Ferraro: The Insider's Outsider

...Since the Vice Presidential candidate's husband, John Zaccaro, is a property developer, anyone who is so disposed also can hope that a dark secret will emerge from the netherworld of the New York real estate market...

...But his blunder did less harm to the Republicans that year than the deliberate acts of Nixon and Gerald Ford...

...That is irrelevant, however...

...lifted her into the inner circle of the majority caucus...

...Their great dream was that in mid-August , when Ferraro was scheduled to reveal her family finances, she or her spouse would open up some closet with a skeleton as damaging as Agnew's kickbacks or—to use the analogy peddled by the Republicans—the medical history that forced Senator Thomas Eagle-ton (D.-Mo...

...Since these tactics may not work, the President will try to distract our attention by barnstorming across the country Andrew Mollison is the chief political writer for the Cox Newspapers...

...Besides, we can learn little about the prospects for November from respondents who pick one side when asked if they prefer Reagan or Mondale, and change horses two minutes later when choosing between Reagan-Bush and Mondale-Ferraro...

...True, the lady from Queens may inspire older women to volunteer as campaign workers and younger ones to register...

...On the other hand, in one case that already provides some hard numbers from the real world of voter registration, the effect of Mondale's choice was ambiguous at best...

...The duo drew larger crowds than he had pulled alone...

...And this year alone she received contributions from over 130 political action committees, for a congressional race she could hardly lose...

...O'Neill (D.-Mass...

...They appeared to confirm the message of last spring's polls: that 70 per cent of U.S...

...She has three preppy kids admitted to schools such as Choate and Brown...

...Ronald Reagan's challenger is Walter Mondale...

...Instead, in a classic straddle he chose a running mate who is a cultural outsider and a political insider: Italian-American Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro of Queens, New York...

...The bulging credentials and solid performances of the last two Vice Presidents, Mondale and George Bush, have dimmed memories of their predecessors...

...The precedents of Kennedy and Spiro Agnew rubbed some of the edge off the ethnic angle, but Ferraro's first-woman credentials earned her the status of an outsider in the news media's early rave reviews...

...Although some polls have Ferraro adding two to four points to the ticket, surveys taken between national conventions are notoriously insignificant...

...the Vice Presidential candidate who in 1976 blamed the Democrats for World War II, Ferraro is a brash, lippy pol who can be counted on to make her share of gaffes...

...off the Democratic ticket in 1972...

...adults support the idea of a female vice presidential contender—although some have no intention of actually voting for her...

...George Bush may or may not beat Geraldine Ferraro...

...In a prosperous year when most habitual voters are likely to be "haves," the standard-bearer rejected the Reverend Jesse Jackson's call for a revival of the Rooseveltian battles between them and the "have-nots...

...Only a National Urban League audience in Cleveland—hoping fruitlessly that he would choose this forum to answer Jackson's demands for greater black patronage—paid more attention to him than to her...

...He had to find a way to bridge the divide...

...Nevertheless, no one was more stunned than the Republicans by these favorable reactions to the woman New York's Governor Mario Cuomo describes as the "Queen of Queens...

...Then they'd become overaggressive, and finally they'd backpedal...

...They'd begin by being very polite, oversolicitous and protective because they didn't want to look like they were picking on her...

...If fate does not bless the Republicans with some kind of scandal, they will probably try to show that Ferraro is not really an outsider after all —that she is merely a liberal with labor ties who is rich as well...

...As an insider, the very experience, predictability and mastery of coalition-brokering that seemed to account for his ultimately winning the Democratic Party's nomination raised doubts about his appeal to the maj ority of Americans for whom Washington is a strange, sometimes threatening place...

...Speaker ThomasP...

...Somewhat in the manner of Senator Robert Dole (R.-Kan...

...The GOP still has not quite figured out how to deal with the unexpected and unnerving turn of events...

...Republican strategists think that by September the polls will stop bobbing up and down, and have assured the press that their computers will then be printing out much sounder strategies...

...Yet any country that cared so little about the prior reputation of its second highest public official as to accept Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Agnew obviously will tolerate quite a lot...

...For at least one woman the GOP's floundering evoked memories of her days as a lawyer under Ferraro in the special-victims unit of the Queens District Attorney's office...

...The Republicans are acting the way male lawyers around here did when they began to work alongside women—or better yet, the first time they found out the opposing counsel was female," said Linda Povman, now the principal law clerk to a criminal court judge, at the kickoff of the Democratic campaign in Queens...

...Nearly half of those who turned on their television sets in mid-July watched the Democrats wave their little plastic flags...

...Ferraro's novelty value was also apparent when she and Mondale went off on their first joint campaign swing...

...His opponents will have to be careful, though, or their eagerness to paint Ferraro as a political lightweight and limousine liberal could make them follow in the footsteps of those lawyers who paid more attention to the opposing counsel than to her case...

...During the 12 days after he went public with his decision, purges of ineligible old names and the addition of new ones in Los Angeles County, the nation's largest, produced a net gain of 8,093 for the Democrats and 10,734 for the GOP...

...Some of the old-timers concentrated more on their rival than on her case or the witnesses, she noted, and that is no way to win a jury trial...

...President Reagan's flip-flop on his charge that the Democrats had indulged in "tokenism," and his use of such incompatible icons as Frank Sinatra and Saint Ann in northern New Jersey, revealed some of the dangers of clumsy improvisation...

...Republican leaders, meanwhile, have been frantically juggling the plans for their own conclave, opening August 20 in Dallas...

...This year Mondale found himself with a more typical problem...

...Several Italian-Americans and United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick have been added to the list of speakers, and extra chairs on the convention floor for women spectators will be mixed in with the disproportionately male delegations that resulted from the party's rejection of sexual quotas...

...Furthermore, Ferraro comes from New York, the largest of the 10 states that have voted for Democratic Presidential aspirants more than once since 1968, and home to most of those wholesalers of national political opinion who refuse to live by the banks of the Potomac...

...during the opening days of the Dallas affair...

...Each sought to placate the political and journalistic establishments by rounding out his ticket with an insider: Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Mondale and George Bush, respectively...

...It was Ferraro who dominated the news coverage, and anybody who saw her chat sassily about catfish and blueberry muffins with Jim Buck May, Mississippi's commissioner of agriculture, understood why...

...Moreover, the San Francisco convention ended up getting the biggest audience either party has attracted so far in 1984...

...In addition, First Lady Nancy Reagan has persuaded comedienne Joan Rivers to address a luncheon for 100 former and present office-holding Republicans who happen to be female...

...Add to this that many of thosewho will be counter energized to vote against a woman meant to support the President in the first place, and a net benefit would appear to accrue to the Democrats...

...Like many " firsts" who quietly move in and mop up after the screams of the pioneers have shattered the peace, she is something of an insider, too...

...Of course, those figures will have little impact among the 3 million Angelinos on the voting rolls...

...Mondale, who cut his teeth on the hyphenated Democratic Farmer-Labor politics of Minnesota, clearly wanted a running mate who could pass as an insider' s outsider...

...They are right...

...the combined number of independents and supporters of third parties rose by 973...

...A former unionist with a 90 per cent-plus rating from the afl-cio's Committee on Political Education, she became rich enough after marriage to fork over $170,000 of the $230,000 spent on her first campaign for the House...

...These men and women are by no means free from the influence of local pride...