Advertising in presidential campaigns was rather primitive — but generally not negative — in the 1950s — but, by 1964, a hardball form of negative advertising emerged in the form of Johnson's "Daisy girl" commercial.

That commercial only aired once, but it influenced the election in many ways — and is still discussed in conversations about political advertising. Perhaps its reputation for having helped the Johnson campaign led to the increasingly frequent use of negative advertising in the elections that followed.

I'm sure the Reagan campaign used some negative advertising in 1984, but I honestly don't remember any. That campaign is mostly remembered for two commercials that focused on the administration's record in its first four years. His opponent was never mentioned in either.

One was called "Prouder, Stronger, Better," and it was developed (in part) and narrated by San Francisco ad man Hal Riney — but it is more popularly remembered as "Morning in America," a phrase from the opening sentence.

Democrats (and I was one at the time) seethed over the commercial. I noticed that Democrats' complaints focused not on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the claims but rather on the merits of the production. They couldn't argue with the facts — compared to circumstances just before the last presidential election, unemployment was down; so were gas prices and interest rates.

Those are the kinds of things an incumbent wants to talk about in campaign commercials. It isn't necessary to focus on the negative if the incumbent can say things have been better on his watch — and the numbers back him up. Those numbers weren't particularly good — but they were better than four years earlier.

In fact, the only thing that could be called negative was the final sentence — Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?

And that really was the point for which a case had been made. The commercial was saying the current administration had made good on its promises. The president's opponent had been part of the previous administration. The Reagan campaign saw the choice as being between staying the course (to borrow Reagan's famous campaign pitch during the 1982 midterm elections) and going back to the policies of the previous administration.

That was a pretty effective way to frame the choice, and more than 58% of those who voted agreed with Reagan.

It's the kind of case every incumbent would like to make — that things have been better under his or her watch than they were under his/her predecessor — but few incumbents can make.

Was Reagan lucky, as Democrats claimed? Or was he good, as Republicans insisted? I have heard it said that it is better to be lucky than good, and maybe that was the case with Ronald Reagan. A president's critics always seem to be convinced that he is leading the country to disaster, and Reagan had no shortage of critics. If he had run for re–election in 1982, there is no doubt that he would have lost. His approval ratings before and after the election languished in the lower 40s.

But conditions changed considerably in the next two years — and Reagan's approval rating just before the 1984 election was precisely what his ultimate share of the popular vote turned out to be — 58%. Reagan certainly was lucky in his timing

If "Morning in America" came across as kinda corny, well, it was. Positive ads lack the drama of negative ads. Perhaps that is the price to be paid for getting what you want.

Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired

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"We didn't come all this way for no two seats 'cause all of us is tired."

Fannie Lou Hamer
Aug. 22, 1964

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I really must apologize. I intended to write about this on the actual anniversary, which was yesterday, but it was an unusually busy day for me. Even so, I didn't want the anniversary — the 50th — to pass without observation. I want to tell the story. Because it is a good story, one that should be remembered.

It's the story of Fannie Lou Hamer.

I didn't hear of Fannie Lou Hamer until well after the fact. I think my mother was the one who told me about her, but that isn't really important. She was a civil rights activist from Mississippi who was in the national headlines for a little while in the summer of 1964, then largely disappeared from national view.

She was involved in the planning of 1964's Freedom Summer, when blacks in Mississippi were being taught how to register to vote. It was an effort that went on throughout the South during the 1960s, actually, but it was far more dramatic in Mississippi, where blacks and whites had lived separately under a social and legal system that had been in place for generations. Other places in the South were integrated — to varying degrees — but Mississippi had earned a reputation for being a "closed society."

I've only seen film of her, but Fannie Lou Hamer has always reminded me of the black women I knew when I was a child in central Arkansas — and, I suppose, she was about the same age as they were, too. I never could tell how old they were. (Guess I'm not much better at guessing people's ages today than I was then.) I knew what I needed to know, I suppose. They were always friends of my mother — at least, I always met them through her — and they were older than she was. I knew that much.

I didn't know until later the extent of Fannie Lou Hamer's suffering in Mississippi, which was much more overtly racist than Arkansas in those days — still is, to a degree, I guess. She was sterilized without her consent — by a white doctor as part of a state–sponsored plan to reduce the number of poor blacks. In the summer of 1963, she and a group of activists were arrested on a false charge and beaten so badly in police custody that it took weeks to recover.

I could understand if such experiences made her angry, distrustful and bitter. But Fannie Lou Hamer looked and sounded like the women I knew in my hometown long after her moment in the spotlight. However unpleasant their experiences had been, they were unfailingly positive. They spoke of faith and "the movement" and registering blacks to vote. So did she.

Fannie Lou Hamer sometimes seemed sad, but she had a profound faith in God and what Martin Luther King called "the promised land" — even though I don't think that King used that expression until the famous speech he gave the night before his assassination.

I guess you could call her a realistic optimist — she believed a change was gonna come, but she doubted she would live to see it.

In the summer of 1964, she was 46 years old and regarded as something of a maternal figure by the primarily young people who had been recruited and trained in the North to challenge segregation in the South.

