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Walter F. Mondale

Walter F. Mondale, a Democrat, was the vice president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. He lost reelection in 1980, along with President Jimmy Carter, but went on to become his party’s presidential nominee in 1984. He was a U.S. senator from Minnesota from 1964 through 1976 and was the U.S. ambassador to Japan during the first four years of the Clinton administration. Mondale is now a senior counsel in the Minneapolis office of Dorsey & Whitney, an international law firm.

John W. Mashek interviewed Mondale on April 20, 2007.

You have a unique part because you have been in three presidential cycles: ’76, ’80, and ’84. Other than the huge amounts that are raised now, Mr. Vice President, what do you find is another major change in how money is being raised? Or is it just that the amounts are so staggering?

I think there are a lot of differences. Number one, the federal system worked, albeit imperfectly, in ’84. Now the system has collapsed, from what I can tell. None of the candidates are living within the ceilings, or waiving the money that they can get because they are raising more from the private sector. And so a lot of what we tried to do in the Watergate reforms has now been nullified. And it seems like the spirit has gone out of the fight some way. You don’t see much being done.

Secondly, just the magnitude of the money is not only obscene, but it is so much out of proportion from what we went through, as bad as it was in our times.

And thirdly, that they have to raise the money so fast. When I ran in ’84 and we had the match and so on, I could get what I needed — maybe $15 million, $20 million — to get through those primaries.

That’s chump change now.

Yeah. That wouldn’t even get you through New Hampshire now.

Then I would get nominated. And then I would get my federal check as a nominee. And then that’s all I needed. And that’s basically how I ran my ’84 campaign. You can’t do that now.

[There was] the one reform a couple of years ago, where they provided that money could not be given directly to the candidate. That, I think, has had some effect, because it avoids direct corruption, or appearance of corruption, or both, of a candidate. It has to go through one of these committees. Now it’s a thin distinction, but at least it’s something. And if you are grasping at straws, that’s about as good as anything.

Senator [Barack] Obama has suggested that both sides commit [to public financing] once we know the nominees. It was my understanding that once the conventions are held, until the election, they have to abide by a certain ceiling [if they take the public funds].

Well, I am not sure it is. I have been listening to these guys. That’s what’s happened in the past; they take that check and they run with it. But it may be that now they will even waive taking the post-nomination money and just make the whole damn thing part of the private money game. I heard something the other day that sounded like that could be done [this time around]. That would be new. That shows the total collapse of the federal system.

Right.

Nothing left.

And, of course, as we both know, on February 5, possibly 20 states — it’s not set in concrete yet — will be holding their primaries, including the largest. So we will know the nominees then. And then you will have this long hiatus until the conventions. My suspicion is, and I hope I am wrong, that both parties, accent Republicans there, are going to spend a lot of money in a so-called campaign to define the opposition.

Oh, yes. You can count on it. I am very concerned about it, because it’s like playing a sudden-death game starting at the beginning and not the end. You will have something like 80 percent of the delegates selected a month after the starting gun. It means not only that you have to raise mountains of money, but [also that] the people with well-known names and with some kind of advantage will, in all likelihood, use that to become the putative nominee early on. There might be people around there on life-support claiming to be candidates. But they won’t be. And then it means that all of the primaries and so on after that first month will be kind of nominal and useless events. So that’s bad. But it means that there will be a quick decision.

And then once a person is the putative nominee, he’s got the votes, everybody will know that. And what he will do — what I would have done, if I were running in this system, I would figure I would have to use that period before the convention to raise an awful lot of money to put the pressure on and define my opponent, and to try to build a really strong convention.

Do you recall in ’84, when you ran for president, after the convention couldn’t you use, and the opposition use, independent money? The Reagan forces had a lot of anti-Mondale ads.

I don’t think we had any, but they did. I think we basically lived off the federal [grant].

I don’t think we did much. We raised money, but basically I was trying to get rid of the debt. I owed $6 million, $7 million when the convention was over. And I wanted to get that out of the way.

This is the first cycle, as far as I can remember, in which neither party is likely to have a nominee who was in there because he was either vice president or because he was so popular that it looked like he couldn’t be stopped.

Right.

And so we have this huge field. And, of course, they are raising money at a clip [in which] the $2,300 limit is easily met.

And the figure $4,600 appears in all of these disclosures.

Husband and wife.

Husband and wife can double up. And that’s what they give, if it’s on the Republican side, though apparently the Democrats are doing better this year.

Right. Well, they are. And I think a lot of that has to do with just our times, and the war, et cetera.

Yeah.

This is a devil’s-advocate question, Mr. Vice President.

Right.

They are revising the figure on how much will probably be spent from $1 billion up to several billion, which is staggering. But when you compare it to pharmaceutical company ads, erectile dysfunction ads, I always come back with, “Well, at what price democracy?” I think the public is turned off when they hear that billion-dollar figure. But democracy doesn’t come easy. I mean, it does cost a lot of money to run now.

Here is what I would say.

Give me the counter argument.

I have never been able to sell anybody on this, but I believe the most dangerous thing in America is the pressure of big money, special-interest money, on the public system.

