Walz seeks an office that humbled Humphrey and was modernized by Mondale

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When asked whether he had anything in common with his new rival for vice president, GOP nominee JD Vance said of Democratic-designate Tim Walz: “We’re white guys from the Midwest. I guess there’s similarities there.”

They also should share this similarity: Being as focused on Mideast violence as Midwest votes.

That’s because the spiraling crisis engulfing the ever-volatile region may also engulf the next administration. They should also prepare for other plights like Russia-Ukraine, China-Taiwan, hemispheric hotspots like Venezuela or intracountry conflicts like the anti-immigrant riots rocking Britain.

Vice presidents weren’t always involved in international issues. Or even domestic ones, for that matter. In fact, John Adams, America’s first No. 2, said, “My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived.”

In more relatively recent times, the duties were, in the words of Thomas R. Marshall, vice president during the Wilson administration, “being loyal” and being “ready, at any time, to act as a sort of pinch hitter.” (And even with that, First Lady Edith Wilson, not Marshall, pinch-hit for the stricken president.)

That is until an understated Minnesotan overhauled the office.

“Modern vice presidents can trace much of their political influence to the broad reforms that Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale made to the second-highest elected office in the late 1970s,” stated a Council on Foreign Relations report from February. The analysis, “The U.S. Vice President and Foreign Policy,” adds that “Particularly since Mondale, vice presidents have served their bosses as leading advisors, often taking on major foreign policy and national security portfolios.”

Mondale’s enduring influence on the institution almost didn’t happen. Because initially he didn’t want the job.

That’s because Mondale’s mentor “had a horrible time as vice president,” said Larry Jacobs, who holds the Walter F. and Joan Mondale Chair for Political Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs — named after the aforementioned mentor, Hubert Humphrey, who was veep under overbearing President Lyndon B. Johnson.

Johnson “humiliated Humphrey and almost prohibited him from doing anything,” Jacobs said, adding that Humphrey “was just ostracized, had no role, was not seen. And even after Johnson dropped out of the presidential race in ‘68, he didn’t do the gracious thing of passing the torch that we saw [President] Joe Biden do to [Vice President] Kamala Harris; he did the opposite of it, which was try to undermine Humphrey.”

Which may have cost the Democrats (and ultimately the country), because it resulted in Richard Nixon winning a very close election.

Jacobs, who for 15 years co-taught a Humphrey School course with Mondale, said that the former vice president told him that he had initially rebuffed Carter’s call to join the ticket, saying, “I’m not interested; I saw what it did to Humphrey, and I don’t want that experience.”

But Carter was undeterred and asked Mondale for a model that would work. Which Mondale provided, redesigning the role by truly integrating it into the administration. Every vice president since, said Jacobs, “has had this relationship in which the vice president was integral to the operations of the office.”

Including in international hot spots, which in the Carter era meant places like South Africa, then under crushing Apartheid, and China, crushed by communist dogma before its dog-eat-dog capitalist era began.

While Nixon had gone to China, it was Carter who formalized relations. And, according to Jacobs, after traveling to South Africa, Mondale was “thoroughly disgusted because of the racist mentality, but he did deliver a very clear message, which was that over time there would be less support for the Apartheid government from the United States, that there needed to be a process that started that would transition to a democracy.”

Carter and Mondale encountered blowback from Congress and the CIA because “our number-one priority had to be anticommunism,” said Jacobs. But they countered that “human rights was the most powerful weapon the West has, and that if we continued our association with this racist Apartheid government, that we would actually be aiding the Soviet Union, because eventually [the Black majority] would become the power and they would have nothing to do with us.”

The legacy of that clarity was apparent to Jacobs years later when he accompanied Mondale to the Carter Center in Atlanta. As Mondale reviewed a speech, a young woman entered the room, spoke quietly and embraced the former vice president.

Turns out she was Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter, who was “telling him that in her family, Walter Mondale was a hero for getting her grandfather out of prison,” Jacobs said. “He was the first one who’d spoken up to the Afrikaners. They attributed his eventual release to his trailblazing efforts.”

Mondale’s trailblazing on the traditional backwater office of vice president left a legacy in governance, too. One that was respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. In fact, Jacobs said that despite disparate ideologies, Mike Pence called to consult with Mondale after the 2016 election.

That wisdom will be missed by Walz and Vance, who both hustled the hustings of modern-day campaigns — cable news interviews — to get considered, often over better-known alternatives. Conversely, neither Humphrey nor Mondale sought the office. But both became part of a then-longstanding legacy of ticket balancing, in each case a Southern moderate matched with a Northern liberal. Nowadays, naming veeps to win their home states seems quaint (Minnesota was already likely to go for Harris, Ohio for Trump) and running mates are often just that, matched by demographics and demeanor (Clinton-Gore in 1992), or ideology, like this year’s pairings.

In gaining acclaim from Democrats, Jacobs said that Walz was “quite astute when it comes to the tools of Washington.” And if elected he believes Walz “will be a quick study” and will approach the role with his “usual gusto.”

Either he or Vance had better. Because once the campaign ends, governance begins, and crises loom.

“You can make an argument that there are only a few other periods in American history where there have been more existential threats to America, its interests and its allies,” Jacobs said. “You’ve got Russia that is unbound by international norms and laws. You’ve got China that is being led by a powerful nationalist leader who is resentful from what they see as their second-class treatment by the West. We’ve got a whole host of nonstate actors armed with devastating weapons, as we can see from the bombings from Yemen. The Middle East is as close to a regional war — or is in a regional war — in a way that we haven’t seen in decades.

“It’s a really horrifying situation internationally. This is really going to be a test.”

The course co-taught by Mondale and Jacobs was called “The Accountability of Power.”

That title could also serve as a warning for what awaits the next vice president, whether he’s the first from Ohio or the third from Minnesota.