Fannie Lou Hamer participated in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. She was there — and, as a journalist, I reserve most of my admiration for people who were there, wherever there happened to be. That commands far more respect from me than those who report on events from afar — even though, for many, it is the only way they can report or comment on most events.

Fannie Lou Hamer was there.

(It's funny, but, for some reason, I can't seem to refer to her as "Hamer" on second reference, which would be in keeping with the AP Style that has influenced my writing since college. I simply have to use her full name.)

Fifty years ago, the Democrats were preparing to hold their national convention. They would nominate President Lyndon Johnson for a full term in office. They would nominate Hubert Humphrey to be his running mate. They would hear a brief speech from Robert F. Kennedy introducing a film about the recently assassinated John F. Kennedy. The delegates would hear a lot about domestic policy, about civil rights.

Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Democratic Party of Mississippi gave the national Democratic Party an opportunity to do more than talk in the days leading up to the Democrats' national convention. The Freedom Democrats challenged the legitimacy of Mississippi's then–all–white Democratic Party, demanding to be seated.

The Freedom Democrats were careful to do all the things the national party required in order to send a slate of delegates to the national convention, including hold a statewide convention to select 68 delegates. That slate included four whites. Then the Freedom Democrats sent their delegates — by bus — to Atlantic City.

Read the words of historian Theodore White, who also was there.

"It is difficult to compress the emotion that the Freedom Democratic Party aroused at Atlantic City into the narrow proportions of importance it holds in the story of the convention," wrote White. "There was no moment when the convention machinery ... might not have imposed a solution. But the intensity of the emotion was so deep, and all other proceedings were so dull, that for three days the convention paused to consider its only excitement.

"One gets the flavor best," White continued, "not by considering the issues raised but by considering and listening to a voice. On Saturday afternoon, as the Convention Credentials Committee moved to consider the situation in Mississippi, a robust Negress rose to testify. She gave her name as Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer of ... Ruleville, Mississippi [in Sunflower County, northwestern Mississippi] ... Then she proceeded to tell her effort to register to vote, legally, going back as far as 1962; and as her fine, mellow voice rose, it began to chant with the grief and the sobbing that are the source of all the blues in the world. The hot, muggy room was electrified as she concluded her narrative of a Mississippi Negro's life when one attempts to register."

At that point, most accounts I have read indicated that the majority of delegates would have voted to seat the Freedom Democrats, but other Southern delegations were threatening to walk out if that happened — and Lyndon Johnson, already fearful of the reaction in the South to the passage of the Civil Rights Act earlier that summer, did not want to lose additional Southern support.

So Johnson, with the assistance of his soon–to–be vice–presidential nominee and Humphrey's fellow Minnesotan Walter Mondale, worked out what was charitably called a "compromise" — two of the Freedom Democrats would be given at–large (and non–voting) seats.

The compromise was ludicrous, and the Freedom Democrats knew it. They rejected it, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who is probably best known for her statement that "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired"), summed things up beautifully.

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"We didn't come all this way for no two seats 'cause all of us is tired."

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By the way, Johnson's "compromise" didn't help him. He lost five Southern states and nearly lost a sixth. In the 50 years since, Jimmy Carter (in 1976) has been the only Democrat who carried more Southern states than he lost.

The First Bump on That Glass Ceiling

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Nearly 15 years earlier to the day, Neil Armstrong took a giant leap for mankind. On this night in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro took a giant leap for women.

She had been telling folks to "just call me Geri" since long before Walter Mondale picked her to be his running mate a week earlier. But somehow that just didn't seem right for a presumptive vice–presidential nominee.

It took her more than four minutes, but Ferraro finally said what thousands in San Francisco's Moscone Center and millions more watching on TV had been waiting to hear.

First, though, she reaffirmed that "America is the land where dreams can come true for all of us."

Exactly one week earlier, Mondale, the former vice president and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, had announced that he had chosen her to be his running mate — and now, it was her turn to officially accept the nomination (per political protocol) after the delegates approved Mondale's choice, which they did by acclamation.

It was a mere formality, of course. A rather quaint American tradition. No one thought for a second that she would turn down the nomination. And she didn't. Then after she had accepted the nomination, she spent about 25 minutes introducing herself to America. Other than her debate with Vice President George H.W. Bush three months later, it was about the most extensive exposure America would get to the first female on a major party's national ticket.

Not all Americans were watching, of course. They never are, but in a convention week that included soaring speeches from Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson, Ferraro's speech clearly was the emotional high point.

American Rhetoric proclaimed the speech she gave 30 years ago tonight to be #56 on the list of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century. It carried unique challenges that neither Cuomo nor Jackson had to face.

Ferraro was the first woman on a major–party ticket. It was historic, and all eyes would be watching her closely. Her detractors would be looking for anything to criticize, and her supporters would be looking for anything to praise.

Ferraro simply seemed to want her opportunity to tell the country what she could do.

"The promise of our country is that the rules are fair," Ferraro told the delegates. "If you work hard and play by the rules, you can earn your share of America's blessings."

That is pretty standard political rhetoric, but it seemed more convincing coming from the first woman on a major party's national ticket.

And, taking a page from John F. Kennedy's political playbook, Ferraro said, "The issue is not what America can do for women, but what women can do for America."

