Battling to take on Reagan

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Mondale gets off to a fast start, but it is a long way to '84

Walter Frederick Mondale, front runner among the seven Democrats who would be President, was on a roll last week. The board of directors of the 1.7 million-member National Education Association formally en- dorsed his candidacy for the party's nomination. So did the general board of the AFL-CIO, and this week leaders representing all 14 million AFL-CIO members are expected to ratify that decision, enter- ing Big Labor, with all its organizing muscle and money, into a Democratic pre-convention campaign for the first time ever. On Saturday a caucus of Maine Democratic activists yielded Mondale a satisfying if relatively meaningless (there would have been meaning only if he had lost) 51% victory. Next week Mondale hopes to announce the public support of two prominent Democratic Governors, 100 Senators and Representatives, and 200 or so leading business people.

Such a sunburst of triumphs and pledges could lead the proverbial visitor from Mars unacquainted with the intricacies of American politics to assume that the quest for the Democratic nomination in 1984 at San Francisco is all but over. Walter Mondale knows better, but he also knows the rules of the Democratic game have changed since the last time around and that there is an advantage to a fast start. A decisive advantage, he hopes. As he puts it, mixing his sports images: "It's like playing a sudden death inning at the beginning of the game." So many delegates to the convention will be chosen in the early innings--some 45% in primaries and state caucuses between late February and the end of March--that an initial big score could indeed be decisive; an early goose egg may be fatal.

So Mondale, 55, is swinging from the heels at a stage that in earlier campaigns would have been analogous to batting practice. Says he: "By Jan. 1, you have to have the money, the structure, the policies. You have to be ready--bang!" If anything, he is seriously understating the case so far as his own campaign goes. It began "within weeks of Ronald Reagan's Inauguration," in the sarcastic phrase of his chief opponent, Ohio Senator John Glenn, 62, and already is humming with World Series efficiency. Take money, for example: Mondale collected so much so early that by Jan. 1, according to some calculations, he will have raised $9 million and spent $8 million. Bang!

Organization? Bang, again. "Fritz" Mondale's troops even now are deployed throughout the country, wooing the bewilderingly diverse elements of the Democratic coalition: labor, teachers, feminists, blacks, Jews and legions of party officeholders. Long before the first delegates are selected, these efforts already are paying off, as the endorsements last week and this amply demonstrate. Though the teachers and union leaders cannot always deliver the votes of their followers, the endorsements will certainly mean more volunteers and telephone banks for the Mondale campaign, not to mention the ballots of many N.E.A. and AFL-CIO officials who will be delegates in San Francisco. Three years ago the N.E.A. alone supplied about 15% of Jimmy Carter's delegate total.

The politicians' endorsements Mondale is able to unveil next week will be far more important in this campaign than in those of the 1970s, because under new party rules that Mondale backers had a hand in writing, 14% of the convention votes will be reserved for elected officials and other Democratic leaders to be chosen independently of the primary and caucus processes (see box). While no candidate can collect binding pledges from this bloc, the endorsements expected in the next few days indicate that it may be filled with Mondale supporters.

Almost five months before the first caucuses in Iowa, in fact, the question already is being asked within the party: Can Mondale be stopped? A tentative answer: Of course, but only with some difficulty, possibly some luck and probably only by one other candidate, Space Hero Glenn. Late in starting, only adequately financed and poorly staffed, Glenn nonetheless projects an aura of independence and old-fashioned virtue that is bringing him up fast in the polls. A new public opinion survey for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White Inc. (see following story) shows him only two percentage points behind Mondale and well ahead of the rest of the field. He is the only Democrat who has held a narrow but consistent lead over Reagan when they are pitted against each other in the polls (Mondale has been up and down), rousing the interest of the many party voters who above all want their candidate to be a winner. And Glenn is the only other candidate who might benefit from that front-loaded delegate-selection schedule. Several of the earliest primaries and caucuses come in such Southern states as Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi, where Mondale's liberalism turns white voters off and Glenn's patriotic appeal is powerful. The five other avowed contenders so far have not demonstrated enough appeal to do much more than survive that brutal opening round --if they are able to do that.

Predictions, of course, are always hazardous, especially at such an early stage among Democrats. For all of Mondale's fast-starting flash and Glenn's quickening struggle to catch up, few rank-and-file Democrats are even thinking seriously about the nomination yet. Apathy, engendered partly by doubt that anyone can beat President Reagan, is surprisingly widespread even among party pros. Says one party veteran: "There's little interest by our young people, who do the scut work of campaigns, and there's little interest by our politicians, who mastermind the caucuses. These candidates of ours don't excite anybody."