And your drug advertising is a good example. They [the pharmaceutical companies] spent an equivalent amount in political campaign contributions in order to get the laws in place that will allow them to run away and make a hell of a lot of money with no oversight. Right now the Senate is all tied up on whether Medicare can negotiate with drug companies over drug prices. And you have got a lot of people there that are opposing that. That’s got to have something to do with [the] contributions. I can’t see why you would be against it otherwise.

In any event, I always say [that] we have got public financing now. Every time you drive over to a gas pump, every time you have to buy pharmaceuticals, so many places you go, hidden in the cost of that thing is payback for all of the money they have given to politicians and what they do to respond. And so I still believe we need to keep working on campaign finance to try to diminish the pressure on the candidate that either corrupts the candidate or appears to corrupt the candidate.

Appearances can be just as powerful as . . .

The court has said that is the standard. They have got a right to prohibit behavior that corrupts or appears to corrupt. And I would say that we are pretty close to both now. And I don’t think we should give up. There is kind of a fatalistic argument that you hear around — that it’s just like water, it’s going to find its course, and so on. But if we dealt that way there is no point in having anti-murder laws, because murders occur. I think we ought to keep trying to strengthen those laws.

I wanted, just for a few minutes, to talk about debates, because we really expect that this year there is going to be no problem in getting the candidates to go for three presidential [debates] and one vice presidential [debate]. The Commission [on Presidential Debates], [co-chairs] Frank [Fahrenkopf] and Paul Kirk, are pretty confident of that. When candidates — and you have had several opportunities to do this — come into a city ahead of time [to] prepare for these debates, was that a chore, Mr. Vice President? It took you off the campaign trail. Or was it something you were eager to do?

Well, you realize, at least in those days, the debate was the biggest thing. You could do any number of things, but if you did poorly in the debate, you were a goner. And if you did well, it’s the best thing you can do.

So I always put a lot of time in those debates. And I would get a team working early to go over the possible questions, the strategy, the themes, and all of that, sort of negotiate about how it should be done and so on. And I always figured that was time well spent. Although it did take time from the campaign trail, I think it was what you had to do. And I am sure they are doing it now.

Somebody who worked with [Bill] Clinton told me that Clinton really worked on those debates. And he was comfortable with those issues. And one of the reasons he was so devastating in those debates was that he had been through it over, and over, and over. And they had tried everything. And he was ready for it all.

He was ready, because he really went through the fire in the primaries.

Yeah. And he prepared, specifically, on the debates.

I think George Herbert Walker Bush would admit that he didn’t like debates, thought it was kind of a waste of time.

He thought he was going to lose.

Well, the [Jules] Witcover [and Jack] Germond book [Mad As Hell: Revolt at the Ballot Box, 1992] actually used his looking at his watch several times in the public forum at the University of Richmond.

Yes.

And, of course, Clinton just appeared as relaxed as an old shoe.

Oh, sure. And I think whatever hope Bush had went out the window. And then, let me see. He wouldn’t debate me when I was running for re-election [as vice president, in 1980]. He wouldn’t do it. And he debated [Geraldine] “Gerry” Ferraro. And I thought Ferraro beat him.

I was a panelist at that debate. And I had the worst seat in the house, because you are kind of thinking about what you are asking next, even though you have got an outline of questions. People asked me who won. And I said, “I’ll be damned if I know.” And, of course, the worst thing that happened was Bush’s comment the next morning. That got the headlines. With the number of candidates in the race this time, is it possible that a candidate without so much money, somebody with limited finances — like a Bill Richardson on the Democratic side and, say, somebody on the Republican side like a [Mike] Huckabee — could, in the light of how much money is out there now with the others, sneak up? Jimmy Carter did it in ’76.

But we had the long process there where you could go through Iowa, New Hampshire, and you could win there and then build. I don’t know if Carter could have made it under the system that we are going to. Well, maybe he could. You never say never, but I think it would be much more difficult. It’s possible. But I think it’s less possible than ever before, because you have to get all of that money. You are going to be in contests all over the country, the sudden-death stuff.

[Hubert] Humphrey once told me, “Getting known in America is like pissing the desert wet.” Some of them have done that, and some of them haven’t. It’s very hard to break through until you have done so. Now, maybe some of these debates will break something loose. Or maybe one of them will prove to be a remarkable candidate who does surprisingly well in New Hampshire, or Iowa, or both, and gets people thinking about it. But it’s a long shot, I would say.

Final question. There are some members of what we call the chattering class, or the bull writers, who say, with all of the candidates in, with all of the separation that’s dividing Republicans and Democrats these days, that this may be a ripe time for an independent to really score, unlike John Anderson and Ross Perot. What’s your read on that?

I think that, once again, it’s hard to know. Usually a third-party candidate rises when there is a lot of resentment toward the establishment, toward the two parties, and Ross Perot or Ralph Nader got a little bit of ground.

But they got no electoral votes.

But what they did, in most every case, is that they denied the Democrat any chance of winning. Well, of course, in Ross Perot’s case, it might have elected Clinton; I don’t know. This year, I think the elephant in the room is the war. And I think people are concentrated on that. It’s not a trivial issue. People want to, somehow, force the system to bend to end this thing. And I think that’s why the people who have been against the war have an advantage. Like Obama and Richardson: they have got an advantage that is going to help them. But I don’t know. I mean, I am just looking at this like you are. I saw polls yesterday that suggest that the last few weeks have been better for Hillary than for Obama. But I don’t know.