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Reactions to the speech were generally good. Pundit reactions to the selection of Ferraro as running mate were decidedly mixed, although Ferraro initially proved to be an asset. Mondale's campaign had been far behind Ronald Reagan's in the polls before the convention; after the convention, the Democratic ticket enjoyed a nice bounce and even managed to pull roughly even — for awhile.

But the Democrats came back to earth in a hurry. By the end of July, questions came up about her finances, her husband's finances, their separate tax returns, etc., and the momentum came to a screeching halt.

No one knew any of that 30 years ago tonight, of course, when Ferraro stood before the delegates to the Democratic convention and accepted the vice presidential nomination.

It was a legitimate nomination, but it was still mostly symbolic. Nearly everyone watching probably realized, on some level, that she would not be elected.

Nevertheless, the euphoria inside the convention hall was unmistakable, and Ferraro was almost giddy at times.

"By choosing a woman to run for our nation's second–highest office," Ferraro said, "you sent a powerful signal to all Americans. There are no doors we cannot unlock. We will place no limits on achievement.

"If we can do this, we can do anything."

The Day Mondale Made History

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"You don't have to have fought in a war to love peace."

Geraldine Ferraro

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In 1984, I made up my mind early to support Walter Mondale for president.

His announcement 30 years ago today of his selection of Geraldine Ferraro to be the first female vice presidential nominee of a major political party did not influence my decision.

Nor, I suppose, did it influence most of my friends and co–workers, all of whom seemed to have decided how to vote fairly early, too.

I know it didn't affect my mother. She was an admirer of Mondale before he was chosen to be Jimmy Carter's running mate.

Mom and I never spoke about Mondale's choice so I don't know if she would have selected someone else if it had been up to her. I might have picked someone else. There were times, I guess, when I questioned the wisdom of Mondale's choice — not because of Ferraro's gender but because of her rather thin political resume.

So, if it had been up to me, I probably would have picked someone with more extensive political experience — and perhaps some experience running in a statewide campaign. As a representative, Ferraro's campaigns had been districtwide.

Of course, if the point is to make history with a nomination, one is limited to the options that are available at the time. In 1984, Mondale didn't have the luxury of an abundance of choices. Democrats had no women in the U.S. Senate and only one serving as governor of a state. He probably could have found a woman in the House who had spent more time there than Ferraro, but she might not have shared so many of his views.

Ironically, that would change within the next few years. That may have been — at least in part — an outcome of Ferraro's groundbreaking candidacy. The '80s was a decade of great strides for women. In addition to Ferraro's nomination, Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman nominated to be a Supreme Court justice, and Sally Ride was America's first woman astronaut.

But, in the rush to make history, the Mondale campaign staff failed to adequately vet her and thus was subjected to a distracting investigation of Ferraro's family finances at a time when the Democratic ticket needed to be refining its message for the general election. It was embarrassing, too, because it revived stereotypes about New York Italian–Americans and organized crime.

Twenty–four years later, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin became the first woman nominated for the vice presidency by the Republican Party.

When Vice Presidential Candidates Collide

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Walter Mondale and Bob Dole met in the first vice presidential debate in 1976.

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History will be made tomorrow night in Danville, Ky., when Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Paul Ryan meet in the vice presidential debate.

This isn't the first time a debate has been held in Danville (population about 16.000). Nor will it be the first time vice presidential candidates have debated. In fact, it will be the ninth time.

It has been said that vice presidential debates have little, if any, influence on the outcome of a presidential election. But they have often been noteworthy.

The first time that vice presidential candidates debated was 36 years ago next Monday, when Walter Mondale and Bob Dole met in Houston.

That night, Dole made a sneering comment about "Democrat wars" and Mondale called him on it.

The vice presidential candidates did not debate in 1980, but, on this day in 1984, the first woman on a major party ticket, Geraldine Ferraro, debated Vice President George H.W. Bush in Philadelphia.

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What stands out in my mind about that debate was the blatantly obvious condescending tone of the vice president's remarks. He was a man with an extensive background in foreign affairs, and he appeared to feel that it was beneath him to debate Ferraro, who had a certain amount of knowledge about foreign policy acquired in three terms in the House as well as her experience dealing with appropriations on the House Budget Committee — but nothing remotely comparable to Bush's resume.

Ferraro was right to tell Bush that she "resented" his attitude, but my memory is that Bush was judged the winner that night.

The victory gave a much–needed boost to 73–year–old President Ronald Reagan's campaign for re–election. Reagan had stumbled badly in his first debate with Mondale only four days earlier, and public opinion polls had begun to show some shakiness in his standing with the voters.

(In the aftermath of his widely panned debate performance last week, Barack Obama can only hope that Biden hands him such a gift tomorrow night.)

When Reagan met Mondale in their second and final debate a week and half later, he seemed energized, and he gave a much stronger performance, essentially locking up his 49–state landslide.

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The vice presidential candidates debated early in October in 1988 — on Oct. 5, a date that has been chosen for vice presidential debates three times. It was on that first occasion — in Omaha, Neb. — that Sen. Lloyd Bentsen told Sen. Dan Quayle that he was "no Jack Kennedy."

