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When Mondale chose Rep. Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, she was one of only 24 women in the House. Today, there are 56. And while Nancy Landon Kassebaum and Paula Hawkins were the only female senators in 1984, today there are nine.

Fifteen years and four elections later, Ferraro remains the only woman ever to have graced the presidential ticket for a major party. But the picture -- and the VP pipeline -- has changed. The buzz created by Elizabeth Dole's short-lived grass-roots presidential campaign and the rise of politicians like Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California is helping fuel speculation that the leading presidential candidates may tap women as their running mates in 2000.

So great are the gains made by women in American politics since Ferraro's rise and fall in '84 that Mondale's caveat about the "range of experience" no longer applies. Many of the female names mentioned as vice presidential contenders have as much political experience as their male counterparts -- and some have more.

"There is a significantly greater pool of qualified women to pick from than there was in 1984," said Ellen Malcolm, director of EMILY's List, an organization that helps elect pro-choice, Democratic women.

With more well-qualified women available, the parties won't have to settle for someone unknown to the public.

"No one can afford a Geraldine Ferraro -- or a Dan Quayle for that matter," says Rich Galen, Republican strategist and a former Quayle press secretary. No one is going to "pluck someone out of obscurity."

Normally, the two major considerations in selecting vice presidential candidates are the number of electoral votes the candidate will bring, and how he or she meshes with the presidential candidate's policies. But sometimes additional factors enter the calculation, such as a candidate's appeal to particular demographic segments, name recognition, issue expertise and access to funding networks.

Salon News asked Washington strategists, lobbyists, pollsters and staffers to assess a short list of women whose names are most often floated as vice presidential contenders.

Next page | The short list