I know. I KNOW(I'd insert the "bang head against wall" smilie here is Medium permitted it).

After four years of the toxic misery Reagan had inflicted, Mondale didn't fight to restore the power of the labor movement, or repeal the vicious cuts Reagan made to social spending and the agencies who were supposed to enforce envonmental and labor laws, or for federal invest in the economic revival of the Rust Belt, or to stop the pointless construction of additional nuclear weapons or the bloody wars Reagan was carrying out by proxy against the the poor in Central America.

Instead of promising anything close to any of that, Mondale's major policy proposal was...wait for it...raising taxes on the middle class, but NOT the rich, for the sole purpose of balancing the budget- an objective no one but the rich cared about-

while keeping the war budget high and, of all things, imposing the same sort of embargo against Sandinsta Nicaragua that we had pointlessly kept in place against Cuba for a quarter century by then.

In what universe was that approach ever going to come anywhere close to beating Reagan? And if it had, who would even have noticed, given that Mondale's platform largely promised to continue Reagan's policies?

And how in the hell did the party decide that the 49-state blowout loss that strategy led to somehow meant that the party was "too far to the left"?