Twenty years ago this Saturday, the first — and, so far, only — three–way vice presidential debate was held in Atlanta.

(The first–ever three–way presidential debate was held 20 years ago tomorrow.)

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The vice presidential debate in 1992 was memorable for the things the third wheel in that debate — Ross Perot's running mate, Admiral James Stockdale — said.

I always thought that was something of a pity because Stockdale was an intelligent and exceptionally brave individual. He spent seven years in a Viet Cong POW camp and suffered severe physical injuries during his captivity.

He had earned the right to be treated with respect, but the fact that he was not a career politician worked against him in an arena where that kind of experience would have served him well.

After the debate, jokes were made about his halting and confused delivery, his opening statement ("Who am I? Why am I here?") and other nifty sound bites that, taken together, made Stockdale look old and foolish.

But the truth was that Stockdale did not know he would be participating in the debate until about a week before, and he got no advice from Perot. He was about as unprepared as a man could be for a nationally televised debate — and it showed.

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Two days ago was the 16th anniversary of the debate between Vice President Al Gore and Jack Kemp in St. Petersburg, Fla., during the 1996 campaign.

On Oct. 5, 2000, Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman debated in Danville.

Four years later, to the day, now–Vice President Cheney debated John Edwards in Cleveland.

Four years ago, on Oct, 2, Biden debated Sarah Palin in St. Louis.

If you have no real memory of those debates, don't worry about it. As I say, they don't seem to matter much when people make up their minds how to vote.

But they can be quite entertaining.

Joe Biden Is Not the Problem

I first heard the rumblings nearly two years ago.

In August of 2010, I wrote about former Virginia Gov. Doug Wilder's suggestion that Barack Obama should replace Joe Biden with Hillary Clinton in 2012, but my tendency then was to dismiss it as idle talk by people who really didn't know what they were talking about.

The topic reappeared last fall, and, when I heard it said that good ol' Joe Biden had to go, that he was a drag on Obama, I responded by writing that "too much emphasis is placed on the vice presidential nomination."

I wrote that "I don't think replacing Biden with anyone, Hillary or anyone else, is the answer for what ails Obama."

And I still believe that, even though I read articles at least once a week now suggesting that Obama needs to drop Biden.

It seems to me that, whenever incumbent presidents have been preparing to run for a second term, this kind of talk always seems to surface.

Sometimes it makes sense. In 1992, for example, there was a lot of talk about how George H.W. Bush needed to replace Dan Quayle on his ticket. Quayle had gained a reputation, whether fairly or unfairly, for always saying something stupid, and some people felt he was a drag on the ticket.

Now, in 1992, I was never going to vote for Bush, anyway, but I could sympathize with the sentiment. Quayle was ridiculed so much in those days that it really didn't take much persuading to convince anyone that Bush was bound to do better with someone else on his ticket.

Bush wound up keeping Quayle on the ticket, though, and, in hindsight, it is hard to imagine anyone who could have helped Bush win more than 100 electoral votes from Clinton. I think the challenger was going to win that election.

Some years are like that. I have to say that 1980 was like that. President Jimmy Carter was on shaky ground in all aspects of his presidency, and the talk that surfaced during his battle with Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination about dropping Vice President Walter Mondale probably had a lot to do with strategy and little, if anything, to do with Mondale's actual performance in office.

Mondale remained on the ticket, and I can't see how any other Democrat could have helped Carter avoid his landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Usually such talk is frivolous. I don't know where it comes from. Perhaps it is a trial balloon to see if there is any way the incumbent can ratchet up his vote total with a fresh face.

If that is what it is, the conclusion usually is that changing the running mate won't make that much difference. Voters judge incumbent presidents on their records, and the voters' sense of fairness (to which Obama ceaselessly, relentlessly, seeks to appeal) tells them that, unless a vice president is guilty of some egregious offense — that if he has been doing his job (which, constitutionally, only requires him to preside over the Senate and break ties when they occur) — he does not deserve to be dropped.

So Reagan kept George H.W. Bush in 1984. Clinton kept Al Gore in 1996. George W. Bush kept Dick Cheney in 2004. Each was, at some point in those re–election campaigns, the focus of a drop ______ movement.

If Obama does drop Biden, my sense is that the voters, many of whom have become super sensitive to workplace fairness in recent years, would demand to know the reason — and, of course, there are few things that the administration could plausibly blow out of proportion to justify such a move.

The truth is that there is precious little that Obama can point to that will validate his claim that he needs and deserves a second term.

He can't run on his economic record. Unemployment was 6.5% nationally when Obama was elected in November 2008. It has been well above that level throughout his presidency.

His signature achievement, Obamacare, is likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court in the next few weeks.

Instead of bringing people together, Obama has polarized this nation to a greater extent than it was before he was elected.

None of those things can be blamed on Biden. Democrats knew when he was chosen to be Obama's running mate in 2008 that he was gaffe prone — but, for the most part, he's been a good soldier, doing the heavy lifting when he was asked to do it and generally keeping his tongue in check.

Gallup reports that Americans are divided on Biden. The latest survey is, as Jeffrey Jones observes, "the first time opinions of Biden have tilted negative since he became Obama's vice presidential pick," but the numbers are "not materially different" from the public's assessment of him from 2009 to 2011.

