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Mondale: McCain made hasty pick |
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By Albert Eisele
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Posted: 09/03/08 07:36 PM [ET] |
Former Vice President Walter Mondale said Wednesday that he sees little evidence that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) “gave a lot of his personal time and attention” to his selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
In his first public comments on Palin, Mondale, who picked then-Rep. Geraldine Ferraro (D) of New York as the first woman to run on a national ticket in 1984, said, “I don’t really know her but it looks like she was selected to placate the right wing of the Republican Party, where McCain was having trouble.”
Mondale, who served as vice president under Jimmy Carter, also asserted that Sen. Joe Biden (D) of Delaware is far more qualified to be vice president than Palin.
“As a measure of presidential status, McCain picked Palin and [Sen. Barack] Obama [D-Ill.] picked Biden, and I think that describes brilliantly the dimension of the difference between the two,” Mondale said in a telephone interview from his Minneapolis law office.
“Biden is ready to be president if necessary. He can really help the president by giving him advice, by being a troubleshooter, by working with Congress and by handling crisis situations. I would be hard-pressed to see how any of that could be true of Palin.”
Mondale said Palin’s “positions on the issues are not appealing to me at all,” but added that he would watch her acceptance speech with interest, as he will with McCain’s address on Thursday night.
As for the disclosure that Palin’s unmarried teenage daughter is pregnant, Mondale said, “I think everyone should stay totally away from that. It’s a personal matter and shouldn’t be treated as a political matter.”
Mondale added, “When I picked Ferraro, I picked her because I thought she would be a strong helpmate if we were elected. She already had a strong record in Congress, and you saw what happened when she debated [then-Vice President George H.W.] Bush — she won that debate, and she was a very good campaigner.”
He added, “Picking a woman because she’s a woman is tokenism. We had a process and we made certain that her name was floated ahead of time. But McCain kept his choice a secret right up to the end.”
Mondale said he has “no regrets” about picking Ferraro, even though allegations of her husband’s ties to organized crime figures became an issue in their losing campaign against President Reagan.
Asked for his views on Sen. Joe Lieberman’s (I-Conn.) speech Tuesday night, Mondale said he didn’t watch it, but compared it to former Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.), who spoke in support of President Bush at the 2004 Republican convention. “Like Zell Miller, it’s not surprising. He’s been a kind of political vagrant like Zell.”
Joking that he was speaking “from a secure, undisclosed location” somewhere in the city limits of Minneapolis, Mondale said he is unconcerned about polls that show Obama didn’t receive as large a bounce from the Democratic convention as expected. “I’m following the advice of a pollster who told me [at the Democratic convention] in Denver not to read any of the polls 'until Sept. 10 or later because they don’t mean much.' ” |
