Walter Mondale says nature of GOP debate leaves him aghast

The elder statesman of the DFL Party in Minnesota acknowledges that he's aghast at the level of discourse in the Republican Party debates.

"I've watched these debates … if you can call them that, and I'm just sick about it, because of all that opportunity for the public to get a chance to decide the big issues by seeing people trying to speak to them," Walter Mondale said.

The former vice president is on vacation and we spoke by telephone on Tuesday.

"It seems to be a race to the bottom, when you are talking about how big your lower parts are and whether you pee in your pants," he said.

Mondale recalled his own debates when he successfully ran for VP against Bob Dole in 1976 and lost to Ronald Reagan for president in 1984. Those debates contrasted values and views, but in a positive way, he said.

He doesn't think any of his own debates were mean-spirited. Almost all the discussion, he said, "was about who would get to the highest ground."

But not in the GOP faceoff this year.

"We may be introducing a kind of poison into the American political system that can hurt us," Mondale said. "If this sort of stuff is accepted, condoned, is seen as positive, we'll see more of it."

Mondale, who supports Hillary Clinton for president, worries if Donald Trump or Texas Sen. Ted Cruz wins the Republican nomination. Trump, he said, has "stirred up a sub-caucus of Americans that like anti-immigrant talk, that like assaults against decent immigration rules. … If there is an America out there that is so brash, so racist, so nativist that they like supporting Trump or so evangelically obsessed they'll support Cruz, then we are in trouble."

Could he imagine Trump winning the general election?

"I don't think you can dismiss Trump as a sure loser," Mondale said. He cautioned that the Democratic Party should be aware that part of Trump's constituency is composed of "disappointed and alienated former Democrats, white workers in the Rust Belt and so on, who don't see any salvation anymore in the Democratic Party, and the unions are so diminished as a force that we're losing some of them."

Mondale, who lived through the Cold War, chuckled when asked if he was amazed that Bernie Sanders, a man who identifies himself as a socialist, was winning some presidential primaries.

"Yes, I think what is happening is people are angry about what they think is government incompetence and unresponsiveness and angry about how many of them have suffered, lost their homes or their jobs and so on without any remedies," he said. "There is a lot of anger out there and I think that Sanders is tapping some of that in a positive way in my opinion, while Trump and these guys [in the GOP] are going to the basement all the time."

I asked Mondale how he viewed the Republican establishment's efforts to try to stop Trump.

"Well they're awfully late and their message doesn't deal with what I'm talking about," he said. "The establishment is exactly what these voters are trying to undo, people they think have been insensitive, noncaring about their needs. And I think the more they holler, the more it helps Trump."

Mondale said he believes the pressure and corruption of big money pouring into election races is a fundamental threat to the nation, and he favors laws to bar corporate and union treasury funding of political candidates.

"And I'd like to see a restoration of the old system," he said, "where candidates get partial public financing when they run for office."

Randy Furst • 612-673-4224 Twitter: @RandyFurst