When I heard about former Vice President Walter Mondale’s death last week at age 93, it took me back to the closing days of his presidential campaign in the autumn of 1984, when he came to Baltimore in his futile attempt to defeat Ronald Reagan.
Mondale drew an enormous, roaring crowd in the brilliant sunlight all around Harborplace. He had many of Maryland’s Democratic Party bigshots seated behind him on the speaker’s platform, including Rep. Parren J. Mitchell, whom he attempted to introduce with all the feigned intimacy of many national politicians.
“And here,” declared Mondale to the exuberant crowd, “here is my great friend, Parnell Mitchell.”
Parnell.
Great friend.
All oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the moment. Reagan won 49 states, including Maryland, and Mondale only won his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Naturally, I don’t say it was based on the great Parnell flub, but it’s generally agreed that such moments don’t help.
Let’s face it, politicians are just like anybody else — they’re susceptible to error. But unlike most of us, they commit theirs in public, which leaves them open to ridicule.
I remember the time William Donald Schaefer addressed a big veterans group and talked about the need for America to have a strong military. This meeting was in Ocean City.
“A strong military,” Schaefer said, “is our best detergent against a foreign invasion.”
Detergent.
He must have thought invaders would be coming in on the Tide.
Some decades back, when there were daily newspaper headlines over Suez Canal confrontations, Thomas (“Tommy the Elder”) D’Alesandro Jr., who was mayor of Baltimore and a leader of the local Democratic Party, gave the nod to a political crony to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
At this candidate’s first press conference, a reporter asked, “What do you make of the Suez situation?”
“I think Mr. Suez is a fine man and a fine Democrat, and I certainly support him,” the fellow answered.
D’Alesandro quickly snatched the microphone away and told reporters, “This press conference is over. We’ll be back in 10 minutes with a new candidate.”
For political foot-in-mouth syndrome, some people still recall the televised 1976 presidential TV debate where President Gerald Ford said, “There is no Soviet domination of eastern Europe,” prompting an astonished Max Frankel, of the New York Times, to blurt out, “I’m sorry, what the …?”
Or they remember Dan Quayle walking into a buzz saw when he debated vice presidential contender Lloyd Bentsen and unfortunately compared himself to John F. Kennedy.
Bentsen replied, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you are no Jack Kennedy.”
Sometimes political utterances go well, sometimes not. When it comes to language, I always turn to that master of the malapropism, the late City Councilman Mimi DiPietro.
At City Hall one afternoon, he returned happily from a talk he’d just given to a local charity organization.
“How did the speech go?” DiPietro was asked.
“Oh, they loved me,” Mimi said. “They gave me a standing evasion.”
Bet Walter Mondale never got one of those.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
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