And this survey was conducted after both Biden's comments about same–sex marriage on Meet the Press and Obama's comments in an interview a few days later in which he said he supported the legalization of such marriages.

In the week that has passed, Biden has been criticized for forcing the president's hand. But I think it was done deliberately. Obama knows that the polls have shown a general softening in public opposition to gay marriage, and I believe this was an excuse for Obama to give lip service to an issue that he believes will energize groups who helped him win last time.

And, with the last president's experience fresh in his mind, Obama is doing the same thing — he's using gay marriage to distract attention from the real issues.

I knew several women who supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries. When John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate, it was mostly a ploy to attract Hillary's supporters, many of whom were thought to be up for grabs in the early fall of 2008.

That ploy failed for several reasons. Polls were showing a pretty close race between Obama and McCain until the economic collapse in September 2008. That, combined with Bush fatigue, pretty much assured that Obama would win.

Ironically, though, Obama had chosen his running mate in large part to bolster his ticket's foreign policy credentials. Biden was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time he was chosen to run with Obama, and there had been some international tensions that summer.

But foreign policy is way down the list in 2012. And, even if it wasn't, Obama has been trumpeting his role in the killing of Osama bin Laden last year. He doesn't need Biden's help in that category anymore.

Of course, Hillary has been secretary of state under this president so her greatest selling point — other than her gender — is her expertise in foreign policy.

And foreign policy is not on most voters' minds this year.

All that Obama has left is class warfare, which is hardly the inclusive, hope and change banner under which he campaigned four years ago. It is the divide and conquer politics that people have been complaining about for years.

Changing running mates won't alter the fundamentals of this campaign. The voters will do what they always do when an incumbent is on the ballot — they will assess the incumbent's record and decide if they want four more years of it.

'Democrat Wars'

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Lately, a proposal that is usually made as a way to offer a glimmer of hope to an embattled president seeking re–election — dropping the vice president from the ticket — has resurfaced.

In the case of Barack Obama, the idea has been bandied about for more than a year now. The latest to bring it up is Laura Washington of the Chicago Sun–Times, who writes that "[t]he idea still has juice" and that Joe Biden's logical replacement would be Hillary Clinton, providing instant appeal to certain groups with whom Obama had problems in 2008.

Washington acknowledges, though, that, while the president "has been having a very bad year," her most reliable source in these matters, a political science professor with expertise in the American presidency, says changing running mates would be "admitting failure." It would smack of desperation, the professor says, and "I just don't think they're at a point of desperation."

I don't know if this White House has reached such a point of desperation yet — and I have my doubts about the mindset that suggests that dropping a vice president from the ticket is going to make up for any perceived shortcomings in the president — but I find the timing of all this to be ironic.

It is just about taken for granted these days that a presidential general election campaign is going to include televised debates.

The series of Kennedy–Nixon debates of 1960 has achieved a somewhat mythical status in American history. They were the first — and, for several years, the only — such debates. They blazed a trail that almost disappeared in the accumulated undergrowth of time and inattention.

The major–party nominees did not debate each other in the next three presidential election years, but, in 1976, they agreed to a series of debates.

And, in every succeeding presidential election year, at least one debate has been held.

As I say, presidential debates were not new in 1976, but they were exceedingly rare. A debate between the vice presidential nominees, however, was new, and the first one was held 35 years ago tonight in Houston.

Now, historically, the job description for the vice president is kind of sparse. Most folks think of the vice president as sort of a president–in–waiting, the first in line if the incumbent president is unable to serve.

But that particular role was not spelled out in the Constitution until the passage of the 25th Amendment — and every vice president who became president following the death of the incumbent between 1841 and 1963 (that is eight in all) did so based on an assumption that was made when William Henry Harrison died in 1841, not on any sort of constitutional provision.

Traditionally, the vice president serves as the president of the Senate, which means very little. It is the vice president's job to maintain order — and he may vote, but only in the event of a tie. The vice president has also served as the United States' representative at the weddings and funerals of foreign dignitaries.

For the most part, though, vice presidents have been, in the words of Franklin Roosevelt's first vice president, John Garner, the executive branch's "spare tire."

(Ironically, the 1976 Republican presidential nominee, Gerald Ford, was the first — and, so far, only — vice president who became president following the adoption of the 25th Amendment.)

That made it difficult to ask questions that were relevant to the constitutional definition of the job. Maybe that is why vice presidential nominees never debated before Oct. 15, 1976. I mean, no one would tune in to watch vice presidential nominees arguing about which one was more experienced at sitting through long meetings or handling jet lag.

So the emphasis was on the role of president–in–waiting, practically assuming that one, if not both, would become president eventually (and, in fact, both were nominated for the presidency in future elections, but neither was elected), and the nominees debated topics that were more appropriate for presidential nominees. They did not discuss the kinds of situations they were most likely to face as vice president.

That alone turned the debate into an exercise in the hypothetical — and then Republican nominee Bob Dole, who hoped to bail out President Ford following his unfortunate gaffe in his debate with Jimmy Carter a week before, compared the number of American casualties in "Democrat wars" in the 20th century to the population of Detroit.

