The Preordainment of Mondale

By Hugh Sidey

The Presidency/High Sidey

Cast ahead to July, Walter Mondale is triumphant. The Democratic presidential nominee has rolled effortlessly to victory on the first ballot in San Francisco as most everyone in the political industry has predicted, as almost anyone who could hear and read has come to expect.

The scholars at Harvard's Kennedy School begin to triangulate and plot the vectors of power that produced the Mondale victory. Duke University's political psychologist, James David Barber, who has contended for several years that the television networks would not have more to say about the nominees than the political parties, starts to gather data for an update to his book The Pulse of Politics.

The archivists work back over the compaign, inch by inch, day by day, trying to find the decisive moment. Was it Super Tuesday, March 13, when Mondale swept most of the primaries and caucuses? Was it Feb. 28 in New Hampshire or Feb. 20 in Iowa, when Mondale gave his first public displays of clout? Hold on, the researchers say, look back further. In January 1983, Iowa's popular Democratic Congressman, Tom Harkin, endorsed Mondale, sending a strong signal to the party faithful. But wait. The logbook shows that Mondale journeyed to Iowa in February 1982 in tow of Congressman Neal Smith, the two doing a little mutual stumping. Important Democrats took notice.

Those things may have been only surface phenomen, the scholars suggest. Evidence before them suggests that the electoral reform commission was created to help a front runner shorten the primary battle season. In the 1984 environment, academicians find it was one more powerful-element that preordained the nomination of Mondale.

The wily AFL-CIO president, Lane Kirkland, sat down with Political Columists Jules Witcover and Jack Germond in March 1982 and floated a whooper. He felt the AFL-CIO should endorse a candidate in 1983, long before the primaries and the conventions, something the federation had never done. Kirkland, its turns out, had been brooding about the idea since 1968 and had had it on the tip of this tongue the day after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.

But there is more, the experts note, as they put the pieces together. Anchorman Dan Rather took a long look at Mondale on the CBS Evening News in September 1983. Indeed Mondale had never faded from he screen after defeat. As early as October 1981 he was back on Meet the Press, the highest Democrat available to satisfy TV's hunger for political combat. Jimmy Carter had become a virtual recluse. Mondale was, after all, the front runner. But did being first early make him first always? Certainly his pre-eminent position on the nightly news and in newspaper and magazine accounts contributed to the Mondale tide.

Pollsters had a say too, the researchers find. The Iowa Poll, conducted by the Des Moines Register, pitted Mondale against President Reagan in December 1982 (Mondale 52%, Reagan 41%). But look further back. The dean of all opinion samplers, George Gallup, matched Mondale against Reagan in May 1980. That was half a year before the Carter- Mondale ticket lost the White House.

You don't suppose, asks one young researcher in this fantasy, that Mondale's nomination became inevitable way back then? That Gallup, Kirkland and the media rallied behind Walter Mondale without even knowing it?

The narrative, indeed, is imaginary, but the dates and names and events are not. A lot of concerned people are wondering this week whether political party operative, in their eagerness to be with a winner, and the American voters, in their dependence on the polls and the media for guidance, are not all locked in an unwitting conspiracy that selects our presidential nominees before anybody has a chance to think -or vote.