The LuLac Edition #4.507, April 28th, 2021

 

WRITE ON WEDNESDAY

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This week we give you a Times Shamrock article on the legacy of the late Vice President Walter Mondale.

MONDALE REMEMBERED FOR TRANSFORMING VICE PRESIDENCY

Because the presidency is the nation’s most important office, Walter Mondale will be remembered primarily for getting clobbered by President Ronald Reagan in the 1984 presidential race, winning only his native Minnesota.

But Mondale, the vice president to President Jimmy Carter who died Monday at 93, forever changed the vice presidency.

Historically, vice presidents rarely dealt in actual governance. They served the political purpose of balancing presidential tickets, as the Midwesterner Mondale did for Carter, a former Georgia governor with little Washington experience. But once in office, they tended to disappear.

Presidents often viewed their vice presidents as rivals, as in the case of President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Some presidents held vice presidents in low regard, as in the case of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his vice president, Richard Nixon. And presidents often kept veeps in the dark. When Harry Truman succeeded President Franklin Roosevelt, for example, he did not know that the United States had developed the atomic bomb.

Under Carter, Mondale was involved in developing and executing policy and in advising the president on an array of policy issues.

Each vice president since then — George H.W. Bush, Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden — was involved in major policy and was a highly visible figure. The same is true now of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mondale rejected relentlessly negative politics, was highly competent and famously boring. For all of that, and his transformation of the vice presidency, he’ll be regarded well in history despite his epic presidential loss.