Democrat Walter Mondale protested that the wars had bipartisan support, and post–debate surveys indicated that a majority of viewers felt Dole's comments were unduly harsh.

"Does he really mean that there was a partisan difference over our involvement in the fight against Nazi Germany?" Mondale asked incredulously, echoing the response of many viewers.

In his book about the 1976 campaign, "Marathon," Jules Witcover wrote:

"[A]s I sat at my typewriter at the Washington Post, watching the debate on television and writing the article about it against a late deadline, I thought of Richard Nixon," Witcover wrote. "It was reminiscent of Nixon's seesaw performance at his famous 'last press conference' of 1962 ... There was a nervous, erratic quality about Dole, a carelessness. He spun off snide remarks almost as if he were unaware of the huge television audience or, perhaps more accurately, as if he were intentionally disdainful of it."

I always felt Witcover was on target in his assessment of Dole, and the characterization of his comments during the debate as "snide" describes them perfectly.

As he got older, Dole's personality seemed to mellow, but, in 1976, his brashness simply rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.

I never felt that he was much of a plus for the Republican ticket to begin with — and he certainly wasn't on this night 35 years ago.

In hindsight, Ford might have been better served by retaining the vice president he appointed when he succeeded Nixon — Nelson Rockefeller. But conservative Republicans, who were in the process of seizing control of the party, would not have stood for that — even if it could have been satisfactorily demonstrated to them that Rockefeller's more amiable personality went over better with mainstream voters.

I often think too much emphasis is placed on the vice presidential nomination — as if observers expect the running mate to become president automatically, but we've had seven vice presidents since Ford became president and only one has gone on to become president — and he did so mostly because he had the good fortune to run in the wake of a popular president who was prohibited by law from seeking a third term.

There is also too much emphasis on — and too little historical evidence to demonstrate — the running mate's potential to attract voters who have not been enthusiastic about the presidential nominee. In 1976, Dole was expected to help win over conservatives who opposed Ford in the primaries, thus uniting the party for victory in November.

But that didn't happen.

And I don't think replacing Biden with anyone, Hillary or anyone else, is the answer for what ails Obama.

Like the criticism that historians often have of generals, that they are guilty of fighting the last war, not the latest one. The groups that preferred Hillary over Obama in 2008 wanted her to be president, not vice president, and I've seen no evidence that those groups would be more favorably inclined to support Obama now than they were then.

When I was growing up, the conventional wisdom about running mates was that, at best, they should do no harm to the ticket. They were even expected to help the ticket, to a certain extent, but not to win the election for the ticket.

That was — and, as far as I can tell, still is — the presidential nominee's responsibility.

Grits and Fritz

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I have a strong picture in my mind of my family's living room on this night 35 years ago.

It was on this night that Jimmy Carter became the Democrats' nominee for president, and it was truly an incredible accomplishment. Carter literally came out of nowhere in 1976 to become his party's nominee, taking the unprecedented approach of entering every primary contest.

People often forget that segregationist George Wallace was one of the leading Democrats when the 1976 presidential primaries were about to begin — and, since it was widely assumed by most that the Republican nominee would be defeated in the aftermath of Watergate and the disastrous 1974 midterm elections, many Americans feared Wallace might very well be the next president.

But Carter scored some key victories over Wallace in early primaries in Florida and North Carolina, forever eliminating Wallace as a presidential contender. For a time, the other Democrats appeared to work together in something of an Anyone But Carter movement, but Carter continued to prevail in the primaries, ultimately winning two–thirds (with most of his losses coming after the matter had already been decided).

He was the first major–party presidential nominee from the Deep South in my lifetime, and he became the first president to be elected from the Deep South in more than a century.

It's happened a little more frequently since. Bill Clinton, after all, was governor of Arkansas. And, if you want to stretch the point, George W. Bush was governor of Texas — although I can tell you, after a lifetime of living in this region, that Texas is really considered more of a border state by most Southerners.

Everything west of Fort Worth is looked upon as southwestern — which is an altogether different thing.

(One of the things I remember thinking later that year after Carter had won the election was that I looked forward to hearing presidential speeches delivered by someone who spoke like most of the people I knew.)

On this evening in 1976, I can remember sitting in our living room with my father and watching Carter accept the nomination.

In the minutes before Carter gave his speech, the TV cameras scanned the convention crowd. Unlike today, presidential nominees in those days usually didn't name their running mate selections until the last day of the convention, and Carter had announced earlier in the day that his choice for running mate was Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale.

Thus, some rather hurriedly printed Carter–Mondale signs were distributed among the delegates to wave, which the cameras clearly showed in their shots of the crowd.

But one homemade sign stood out. It simply said, "Grits and Fritz." Fritz, in case you don't know, is a rather common nickname for Frederick, which happens to be Mondale's middle name.

"Grits and Fritz" stuck. I saw bumper stickers bearing that slogan right up to Election Day — I even saw people wearing buttons that said that as they attended the inauguration festivities the following January.

"My name is Jimmy Carter, and I'm running for president," Carter said with his trademark grin, repeating the introductory line he had uttered countless times in the snows of New Hampshire and elsewhere.

