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By 1988 no candidate will any longer be able to dodge the issue. The inrush of illegal immigrants from the Third World into the U.S. proceeds almost unchecked. No political leader can ignore the dilemma it puts to conscience; but, in the future, if the U.S. "tips" ethnically as our big cities "tip," it may be impossible to pass any law that makes immigration just and orderly. Neither candidate faced up to the problem in 1984—they bequeath the agony of decision to 1988.
The two largest underswells of 1984 cannot be squeezed into the time frame of the year now ending. They rolled out of past centuries, and 1984 only lashed them to a crest. Both were matters of manners and morals that thrust into politics—the outburst of women and the grotesque debate on church and state.
Women come first—for no one can talk realistically of American politics today without recognizing them as a new, distinct and independent force. Arbitrarily, 1984 gave historians a pinpoint, a day to which the women's movement finally led and from which its story will go forward: noon July 12, the moment Walter Mondale named Geraldine Ferraro, mother, lawyer and Congresswoman of Deepdene Lane, Forest Hills Gardens, Queens County, N.Y., as his running mate. In large part his choice of Ferraro was forced on Mondale as a tactical maneuver; but, from the instant it happened, it was history beyond politics.
I was in San Francisco in the presence of women when the announcement was made, and caught the feeling of holiday that old war correspondents tell of the liberation of Paris. One had to be there for the feel of it, the crying, the joy, the jubilation. Ann Lewis, political director of the Democratic Party, caught it best.
"It must have been like this the day they signed the Declaration of Independence and the word spread and people said, 'At last it's happened, at last it's happened.' " Women? Women as a separate political force?
Always previously in American politics, men had assumed that they understood the affairs of the world best, they knew what was good for wives, mothers, sisters, daughters; and, trying to protect their women, had penalized them with countless legal disabilities and disqualifications. Men had shoveled the ditches, dug the coal, worked the plow—all to make a living for the dependent "family." They had fought the wars, dying as sons, fathers, husbands, to protect the families left behind. Tradition sustained the conviction that those who had the burden of action held the right of leadership.
But men love their daughters as much as their sons. Postwar prosperity urged families to give their daughters equal education, and with education came skills, status, professional competence. More women go to college today than men; they emerge as lawyers, economists, financiers, doctors, scientists—and politicians. By the '70s women had begun to organize; in 1980 pscphologists first defined their differential voting behavior as "the gender gap"; by 1982 women were conducting their own independent campaigns in state after state, helping push to victory Cuomo in New York, White in Texas, Blanchard in Michigan. By spring 1984 they were ready to ask that a presidential nominee appoint a woman