Once delegate selection begins, primary voters are, so notoriously volatile that being the front runner often has held more peril than promise. It is true that apart from a brief stumble in Iowa, Reagan in 1980 kept the lead from earliest speculation to final convention ballot. But otherwise the list of men thought to be leading in the pre-season reads like a roll call of blasted hopes: George Romney, Edmund Muskie, Scoop Jackson, Ted Kennedy. As they discovered, the front runner has to win almost everywhere to maintain his aura of invincibility. Even a small slip in an unimportant early contest can start a dreaded loss of that fickle prize-above-prizes in modern politics, momentum.

Current case in point: last week's Maine straw poll. Such polls select no convention delegates and are not even a guide to voter sentiment, since they are often taken at meetings of the party faithful; the one in thinly populated Maine should have been especially meaningless. But after California Senator Alan Cranston packed a June Wisconsin caucus and won a straw poll there, Mondale vowed to tolerate |no more such upsets; his troops hit Maine like Eisenhower's armies assaulting the Normandy beaches. Fifteen paid Mondale workers and 35 full-time volunteers canvassed the state's two congressional districts for 2 1/2 months. Mondale himself stumped for ten days. According to rivals, he spent $200,000, or more than $100 for each of the 1,849 party pros who cast straw poll ballots at the caucus in Augusta. And all that for a contest in which Glenn made a token effort. Mondale's chief opposition came from Cranston and South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings, who were desperate for a victory that might win some press attention. Results: Mondale 51%, Cranston 29%, Hollings 11%, Glenn 6%. So Mondale won -- what? Little more than a chance to crow and privately sigh with relief.

Mondale has some advantages that previous front runners did not enjoy. In 1984 there will be no opportunity for a little-known candidate to build momentum gradually, as George McGovern did in 1972 and Jimmy Carter did in 1976. The early bunching of primaries and caucuses puts a higher than usual premium on precisely the factors that are Mondale's strengths: money, organization, a well-known name and a sharply defined appeal to party loyalists. Those strengths are so formidable, in fact, that it will be difficult for Glenn to score a knockout, even if he wins the early rounds. By the same token, Mondale will be hard pressed to K.O. Glenn, whose hero status gives him a staying power unavailable to most ordinary politicians. So much for the sudden-death first-inning theory.

Through the early half of this year, Mondale had raised roughly $5 million, just about twice as much as Glenn. True, Mondale's expenses are higher--for example, he had to stage that extravagant sideshow in Maine--and Glenn currently is about matching him in fund raising. But as far back as the beginning of 1982, Mondale had a computerized list of 25,000 people around the country who could be tapped for small contributions by direct-mail solicitation. Glenn's aides are only now putting together a similar list.

Mondale has the best organization money can buy. Concedes Glenn's press secretary, Greg Schneiders: "If we had a choice between our organization or Mondale's, we'd take his." Mondale and his aides usually fly first class; press secretaries and other campaign assistants tend to him in relays. On a campaign swing to Maine, Chivas Regal Scotch flowed and the sandwiches were lobster.

Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses, and New Hampshire's earliest-of-all primary give those states weight way out of proportion to the number of delegates they choose. In both places, Mondale's aides hunch over smart new computers, while Glenn's operatives scribble on yellow legal pads. This week Mondale will open six field offices throughout Iowa; no other candidate has an office outside Des Moines.

Like another former Vice President, Richard Nixon in 1968, Mondale is reaping the reward of years of faithful speechmaking at rubber chicken dinners for party candidates throughout the country. Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, a leading liberal, made a splash in June by endorsing Glenn as the more electable candidate. Shortly before, in Michigan, a state with more delegates, Mondale quietly signed up 139 elected Democratic officials, including Governor James Blanchard and Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. In Pennsylvania, which has a potentially important April primary, Mondale can count on so much help from the regular Democratic organization that he has not bothered to put together one of his own. Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri is grateful for federal cash that Mondale steered to the city when he was Jimmy Carter's Vice President, and Mondale has raised $50,000 for Wilson Goode, who is likely to be elected mayor of Philadelphia next month. Unlike some other black leaders, who are poised to support the Rev. Jesse Jackson if he declares his candidacy, Goode probably will be with Mondale all the way.