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My father roared with laughter. So did the delegates, but their laughter changed rather rapidly into an enthusiastic — and prolonged, as I recall — cheer.

At that moment, I knew the Nixon–Ford days were just about over.

Those were heady days for Democrats, but, of course, they had no idea what was ahead of them — escalating energy prices, a recession and a hostage crisis that set the table for five Republican victories in the next seven national elections, and 18 years (of the next 30) in which Republicans held at least one of the chambers in Congress.

Funny, but I feel like I have lived through it all a couple of times since then.

Ironically, Carter gave a speech that was probably even more memorable — although Carter almost certainly doesn't like to remember it — exactly three years later. It was the so–called "malaise speech."

(It's really ironic that it should be remembered that way. Carter never used the word malaise in his speech, but people still speak of it as if he did.)

On this night in 1979, America was not a happy place. Gas prices had gone up nearly 50% since that night in 1976, but the minimum wage had risen by only 26%.

But that was still in the future on this night in 1976.

In 1976, this night was a triumph for Carter and the Democrats. On this night 35 years ago, Democrats believed that they were on the verge of seizing political power for a generation, much as the Democrats who met to nominate Barack Obama 32 years later appear to have felt.

It remains to be seen whether Obama's presidency ends the way Carter's did.

Candor in Politics

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Walter Mondale knows something about being candid with voters.

For one thing, he knows it can backfire on you. In a piece in the Washington Post, Mondale recalled that, in his acceptance speech at the 1984 Democratic convention, "I told the truth" when he promised to raise taxes.

He was ridiculed for that promise. Critics did, as Mondale writes, describe it as "exemplifying the folly of proposing tax hikes during an election" and not without justification, either. Ronald Reagan won the election, carrying every state except Mondale's home state of Minnesota.

"[B]ut I won the debate," Mondale observes. "Reagan ended up increasing taxes in 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987."

On the face of it, it does seem like a counterproductive thing to do — proposing that voters pay more in taxes. It's like any time in your life when you had to choose between something that was fun and something that was good for you.

Many more people would lose weight or quit smoking or accomplish something else equally desirable ... if only it wasn't so damn difficult.

It is not my intention to advocate or oppose Mondale's position on raising taxes in 2011 — but, rather, to agree with his observation that there are "political lessons" to be learned from his experience: "avoid generalities, and clearly link taxes to addressing concrete national needs."

It reminded me of a time when I was a young reporter fresh from college.

The newspaper where I went to work after graduation served a county that had approved, in a special election just a few months earlier, a one–year, one–cent–on–the–dollar sales tax to finance the construction of a new county jail.

The old county jail really was a cracker box — in fact, some prisoners escaped from it and were at large for a couple of days not long after I started working for the paper, reminding everyone of the need for a more secure facility.

I wasn't living there during the special election campaign, but I gathered that no one really disputed the claim that a new county jail was desperately needed. The only questions were whether this temporary sales tax would be adequate and would it be the best, most equitable way to raise the funds.

The voters decided the answer to both questions was yes and gave the proposal a big thumb's up.

It was a fair tax, same amount, applied to every purchase within the county, large or small. And it turned out to be more than sufficient to cover the cost of building a new jail.

Matter of fact, the tax raised enough money to cover the cost of the new jail in nine months. The last three months of the tax were going to be a windfall for the county.

That got some folks in the county thinking. If they could get the voters to approve a permanent one–cent–on–the–dollar tax, they could create an all–purpose fund to be used in any way that county officials saw fit.

I heard some of the early musings — at county meetings and in behind–closed–doors conversations — about creating a fund that could be used in the event of a tornado or a flood (both frequent threats in central Arkansas).

But they encountered unexpected resistance this time. At first, people were showing up at county meetings to request that funds be allocated for this project or that one, for this purpose or that one, and county officials kept reminding them that this fund was supposed to be along the lines of an emergency, all–purpose fund.

That wasn't good enough for the voters. They wanted specifics. And, when county officials wouldn't commit to specific purposes, the voters overwhelmingly rejected the proposal to make the tax permanent.

I remember how shocked the county officials were on Election Night. It had all been so easy for them only a year earlier. What went wrong?

They didn't get it then. Some of them probably never did get it.

They had been specific about a need the first time. They had been vague the second time. To the voters, it smacked of a slush fund, and they weren't going to authorize anything like that.

Things really haven't changed that much. Voters still want honesty from their leaders — however remote that prospect may seem at times.

Asking people to pay more in taxes is never a popular thing to do. But people can be a lot more reasonable than many politicians tend to think.

Try some honesty ... for a change.

Gerry

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I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I understood what many of his young supporters were feeling.

I understood it quite well. It was the enthusiastic fervor that comes with being on the same side as a trailblazer, a pioneer, and that is a feeling that, I truly believe, every generation in America should experience at least once — because it is really the essence of what it means to be an American.

America has always been about pioneers — the pioneers who braved the ocean and the unknown to come to this continent centuries ago, the pioneers who explored and charted it, the pioneers who took their search for answers into space.

Obama was a pioneer, the first black to be nominated by a major party for president or vice president. Whatever history ultimately says about the successes or failures of his presidency, he will always be the first black nominee, the one who made it possible for others to follow.

