I wasn't old enough to vote in 1984, but I was old enough to pay attention to some of the topics raised by Joe Conason:
The female running mate was a clever gambit that the Democrats executed very poorly. As inspiring as the Ferraro story was when she took the stage at the July 1984 convention in San Francisco, her nomination turned out to be unhelpful to the Democratic ticket, which lost 49 states to the incumbent Republicans, President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush. Circumstances were generally unfavorable to Mondale, whose own inept campaigning made matters still worse, but the initial euphoria over the first woman on a major party ticket evaporated as soon as the press took a closer look at her background.
As Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett later revealed, the Republican oppo researchers knew much that Mondale evidently didn't about Ferraro and her family's connections with organized crime, dating back at least two generations, and how she had personally profited from those unsavory bonds. (Barrett and William Bastone continued to report on those links for the Voice when Ferraro ran for the Senate in 1992, discovering literally dozens of contributions and deals that involved the worst thugs in New York.)To Ferraro, reports of her husband's criminal associations proved only the "anti-Italian" bias of the press. Her claims of ignorance about her husband's real estate business -- he rented space in lower Manhattan to a Mob porn operation and a Chinese sweatshop, among many other questionable deals -- were not entirely plausible, since she was an officer of his company and shared office space with him. There were tax problems, too, and despite a spirited performance at a press conference where she evaded as many questions as she answered, her image never quite recovered before Election Day.
[From Geraldine Ferraro, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton | Salon ]
Ms. Ferraro still sounds bitter about the whole political process. However, I don't think you can blame Hillary Clinton for the toxic speech of one of her supporters, no matter what certain media types proclaim. There have been no conferences where the Clinton team collectively decided to raise the race card repeatedly, as far as I know.
