Mondale:" This is an exciting choice"

By Roger Rosenblatt

"One last point," he says, his voice making its usual high climb but betraying no awareness that he is about to deliver the line of his life: "This is an exciting choice." Quickly he looks down at the rostrum, hunting for the next sentence in the speech. He continues: "I want to build a future." Wait. The audience is clapping. Walter Mondale appears surprised. They seem to be giving an ovation to his previous remark. Perking up like a bird, he acknowledges the woman standing to his right, as if seeing her for the first time. He smiles, she smiles back. The applause grows loud. "Let me say that again," says the delighted Mondale. "This is an exciting choice!" The crowd goes wild. Mondale is clapping too. Does he know yet what he has done?

Does anyone know what happened mid-day last Thursday in the Minnesota statehouse? If this were Great Britain or India, whose pulse would race? But here? It couldn't happen here. The professionals think they can explain it. As Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro doesn't balance the ticket philosophically, being liberal, pro-union and all, but it may help that she is Catholic, urban and ethnic, though that might hurt the Southern strategy. A sort of Sunbelt-Frostbelt standoff, if you get the drift, complicated by the blue-collar factor. Of course, the gender gap is the key to everything: more women, more votes. Got it. But wasn't something else involved in Mondale's decision to propose a woman for Vice President of the United States? Or did we only imagine that the nation whooped, quaked, froze, beamed?

And it wasn't only the women-ought-to-be-locked-in-the-kitchen nation or the women-are-better-than-God nation either. It was the great, quiet, don't-bother-me middle, awakened by a stroke to a new set of feelings and fumbling to put them in order.

History, so this is how it's made. One tends to think of history making in terms of treaties, crownings, facts, but it's the mind that makes the changes. Come November, a woman from Tulsa (Hartford, Butte) will hear the curtain of the voting booth shut behind her, and she will be alone with America and her own life. Another woman's name will be on the ballot before her. However she votes, her thoughts about her place in the world will not be the same again.

If Ferraro's candidacy raises no new issues, it will intensify old ones nonetheless. Questions about Social Security, education, abortion, public housing are bound to take on a special quality when a woman addresses them. Discussions of arms agreements and foreign policy may also sound different from a mother's point of view. When her turn came to speak last Thursday, Ferraro sounded like any politician, male or female, touching the right chords ("Straight-forward, solid Americans") and the right bases ("My good friend, Charlie Rangel, the Congressman from Harlem"). That may change, to her surprise, as she is confronted by questions and concerns that are not conventionally political.

There may be some fun in this campaign too--at last. Until Mondale's triumphant sentence, the most memorable remark this tedium produced was "Where's the beef?" Now, while tolerating the inevitable Mr. Mom jokes applied to Ferraro's husband, we should also have the more subtle pleasure of watching President Reagan tiptoe through the social land mines. Will Ferraro be a "gal," a "girl," a "lady"? There should be wonderful national bull sessions too: heated, sophomoric, serious. What is this "compassion factor" anyway? As if Elizabeth I were a dove. Sense and nonsense will gallop tandem through the land, and polls will be taken by the hour.

But in the long run, what happened in Minnesota was not just politics. The selection of Ferraro will affect not only the woman in the voting booth. It will be equally felt by the man who--today, next month, next year--stares across his desk, dining room table or bed sheets and sees someone as if for the first time. There is no analogue to lean on, no sentimentalization to rely on, nothing Americans can do now but work the matter out for themselves and see where the rejiggled republic stands. The world's most powerful nation may be ready to be led by a woman, and any woman at all may prepare herself to lead it. This is an exciting choice. --By Roger Rosenblatt