To while away the days until the publication of Sarah Palin's memoirs on November 17th, Rudolph Delson is reviewing the American vice presidential literary canon.

So much of life is ephemera!

So much of politics is kerfuffles!

Consider Geraldine Ferraro's first memoir. She wrote it in 1985, about her 1984 campaign for the vice presidency. Here, on page 62, is how she sums up Ronald Reagan's first term in office:

Programs were being cut back or eliminated, ketchup was being substituted for vegetables in school lunches, the President was blaming trees for pollution, and Interior Secretary James Watt was describing the members of his coal commission as "a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." Unbelievable.

The "ketchup is a vegetable" kerfuffle? The "trees cause pollution" kerfuffle? The James Watt kerfuffle? Those were the days!

And when I read page 62 I thought it made for a pretty symmetry that Ferraro should mention that flap about "a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." After all, a quarter century later Ferraro would find herself in an identical kerfuffle over some comments she made about Barack Obama. But as it turns out there was no need to wait twenty-five years for Ferraro to become James Watt; hardly twenty-five pages later, Ferraro, describing the list of potential Vice Presidents that Walter Mondale drafted in the summer of 1984, says they were "four mayors, one governor, one senator, and one congresswoman," or...

...one Mexican-American, two blacks, three women, and one white male. Wow. No wonder the press was having such fun with the Vice Presidency. The list sounded like a lineup for Noah's Ark.

It's hard to put down a writer like Ferraro; she has such a good sense for how to deploy the gaffes of her enemies, and such a poor sense for how to avoid gaffes of her own. And as with her prose, so with her politics. She is shrewd but wild, independent in mind but ad hoc in her judgment. And she is never more fascinating, never less predictable, than when she writes about sexism in politics. To wit:

In July of 1984, in her role as the first woman chair of the Democratic Party's Platform Committee, she realizes that she will be the focus of some television coverage and will be judged in part on her hair cut; Ferraro is pragmatic about this, takes it amusedly in stride. In August of 1984, her husband is reluctant to release information on his finances, and the secrecy of his finances grows into a scandal; Ferraro is baffled, apparently having believed that the fact of being a man would exempt her husband from the role of self-abnegating political spouse. In September of 1984, her opponent George H. W. Bush is assigned a prime position in New York City's upcoming Columbus Day parade, while Ferraro is assigned a spot far to the rear; Ferraro does not hesitate to attribute this slight to sexism, nor hesitate to say that she deserved to be honored as "the top Italian in the country." In October of 1984, the New York Post publishes a story smearing Ferraro's long dead father, and the question Phil Donahue has for Ferraro is whether the Post story made her cry: Ferraro is furious, and even a year later is still brooding over this instance of a double standard.

In other words her feminism, like her prose style, comes from instinct rather than training-which is what makes Ferraro so appealing. She writes:

Women's voices were essential in government. [...] Instead of engaging in confrontation, women were more apt to negotiate, I learned from reading Carol Gilligan's book In a Different Voice. Instead of looking at short-term solutions to problems, women were more apt to think in terms of generations to come. Instead of thinking in win-lose terms, women were more apt to consider the gray areas in between.

I do not know what I would have thought about this characterization of how women are "apt to think" in 1985; in 2009 I find it pretty silly; but still, this passage is endearing. It is the only passage in her memoir where Ferraro cites a specific influence on her political philosophy. In a Different Voice was published in 1982. In 1982 Ferraro was forty-seven years old, a second-term member of the House of Representatives, a star in the Democratic Party. There is something charming about a mid-career politician who is not too preoccupied by power to still be moved, intellectually, by a new book.

Had she not left to run for Vice President, she could have been a great Congressperson. Reading about how she maneuvered, after her nomination, to appease supporters of Jesse Jackson, or about how she mustered support for her Flexitime bill for federal workers, it is hard not to think of what we lost when she retired. What might she have done for health care reform in 1994 if she had she held Al D'Amato's seat?

And-at least with the help of Linda Bird Francke-Ferraro might have been a great writer of suspense, too. The sections of her memoir about her husband's tribulations in the press, or about the vice presidential debate with George H. W. Bush, are still gripping now, six elections later; even the sections about such mundane business as staffing her campaign or scheduling her plane flights are tantalizingly perfumed with hope and doom; this memoir is a page turner!

In the end, true to her Carol Gilligan, Ferraro refuses to think "in win-lose terms." The 1984 presidential election was a fiasco for Ferraro, but:

The real test of my candidacy will come when the next woman runs for national office.

How so?

We know now that women can run for high political office. We have proved we have the stamina to get through a campaign, to stand up for our beliefs in a national televised debate, to articulate the issues. [...] I don't think the press will be looking to see if the next female candidate will burst out crying every time she has a press conference. Perhaps the style of her campaign will be less important and the substance of her campaign will get the attention it deserves.

Which itself creates some suspense, as we wait for Sarah Palin's contribution to the ephemera of 2009.

Rudolph Delson lives in Brooklyn. He has won no awards and earned no distinctions. His novel "Maynard & Jennica" is now available in paperback.