The view of how America speaks is reflected in our laws. And one of the laws is fair housing. It very clearly prohibits discrimination in the sale and rental of housing in America. It's been a sad fact of American life that the practice in many communities has been quite the opposite. That's why we…
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Walter Mondale
Walter Frederick "Fritz" Mondale (born January 5, 1928) is an American politician, diplomat and lawyer who served as the 42nd Vice President of the United States from 1977 to 1981, and as a United States Senator from Minnesota (1964–76). He was the Democratic Party's presidential nominee in the United States presidential election of 1984, but lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. Reagan won 49 states while Mondale carried his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C. Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minnesota, and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1951 after attending Macalester College. He then served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War before earning a law degree in 1956. He married Joan Adams in 1955. Working as a lawyer in Minneapolis, Mondale was appointed to the position of attorney general in 1960 by Governor Orville Freeman and was elected to a full term as attorney general in 1962 with 60 percent of votes cast. He was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Governor Karl Rolvaag upon the resignation of Senator Hubert Humphrey following Humphrey's election as vice president in 1964. Mondale was subsequently elected to a full Senate term in 1966 and again in 1972, resigning that post in 1976 as he prepared to succeed to the vice presidency in 1977. While in the Senate, he supported consumer protection, fair housing, tax reform, and the desegregation of schools. Importantly, he served as a member of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities ("Church Committee"
We often do get the best and the brightest—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, for example. They are brilliant, as have been many other presidents. But big money especially is undermining the integrity of the public process and posing enormous risks to the honesty of the electoral process.…
Digital media, new since I ran, offers citizens a much easier way to do research, to get new knowledge and to communicate. However, the advent of the Citizens United case has dangerously tipped the scales in favor of our richest citizens, bending the process toward big money and, sadly, reducing…
You know, I lived in this country at a time when we had segregation. I was in the middle of all the civil rights fights in the '60s and the '70s. And thank God we've gotten rid of official discrimination.
I think people are terribly frustrated. I think they don't see big issues being resolved. A lot of people are hurting. Unemployed. In danger of losing their homes and all the rest. And the—it shows up in part with the Tea Party, which is really a protest movement in my opinion.
I know Hillary. I love her. We’re dear friends. But she was not a very effective candidate. She seemed too centered on the bureaucracy of the campaign. So I don’t think that we Democrats are blameless in this.
And now he’s president and you still can’t sleep. And now you’d like to get under the bed. You’re right to be scared. You’ve gotta be scared. I don’t know why you wouldn’t be scared.
To use nukes is not just another form of warfare. It’s existential. It can wipe out parts of the earth. It’s a cataclysmic event. It’s not just okay to do. And during some of the talk around North Korea, I thought there was some loose talk there about using nukes.
[Trump] has an appalling record for using lies or near lies to draw outrageous conclusions and that’s what he did there. We can’t accept that. This nation has to be based on truth and facts. And our public officers have got to be measured against a standard of what’s necessary for a healthy America.
A leader has to be held responsible for the result of what he says. The result of what he’s been saying is that our whole nation believes that he was supporting white extremism. Didn’t have anything bad to say about Nazis. That sort of thing. If he didn’t mean it, he should have corrected it in a…
I told somebody afterwards that I think I would have voted for Reagan if I weren’t running, because he is a nice guy. He never was mean to me. I was never mean to him, and look at that campaign. It was a pleasant year, I think, for Americans. I think we ended up a united country, and so I could see…
We were down 10-15 points, and another white male wasn’t interesting the public an awful lot. So there was this very strong movement in America and in the Democratic Party, saying that the time had come to include women on the ticket. A bold idea—I hope some day that it will succeed. So we started…
I couldn’t justify Chappaquiddick. I mean it was a humiliation, a horrible embarrassment, and as I told somebody—it’s in these papers here—I said he took us with him over that bridge because he was sort of our star. I think if that hadn’t happened, he might have been in the White House himself.
He was a young, good-looking guy, big guy, a huge personality, what somebody would call a ‘room bender.’ He would come into a room and everybody knew he was there. Lots of energy, part of the Kennedy mystique, and was an all-out progressive, itchy and anxious to change and reform and get it done…
We have a president who doesn’t care about the facts. That’s new and very dangerous. Shocking, I would say.
I've been in this public life, presidential races and so on for most of my life, starting in early Hubert Humphrey days, and I am sick about the diminished lack of substance, real closure on the important questions in our campaigns. I think we're in what I call the era of the marketer, where the…
I felt very strongly about the need for debates. If you want substance in politics, you just inevitably are driven to believe in debates. And, of course, did a lot of it in the United States Senate, and I thought I could handle myself.
We elected Johnson and Humphrey and because we had a successful convention, we had the largest range of fundamental civil rights adopted in our history. The Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act the other major measures. All of the programs for educational assistance, poverty assistance early…