Facing the Fatigue Factor

By KURT ANDERSEN

Always running at full tilt, the Candidates show the strain

The Denver reporter, who had not seen Gary Hart for weeks, thought he looked terrible--haggard, pale, tapped out.

"Don't you badly need a rest?" he asked when the candidate arrived in Colorado last week as the votes were being counted in Pennsylvania. Hart hemmed, hawed, then rasped almost plaintively, "Tomorrow will be the first day we've had off since Christmas." Back in Philadelphia, Walter Mondale, the eventual victor, had turned peevish during his last go-round of a day with reporters. Would he predict his margin of victory, a newsman asked. "No," snapped an irritated Mondale. Is something wrong? asked the next questioner. "Nothing," barked Mondale. Then he caught himself and apologized. "I am getting what is known as punchy," he said. "I don't think I've been home in five weeks."

Four weeks, in fact. But none of the three men who remain in the race for the Democratic nomination can be blamed if they lose track of a few days here, a week or so there. Even Jesse Jackson, the youngest of them, is exhausted. "He doesn't sleep," jokes a Jackson aide. "He just faints a while." Hart, 47, Mondale, 56, and Jackson, 42, have been on the road for more than a year. Since January they have had to go at a ferocious pace, running an electoral marathon at sprinters' speeds. It shows. The survivors often look drawn and ashen, and all have made blunders because of fatigue. Indeed, the intensity of this year's primary rigors, physical and emotional, may be unprecedented. Says one drained journalist, a veteran who is trooping after Jackson: "There has never been anything like this. Never."

The candidates are enjoying a bit of a respite right now. But during the high-pitched seven weeks from Iowa's caucuses to Pennsylvania's primary, each roared in and out of hundreds of towns, eating perfunctorily and exercising hardly at all. Sleep comes a few hours at a time in stuffy rooms and cramped airplane seats. The adrenaline gushes all day long. Every remark, every intellectual twitch or tic is scrutinized, recorded, analyzed. In the frenzy of political combat, the candidate must improvise crucial strategic moves, keep his facts straight and try to look presidential to boot. Senator John Glenn said he was "perpetually tired" two months before the first primary. Fellow Dropout George McGovern seemed well rested, even twinkly, while he was in the race. Still, he says, "Fatigue is public enemy No. 1. It has become a most serious problem in American politics."

The standard campaign day just before any primary includes a couple of events in each of five cities. Mondale may hold one season record: the day before Super Tuesday, he hit eight Southern cities in 18 hours. During one 24-hour period before the Pennsylvania primary, Jackson flew aboard a twelve-seat turboprop plane from Pittsburgh to Madison, Wis., to Milwaukee to New Orleans. Along the way he delivered five speeches and slept about five hours. Two weeks ago, Jackson made a campaign appearance that ended at 10:30 p.m. in Albany. He then traveled to Harrisburg, Pa., and went to an antinuclear rally from 4 to 6 the next morning, after that attending a meeting of black state legislators at 10 a.m.

For the two front runners, last Monday's schedules were typically tough. Mondale awoke at dawn in Wilkes-Barre and toured a dress factory. He flew to Erie for a runway press conference, then to Pittsburgh for another runway press conference. In Harrisburg, Mondale waited as usual for the press to shuffle out of the 727 ("How many more?" he croaked as the reporters filed by), so that the TV news cameramen could get a clear shot of him disembarking. For the 100 supporters gathered on the tarmac, he recited his routine speech, then climbed back up the ramp. On to Philadelphia for a fourth runway press conference ("Vice President Mondale, what is your favorite color?"), and then to Washington for a fund-raising dinner.

Hart's Monday, meanwhile, publicly began at the Philadelphia docks for a 7:30 a.m. mingle with longshoremen. He flew off to Allentown and Bethlehem to stroll through a steel plant and hold a press conference, but engine problems kept him from leaving for Pittsburgh on time. While a pair of small Learjets were being hired, Hart felt obliged to caper around for photographers (he posed in a cockpit wearing dark glasses and pilot's cap) and to discuss the Democrats' alleged indulgence of black antiSemitism. At Pittsburgh's airport (four hours after Mondale had touched down there), he met with a group of old people bused out for the occasion, then submitted to three separate TV interviews and a 20-minute radio call-in show. During his hour in Erie, Hart gave another press conference and, growing ever more hoarse with bronchitis, addressed a rally. From there he flew to Trenton, N.J., drove back into Pennsylvania for a nighttime rally in a shopping mall, and finally returned at 11 p.m. to Philadelphia--where the day had begun.

