The candidate wanted no part of the negativity endemic to politics. Instead she offered an aggressively upbeat view of the future she foresaw for the human race.

“We must combine our compassion with our creativity,” she urged the convention. “We must initiate a new process in democracy to identify our positive options, discover our potentials and commit our political will to long-range goals.”

The words might have fit nicely into the current presidential campaign, but they actually were spoken 35 years ago at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco by a woman few expected to see take the stage, much less be nominated for the vice presidency. She was Barbara Marx Hubbard, who was not a politician by trade but a futurist, spiritual thinker, author and proponent of what are today lumped under the label of New Age ideas.

Ms. Hubbard, campaigning for months, had gathered enough support to have her name placed in nomination, mostly so that she could make a symbolic speech to the convention before endorsing the already assured ticket of Walter F. Mondale and Geraldine A. Ferraro. Ms. Hubbard believed that humans would graduate to a new level of cooperation and enlightenment, and in her speech — delivered to a largely inattentive audience, and not in the prime-time television window — she suggested who might lead the way into that brave new world.