On the hustings, Mondale presents himself as the Compleat Democrat "who cares" about all the causes of all the party's various constituencies. His game plan is to appeal unashamedly to interest groups by plugging the issues each holds dear, hoping to weld them into a majority coalition. An incomplete list of the promises made in a single speech in Rochester, last week: for labor, to "put all Americans back to work"; for teachers, to "lead a renaissance in American education"; for business, to force foreign competitors to "open their markets to us as much as we've opened ours to them"; for hawks, to use military might to keep the peace and project American moral authority around the world; for women, to win ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; for the elderly and sick, to put a lid on hospital costs; for blacks and minorities, to crack down on civil rights violators. Seeking to increase his already strong support among Jewish leaders, Mondale had earlier asserted, contrary to his old boss Carter, that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are legal. Glenn tried to sound equally pro-Israel with a speech repudiating "evenhandedness" in the Middle East.

Just how Mondale would fulfill his pledges is usually left vague, but there is one clue: when asked if he would favor this or that new federal program, he almost invariably agrees. A new Civilian Conservation Corps? Yes. A national bottle bill? Sure. A Peace Academy? Why not?

This very strategy, however, is simultaneously Mondale's greatest weakness. It opens him to the charge that he has sold himself piece by piece to special-interest groups, to the point at which he can no longer say no to any of their demands. "It's not that he likes labor," says one Democratic Senate aide, "it's that he's captive of labor." Mondale indignantly replies that there is nothing so "special" about the groups he courts. Women, blacks, labor and the elderly, he says, are a majority of all people in the country. But the charge clearly has hurt. Says one Democratic Senator: "The special-interest rap is the Sword of Damocles hanging over Mondale's head."

Long range, some Democrats fear that Mondale would be too beholden to interest groups to govern effectively as President. More immediately, they fear that he is setting himself up as the oldfashioned, free-spending, solve-every-problem-with-a-new-Government-program liberal that Ronald Reagan eats for breakfast. Talking to the party faithful in Maine, Mondale was asked at almost every stop if he could win. Clearly nettled, he ended one talk with this line: "And if nominated, I can be elected."

Mondale's weakness plays directly into Glenn's strength: an appeal that cuts across class and interest-group lines, based on his days as an astronaut, which will be celebrated again in the upcoming movie of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff. Crowds pack around to stare at the first American to orbit the earth, fondly remembering a time when the nation seemed more united and the future more full of hope. One telling incident: when New York Governor Mario Cuomo played host to a Democratic forum at which Glenn spoke, Cuomo's secretary begged the Governor to get her Glenn's autograph.

Glenn plays this patriotic feeling for all it is worth, and perhaps more. Rain streaming down his face at an outdoor rally in Birmingham, he recited an expanded version of the Pledge of Allegiance: " 'One nation, under God.' It doesn't say North or South or East or West... 'Under God.' It doesn't say under a despot or a monarch or a Politburo." Reporters noted that the wording was taken almost verbatim from an old speech by, of all people, Mondale's mentor, Hubert Humphrey, but the crowd was thrilled. Face flushed with ex- citement, Hollis Hill, a Birmingham chemist, exclaimed: "He appeals to everything--the American flag, apple pie!"

Politically, Glenn presents himself as an independent attuned to the centrist mood of the country and unafraid to ask for sacrifices as well as promises. For example, he stresses the need for big tax increases to reduce budget deficits. "I don't like to say it in the middle of a political campaign, but it's a fact," he says. "We've got to face up to it." Mondale speaks of raising taxes too, but with a very different political spin: he says the rich were unduly favored by Reagan's tax cuts, and pledges to make them pay their "fair share."

Glenn has talked so little about issues, however, that many hero worshipers confess they do not know where he stands. Advisers concede he must spell out a policy if he is to convert adulation into votes, and are feverishly writing position papers. He has a skilled media man in David Sawyer, who plans a heavy schedule of TV spots after Jan. 1 .

One problem in publicizing Glenn's positions is that some of his Senate votes, while defensible and perhaps appealing to the political center, grate on the liberals who turn out heavily in Democratic primaries and caucuses. Mondale has been calling attention to Glenn's vote last sum mer to produce a more sophisticated type of nerve-gas bomb, which is anathema to many voters worried about the arms race. Glenn thought that new bombs would be less subject to accidental leakage than the outdated weapons now in the U.S. arsenal, a stand illustrative of his penchant to focus on narrow details of issues. One gag making the rounds is that while some people cannot see the forest for the trees, Glenn cannot even see the trees; his vision discerns only branches and twigs.

