ADELE FERGUSON-Ferraro’s nomination did not help Democrats

EVERY POLITICAL junkie knows that Walter Mondale sealed his doom as a presidential candidate when he told the 1984 Democratic national convention Ronald Reagan wouldn’t tell the American people he was going to have to raise their taxes the next year but, by golly, he, Walter Mondale would guarantee to do it.

I was there in San Francisco. There he goes, I said to myself. But I was one of the few, I think, who wrote that despite news reports millions of women were thrilled, the other thing he did to cinch his defeat was pick Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate. This at the urging of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill and the National Organization of Women.

Actually, NOW didn’t care what woman as long as it was some woman. Well, I’ll amend that to qualified woman, although NOW’s standards for qualification are considerably lower than mine.

On Aug. 1 that year, I wrote that six years in Congress wasn’t sufficient to qualify Mrs. Ferraro to be president, which is what you always have to consider when you’re naming the No. 2. Her nomination, I wrote, was going to kill the ticket because of the reluctance on the part of a lot of people, some women, but men in particular, to accept President Geraldine Ferraro.

SHE HAD A TOUGH year. It was bad enough when Barbara Bush referred to her as a bitch to two wire service reporters in what she thought was a private conversation on the Bush campaign plane. Mrs. Bush said later she didn’t intend to label Ferraro a witch or an itch or a glitch or anything else that rhymes with rich except exactly what we all think she meant.

Then Mr. Ferraro, John, opened his big fat mouth. I bet Geraldine and Walter Mondale too could have beaned him when they read his Redbook magazine interview in which he said be would insist on attending all cabinet meetings because he wanted to know what was going on., and “Gerry always wants me around.”

He hadn’t learned yet that if a vice president is considered as useless as the proverbial appendages on a boar, a vice president’s wife or husband is even more so.

Rosalind Carter attended cabinet meetings but it took folks awhile to wake up to the fact that she wasn’t just the president’s wife, she was co-president if not the decision maker.

I’m sure Geraldine didn’t want her husband plunked in.

a chair in the cabinet meeting room and I don’t know why he’d want to.

I recalled that back when she first wanted him to reveal his income tax returns, he told her that he wouldn’t tell her how to run the government if she didn’t tell him how to run his business.

It turned out later that somebody should have told him how to run his business because one day the cops were at his door.

ON NOV. 6, a record 69 percent of American white males voted for the Republican candidate for president. Certainly, some of them did so because they believed times were better and would stay better under Ronald Reagan, but I also believed they didn’t want to risk a President Ferraro.

Tip O’Neill, on election night, said “No candidate we could have put up could have withstood Ronald Reagan,” so he knew exactly what was going on when he arranged for his protege to be veep. He and Ferraro were planning her run for the Senate in two years.

She died at 75, which is fairly young these days. I found her on the campaign trail to be affable, available and, despite Barbara Bush’s unkind assessment, always a lady.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)