In 1984, then–Rep. Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman to be nominated for a spot on a major party's national ticket, and I was an enthusiastic supporter of the Democratic ticket that year.

Ferraro's death today at the age of 75 has brought back a lot of memories of that time for me.

I guess my experience in 1984 more closely mirrored the experience of Republicans in 2008, though, because, as you undoubtedly recall, the Republicans nominated then–Gov. Sarah Palin to be their first female vice presidential candidate.

(In fact, I observed in 2009 that the parties' first female vice presidential nominees had lived parallel lives since their historic campaigns.)

Like the Democrats in 1984, the Republicans went down to defeat in 2008 — so that year I did not have the experience of supporting a barrier–breaking nominee who was successful in the general election.

Well, that may not be entirely true. I wasn't old enough to vote in 1976, but I supported Jimmy Carter, who was — I was told at the time — the first president elected from the Deep South in more than 100 years.

Carter was kind of a pioneer in that sense — although, frankly, I always had my misgivings about that. Lyndon Johnson was from Texas, which I always considered a Southern state (if not a Deep Southern state), and Dwight Eisenhower was born in Texas, although he grew up in Kansas. Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia, but he spent his adult life in New Jersey.

As a product of the South, I felt a great deal of pride in seeing a fellow Southerner elected president — even though he wasn't the first.

Then, in 1984, I really did get to support a political trailblazer, and, when I think of that time, I have to conclude that I was more carried away with the symbolic nature of Ferraro's nomination than her relevant experience.

It was, frankly, comparable to the experience levels that Obama and Palin brought to their tickets in 2008. Far from impressive.

I don't remember giving much thought to Ferraro's experience level at the time. I was influenced by other things, and one certainly was the historic symbolism of her candidacy.

I never really thought the ticket had a chance to win — and I was living in Arkansas, where the numbers were running pretty heavily against the Democrats (on the national level, anyway). It was hard for someone supporting the Democratic ticket there to get much of a sense that victory was really possible.

A few weeks before the election, Ferraro came to speak in Little Rock. I'm still not sure why she came to Arkansas, what she hoped to gain, but I went to hear her speak with some friends of mine, Mike and Jane, anyway.

About five or six months later, the three of us went to Dallas to see Eric Clapton in concert. The atmospheres at both events were just about the same.

In 1984, a Geraldine Ferraro event was like a rock concert without the music, just the star on stage. She would stand up there and wave, and folks would shriek and holler like they did at the Beatles shows 20 years earlier.

I clearly remember that day. It was a kind of drizzly October morning. I was working nights at the time. Can't recall if the event was on a day that I had off anyway or if it was just an ordinary weekday morning, but it really doesn't matter, I suppose. In those days, I was always off duty in the morning.

Nor does it really matter why Mike and Jane also were able to attend that event on a weekday. The fact remains, the three of us went to see "Gerry" — as her supporters tended to call her affectionately — and my memory is that the place was packed.

And everyone cheered wildly at anything she said. She could have been reading to us from the classified ads in the morning paper, and it wouldn't have mattered.

Personally, with my lifelong interest in history, I was just pleased to experience this brush with history. I have no specific memory of anything she said.

(It was doubly historic, in fact, as I recall. Then–Gov. Bill Clinton attended that rally. He was always a vocal supporter of the Mondale–Ferraro ticket, even though the voters in Arkansas were not as enthusiastic about the ticket as he was.)

I'm sure she spoke critically of Ronald Reagan and his record in the White House. That's one of the main jobs of a vice presidential candidate. But even when she was critical in that campaign, Ferraro was dignified and respectful. She was often subjected to indignities by the opposition, but she never repaid them in kind.

1984 was groundbreaking in another way. It is the first campaign that I can remember that utilized popular music from the politically charged 1960s in its advertising.

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That reminds me of the closing days of that campaign. It was truly a memorable time for me.

Even though it was early November, my memory is that it was unseasonably mild, and my friend Sheila and I decided to do our own form of "campaigning" for Mondale–Ferraro.

The evening before the election, we decided to just go out driving in Little Rock. I had some Mondale stickers on the back of my car, and we thought — naively — that we might drum up some support for Mondale by just cruising around and letting the other cars see the stickers.

What the heck? Gas wasn't too expensive in those days — at least not compared to what we pay today — and my car got good mileage. But there was simply no way that I was going to sway enough voters to my side to change anything in Pulaski County, let alone the state of Arkansas, through mere exposure to the bumper stickers on the back of my car.

I don't think either Sheila or I had any realistic expectation that we could influence the outcome that night — and it didn't matter, I guess. We were experiencing the "Yes we can" moment of our generation.

It turned out that we couldn't — but, in a way, we did.

Because of Gerry Ferraro, women could dream of something of which only little boys were encouraged to dream before. Blacks can do more than dream today — and, I suppose, someday in the future, Hispanics and Asians and gays will join them, if they haven't already.

I had heard little of Ferraro before Mondale chose her to be his running mate, and I heard relatively little from her after that campaign — except for 2008, when she was part of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

For the most part, she played her role on the national stage in 1984, then stepped back to let others take the spotlight.

Gerry Ferraro blazed the trail. She played her role in American history.

She fought the good fight.