Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to receive her party’s nomination to run for Vice President is dead at 75. Her battle with blood cancer lasted a long nasty 12 years. Our battle with character assassination, a fight she also took on, is still with us.

Today, when every display of hate is scoffed off, or dismissed as the work of supposedly independent T Parties, it’s worth remembering that every bit of dirt that could be dislodged from the earth was hurled at the country’s first female candidate for Vice President. And it wasn’t just spontaneous sexism or New Yorker hate – it was the Republican Party’s chosen tactic.

It its barely recalled now, but in 1984, pickets followed Ferrarro’s campaign around and drowned her speeches with heckling. They called her names and because she was pro-choice, thy cast her as a baby-killer. “Ferraro: Vice President for Death” was one of the kinder slogans. The scene at a Ferraro election stop looked like what women had seen for years outside abortion clinics. It wasn’t unlike what Florida vote-counters would find outside their offices years later in Palm Beach, during the 2000 recount. And  the GOP said then what they say now, namely that the thugs had nothing to do with them.

The media found out different. Journalists turned up an audiotape of a training session in which the pickets were couched to say, “I’m a concerned citizen,” instead of the truth which was, “I’m with Students for Reagan.” The trouble-makers were tied conclusively to the Reagan-Bush campaign but the nation’s first party-promoted public stoning was effective. Ferraro fell. And stoning rose.

It’s with us still. Just ask Elizabeth Warren.