Walter Mondale

Walter Mondale, who has died aged 93, is destined to be a trivia question: 'which die-hard liberal did Reagan beat by a landslide in 1984?’ That’s unfair. He had brains, looks and a presidential temperament. He was just out of time. Here’s my Mondale anecdote. I interviewed him for my PhD in 2005 at his office in Minneapolis. He offered me a coffee; I said yes, and was then stunned when he got up from his desk and made it himself. This is unheard of in US politics. 'I can’t wait to tell the folks back home that a vice president of the United States made me coffee,’ I said. Mondale sighed. 'Nowadays,’ he replied, 'it’s nice just to have something to do.’ He had a great sense of humor; the problem was it was deadpan and it paled in comparison to Reagan’s.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.