Walter Mondale. Are you excited yet? Many Americans will not recognize his name. He served as Jimmy Carter\u2019s Vice-President from 1977-1981 and was the Democratic nominee for president in in 1984.<\/p>\n
You might say that he is charisma challenged. But as best we can tell, there\u2019s no correlation between charisma and intelligence. Walter Mondale had, and still has, some excellent ideas.<\/p>\n
George Lakoff has warned progressives and others to not assume that just because something makes sense, then it will be accepted by the American people. What Walter Mondale did in the 1984 campaign is good evidence for Lakoff\u2019s thesis.<\/p>\n
On Tax Day, 2011, Mondale penned an op-ed <\/a>in the Washington Post <\/span>advancing the reasonable argument that the United States government cannot address its budgetary problems without raising taxes. It included a reflection on personal experience:<\/p>\n I told the truth in 1984. \u201cThe American people will have to pay Mr. Reagan\u2019s bills,\u201d I said in my acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco. \u201cThe budget will be squeezed. Taxes will go up. .\u2009.\u2009. It must be done. Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won\u2019t tell you. I just did.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There\u2019s something called a Venn diagram in which two circles intersect. There\u2019s rarely a great deal of overlay between the Republican Party and the truth. So, Ronald Reagan and his cohorts had no difficulty skewering Mondale for respecting and telling the truth.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Republicans said that Mondale was just another big-spending Democrat whose views were antithetical to Reagan\u2019s mantra. In his first inaugural address on January 20, 1981, Reagan said, \u201cIn this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.\u201d (audio clip)<\/a><\/p>\n If this sounds familiar, it\u2019s because it is. The words could just as well have come from Paul Ryan, Sarah Palin, John Boehner, Michele Bachmann, or even the Donald. Reaganomics didn\u2019t work in the 1980s; so much so that Reagan somewhat surreptitiously ate his own words and supported the raising of certain taxes in his second term.<\/p>\n Through the lens of 2011, even Reagan\u2019s whiz kid budget director, David Stockman, has fallen off the Reaganomics wagon. In a New York Times op-ed last July 31, Stockman wrote:<\/a><\/p>\n