Word: humphrey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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They're No. 2s-and they're trying hard No one much cared what William Miller said about Hubert Humphrey in 1964, or what charges Sargent Shriver leveled against Spiro Agnew in 1972. The truth is, no one has much cared what any vice-presidential candidate said or did-until this year. By selecting a woman, the Democrats made the 1984 contest for Vice President more intriguing than it has ever been. Indeed, the sideshow is regularly getting as much focus as the main event, partly because the electoral outcome seems predictable...
...Texas Southern University in Houston, black students applauded long and loud when Mondale criticized Reagan's frequent references to revered Democrats. "But they have to be dead," Mondale noted. "It's got to be Roosevelt or Truman or Kennedy. They're even picking my old friend Humphrey; he's turning over in his grave. Why don't they leave our own heroes alone and honor their own-Hoover and Nixon and Agnew...
Politics, after all, is the art of compromise, and Humphrey was merely practicing the trade. The problem, says Solberg, a former TIME writer and visiting lecturer in history at Columbia University, is that Humphrey was still compromising as the tide of liberalism swept past him. Having failed to gain the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1956 and the presidential spot in 1960, he saw Johnson's 1964 invitation to join him on the ticket as his last hope. Humphrey wanted to be President so badly that he buried his aversion to the Viet Nam conflict. Johnson abused Humphrey shamelessly...
...Even so, Humphrey managed to leave behind a legacy of liberal legislation that has survived three Republican Administrations. In a 1977 poll of 1,000 leading Capitol Hill figures, he was named the top Senator of the past 75 years. (Humphrey, then fatally ill with cancer, responded to the news: "Jesus Christ, Lyndon Johnson's going to be sore as hell about this.") Solberg, whose biography is the first to benefit from Humphrey's papers at the Minnesota Historical Society, recounts his subject's career in impressive detail, but stumbles when he tries to explain Humphrey...
Walter Mondale does not play the trombone. The rhetorical music that issues from him on the stage sometimes sounds like the comedian Pat Paulsen playing a candidate, or like Hubert Humphrey on the verge of tears. Even the delegates who cheered Mondale most ardently at Moscone Center would admit that, whatever his strengths, he is not entirely the candidate of their dreams. But who would be? Jimmy Carter? George McGovern? Lyndon Johnson? John Kennedy? There may be something in the last. The Democrats' model of the perfect candidate, a Platonic form buried somewhere in the subconscious of the party...