Glenn's outstanding campaign weakness, however, is the mirror image of Mondale's strength: organization. Glenn's staff is universally regarded as inadequate, and its internal squabbles are becoming visible to outsiders. In so crucial and early a state as New Hampshire, Glenn's aides not only are outnumbered by Mondale's but have done an ineffective job of scheduling their candidate's appearances. Complains one party insider: "Glenn comes up here, but he is almost invisible." Glenn's own New Hampshire coordinator, Rick Jenkinson, concedes, "If the primary were held now, we would certainly lose." The primary, of course, will not be held for another five months; in New Hampshire and elsewhere, Glenn still has time to organize, but that time is getting short.

The other candidates are reduced to hoping that either Mondale or Glenn falters badly in the early primaries and caucuses; if one of the dark horses has run respectably, he could then emerge as a plausible alternative to the leader. It seems like a slender hope: they are more likely to run afoul of a little-noticed election law under which a candidate who fails to win at least 10% of the vote in two consecutive primaries is cut off from federal matching funds 30 days later. He can requalify only by taking 20% of the vote in some subsequent primary. With primaries coming so rapidly in March, the law could close down some campaigns in a hurry, or shut shakily financed candidates out of vital contests that they dare not enter for fear of getting less than 10%.

Cranston, 69, has a surprisingly strong organization and a grind-it-out campaign style. "He's like a turtle," says admiring Iowa Democratic Chairman Dave Nagle. "You turn away, then turn back and see he's moved six inches." Cranston's unequivocal support for a freeze on nuclear weapons has made him popular with peace groups, but it has also created the impression that he is running a one-issue campaign. Moreover, it is an issue that lost some of its force when the Soviets shot down the Korean jetliner.

Hollings, 61, gets off barbed one-liners (sample: Glenn "is trying to win by waving, but if the American people want a hand-waver, Reagan will win") and has a reputation in Washington as an intelligent and effective Senator; the rest of the nation seems unaware of it. Colorado Senator Gary Hart, 45, discusses issues thoughtfully but is short of money and has a weak organization; worse, he strikes some voters as arrogant. Former Florida Governor Reubin Askew, 55, might win the March 13 primary in his delegate-rich home state; he complains bitterly that he cannot get the press to pay attention to him anywhere else. George McGovern, 61, seems to be running more to win some attention for his blunt views ("Let's get out of Central America. Bring the Marines out of that religious war in Lebanon") than in any hope that Democrats will forget the disaster he led the party to in 1972.

Paradoxically, the candidate other than Glenn who worries the Mondale forces most is the one who is not yet formally in the race: Jesse Jackson, 42. The new Yankelovich survey put Jackson in fourth place with 5% of the vote. An August sounding by Atlanta's Darden Research Corp. showed 7.4% of the Democratic and independent respondents in nine Southern states choosing Jackson; nearly three-fifths of them would vote for Mondale if Jackson does not run. Glenn might win several of those states anyway, but to Pollster Claibourne Darden the meaning of his figures is clear: "If Jackson's in, Mondale's out" in the South.

For all that, there is one group of expert if not exactly impartial observers who are convinced that Mondale will win the nomination: Reagan's White House aides. It is not a prospect that displeases them, for most believe that Glenn would be more difficult to defeat because of his appeal to the all-important political center. "If Glenn is the candidate, Reagan won't have exclusive rights to motherhood and apple pie," says one Republican political consultant.

Reagan Pollster Richard Wirthlin lately has been insisting that Mondale would be a tough opponent too, because of his following among traditional Democratic groups, such as union members and Jewish voters, who defected to Reagan in large numbers in 1980. In addition, while blacks are likely to vote against Reagan in any case, a Mondale candidacy might bring more of them to the polls than a Glenn campaign would. Wirthlin's talk, however, seems at least partly designed to guard against Republican overconfidence and avoid having the White House give Glenn's candidacy a backhand boost.

Whichever Democrat wins, he will face a hard campaign. Much depends, of course, on the state of the economy, the climate in foreign relations and other imponderable factors. But Reagan's standing in the polls has been rising with the economic recovery, and he daunts Democratic pros more than any other Republican since Eisenhower. Whichever Democrat survives the nine innings of the primary season may find himself pitching next season to the Republicans' best hitter, probably with the bases loaded. Getting there may be half the fun. --By George J. Church. Reported by Christopher Ogden/Chicago, Evan Thomas/ Washington and Jack E. White/New York

With reporting by Christopher Ogden, Evan Thomas, Jack E. White This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.