The ceaseless scurrying would tax anyone. The more ineffable pressures the candidates face, to regain or maintain momentum, to remain intellectually focused but not rigid, are at least as burdensome. Frequent high-stakes televised debates (eight so far) have been an extra drain on emotional resources. "The debates are particularly difficult," says Oliver ("Pudge") Henkel, Hart's campaign manager. "It's a major change of pace from the rest of the campaign. It is so intense that there's invariably a letdown afterward."

The advanced stages of candidate fatigue are obvious. "I can tell," Mondale says. "My syntax starts going first." Press Secretary Maxine Isaacs notes that his looks go too: "He gets big bags under his eyes." Other aides say Mondale gets grouchy as long days wind down.

A bushed candidate is more prone to mistakes and misstatements. Usually the bungles are minor. When Mondale was asked in Pennsylvania about Hart's proposal for a $ 10-per-bbl. tax on imported oil, he rambled numbly, "It's a question of, ah ... ah ..." He stopped. "I can't think of the name. I'm getting a little tired. I'll get back to it." Yet Mondale, who is rather too buttoned down in public, sometimes loosens up when he is fatigued. Campaigning hi upstate New York, he joked that as Vice President he had channeled so much federal money to Rochester, he was afraid he would be investigated.

Jackson fell asleep during two recent interviews. When he is groggy he tends to mix up his trademark parallel constructions. "Jails at their worst," he proclaimed in Ference, Ala., "are better than schools at their best." Hart last week mistakenly referred to his "19-year-old son"; John Hart is 18. The Senator (who seems to have a knack for muffing ages) made an odd joke last week about how old he feels. "When we started, I was 20," he told a little girl who asked if it was difficult running for President. "Now I feel like I'm 95."

Hart, perhaps the most driven of the three, has probably committed more serious tactical blunders because of exhaustion. "Gary Hart has been suffering from extreme fatigue since Super Tuesday," contends McGovern. "The errors he made during the Illinois primary were a direct result of fatigue." In Illinois, Hart looked foolish when he accused Mondale of broadcasting unfair advertisements, which, it turned out, did not exist; a Hart commercial attacking a powerful local Democrat aired for two days even after Hart had disclaimed it. Said Press Secretary Kathy Bushkin at the time: "Gary's fatigued now and he's delegating decisions that he used to make before."

Hart and Mondale smoke cigars, but none of the candidates admit to any special relaxation techniques. Indeed, Jackson seems determined to stay cranked up. "I have never known him to rest," says Frank Watkins, his press secretary, "except when he was ordered by the doctor to go to the hospital [for exhaustion, hi 1979]." Mondale, before his defeat hi New Hampshire, could afford three quiet hours a day in his hotel room; now he relies on naps in transit. Lately, Hart's handlers have tried to schedule only three major campaign events a day. "It's surprising to me," says Henkel, "that Gary is holding up so well, that his psyche is largely intact after this roller-coaster ride."

Roller-coaster ride, shooting the rapids, demolition derby--almost any metaphor involving gut-churning ups and downs or collisions is apt. Candidates seem to think the electorate wants to see them endure incredible campaign pressures. Yet it is unclear whether surviving such a regimen is a measure of presidential mettle. Henkel, new to national politics, thinks not. "The Democratic Party has to face up to the punishment this process inflicts on its people," he says. "These four or five months of extremely intense activity are not the best test of a candidate's ability." Hart, however, has no real complaints. And Mondale, who quit a presidential candidacy once before, approves of the campaign's intensity. "I think it tests much of the same qualities needed in a President," he says, such as "decision making under fire, the ability to unify and persuade."

Pushed and inspected for unrelenting months, all the candidates last week had some R. and R. On Wednesday, Mondale had a relatively calm day in Phoenix, joking with a winner's swagger about his fatigue. "I'm not tired," he said. "But the Smithsonian called and wanted my eyeballs." Hart, still troubled by bronchitis and a nasty cough, spent the time at home in Denver, resting up and swallowing antibiotics. "The day off helped a lot," Hart said on Thursday--in between high-pressure public appearances in Missouri, right back on the campaign trail.

--By Kurt Andersen, Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale and David Beckwith with Hart, and other bureaus

With reporting by Sam Allis with Mondale and David Beckwith with Hart, and other bureaus