Walter Mondale, a leading liberal Democratic voice of the late 20th century who was U.S. vice president under Jimmy Carter and lost in a historic landslide to Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential election, died on Monday at age 93, according to media reports.
Mondale, the first major U.S. party presidential nominee to pick a woman running mate, died in Minneapolis, according to a family representative quoted by Axios.
Widely known as “Fritz,” Mondale believed in an activist government and worked for civil rights, school integration, consumer protection and farm and labor interests as a U.S. senator and vice president during Carter’s troubled one-term presidency from 1977 to 1981. He also served as U.S. ambassador to Japan from 1993 to 1996 under Bill Clinton.
Mondale was the Democratic nominee in 1984 against Reagan, a popular incumbent Republican who had beaten Carter four years earlier, and selected New York Democratic U.S. congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, as his vice presidential running mate.
But Mondale suffered one of the worst defeats ever in a U.S. presidential election, losing in 49 of the 50 states and carrying only his native Minnesota as well as Washington, D.C.
It was the first of two times that Mondale was sent into political retirement by a crushing defeat.
Eighteen years later, grieving Minnesota Democrats beseeched Mondale, then 74, to run for the Senate after Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash 11 days before the 2002 election. Mondale lost narrowly to Republican Norm Coleman, who depicted him as the graying representative of a bygone era.
During his race against Reagan, Mondale promised Americans he would raise their taxes, a vow that did little to help his candidacy.
“I mean business. By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds,” Mondale said during his speech in San Francisco accepting the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination. “Let’s tell the truth. It must be done, it must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”
The remark helped sink his campaign. Even years later, he expressed no regrets. “I’m really glad I did it,” he told PBS in 2004. “It’s something that I felt good about, and I thought I told the truth.”
Earlier that year, Mondale made a memorable political quip when, during a primary debate, he tried to depict Gary Hart, a rival for his party’s presidential nomination, as all style and no substance by asking: “Where’s the beef?”
The line, borrowed from a humorous hamburger commercial popular at the time, hurt Hart’s campaign.
Mondale was a protege of fellow Minnesota liberal Hubert Humphrey, also a senator and vice president, who lost the 1968 presidential election to Republican Richard Nixon.
Mondale served in the Senate from 1964 until he was elected as vice president in Carter’s 1976 victory over incumbent Republican Gerald Ford, who had become president after Nixon resigned in 1974 due to the Watergate corruption scandal.
Mondale became a more engaged vice president than many who preceded him. He played a key role in buttressing the sometimes frayed relationship between Carter’s White House and the Democratic-controlled Congress.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Diane Craft and Peter Cooney)
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