Ferraro's passing

Pretty sad news here: ["First Female VP Candidate Ferraro Dies At 75"].
The headline, of course, is incorrect. She was the first woman on a major party ticket. There were many other minor candidates before her: ["List of female United States presidential and vice-presidential candidates"].
That doesn't, however, diminish her accomplishments.
Personally, I always liked Ferraro. I didn't think Walter Mondale was all that bad either (much better than that phony nut Reagan). In fact, I've always liked and admired lunch bucket-type Democrats, especially the more I learn about them from reading political history books from the 1960s and 1970s. It wasn't until Bill Clinton came along and started selling working folks out that I became completely disillusioned with most Democrats (Disclaimer: Currently, I'm a registered Democrat although I'm not active in the party at all. I just choose to vote in their primaries. My politics has evolved and I now call myself a "liberaltarian" - part classic liberal; part small L libertarian).
Ferraro, in later years, continued to be quite sensible and even more likable than during the years when I was politically involved (the fact that she would regularly appear on Fox News to take on those folks in debate says a lot). Although, it often seemed as if she would stand by the party label instead of the correct policy. Many Republicans are flawed this way too, and it is really killing the country, since the answers to the problems are a combination of the best ideas of both fringes of the political parties (the United States needs a single-payer health care system and we should all be able to own handguns if we chose to, for example; we should tax Wall Street transactions but taxes on earned income should be as low as possible, as another).
It's sad too that her husband's tax problems assisted in ruining her character, just because they filed joint returns. It didn't help things either that their last name had a vowel at the end of it, so some folks could make really inappropriate jokes about mobsters getting access to the White House (as if the fascists who were in there at the time were acceptable human beings, backing political movements that allowed nuns to be killed in El Salvador or selling weapons to the enemy, you know, real "mobster" stuff).
R.I.P. Geraldine, and may your class of old school politician return to our political system. It's badly needed.