At the age of 93, former US vice president Walter Mondale died. This was announced by a spokesman for the family. He was number two with Jimmy Carter in the White House from 1977 to 1981. By 1984 he won the Democratic nomination for the presidential race. He was defeated by Republican Ronald Reagan.
Walter Mondale will remain for the Americans the discreet man of pre-show politics, the one who, chewing his cigar, refused to mix private life and politics, and transform personal tragedies into an electoral tool. In his speeches as candidate for president Mondale was the one who denounced the farmers’ crisis, avoiding telling the story of his father, who had lost everything in 1920 with the collapse of wheat prices. He was the one who shouted alarms about the rising costs of health policies, without telling his mother that she had lost coverage when she fell ill with cancer. Perhaps also for this reason Mondale had no hope against the rising star of the Republicans, the actor Ronald Reagan, who is so cinematographic and televised in all his statements.
Democrats offered many different interpretations and theories as to why Mondale lost so devastatingly. Jesse Jackson argued that the Democrats had focused too much on the white electorate, but then it was Mondale himself who explained the reason for the defeat: “I was – he admitted – not well suited to appear on television.” Politics had entered a television dimension that would change the narrative of politics. Called by Bill Clinton to fill the role of ambassador to Japan, after his retirement in ’96, Mondale fell into oblivion, eventually finding that television showcase that gave him back a popularity he had never really sought. It came with the homage in the Simpsons animated series. In the episode “Un clown va a Washington“, Mondale played the guardian of Parliament who, an expert in” government intrigues “, helped Krusty the Clown to pass a law in just three hours. Nobody, as far as we know, asked him if he had seen the episode and if he liked it.
The Democrat had emerged with his obstinacy from rural America, raised in Ceylon, the small town with Heron Lake and Elmore, a sacred triad of Minnesota’s farming villages, the most populous of which did not reach 950 inhabitants. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, a soldier in the war in Korea, then a lawyer, it is from the agricultural womb of America that Mondale built his political rise, making the family of “farmers” the “foundations of a strong nation”, supported by his wife , Joan, and their three children.
His references were President John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, vice president from ’65 to ’69. He established himself as a reformer, opposed to the war in Vietnam, an introspective populist determined to oppose the rich, industrialists and bankers, chosen by Carter in ’76 as vice president in the race for the White House. The farmers’ ticket defeated the one formed by Gerald Ford and Bob Dole, but their mandate was marked by the economic crisis that led to Reagan’s triumph.
In 84 Mondale tried the race as president, with Geraldine Ferraro as deputy, but if his message had a hold on that kind of silent America, and he personified the “civilization of Minnesota”, as Senator Amy Klobuchar commented, the Democrat failed. to win the attention of the rest of the country. And the great chance of going to the White House vanished in front of Reagan’s new triumph.