Prime Time Showdown

By Evan Thomas. Reported by Sam Mils with Mondale and Douglas Brew/Washington

Face to face with Reagan, Mondale makes his case

Ronald Reagan thought he had saved his best shot for last. He reminded voters that as a challenger in 1980, he had asked Americans, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" and that they had answered by electing him President. Now, he said, the question should be "Is America better off than it was four years ago?" The answer, he said, "has to be yes."

It was a hard point to rebut, but Walter Mondale was ready with an answer: "The real question is will we be better off? Are we better off with this arms race? Are we better off when we load our children with this fantastic debt?"

For weeks, Mondale had lagged so far behind Reagan that he was barely within shouting range. But finally last Sunday night in Louisville he was on the same podium, eight feet away from Reagan in the first of two presidential debates. It was, almost certainly, his last, best chance to turn a runaway election into a close contest again. Just by being on the same stage with the President, by holding his own and indeed by scoring significant points, Mondale not only avoided a knockout blow, he helped his cause.

To what extent will not be known for days, perhaps not until Nov. 6. Mondale appeared poised and prepared, and even showed flashes of the humor that he is capable of but has rarely displayed during the campaign. Surprisingly, he was more at ease than the President. Most important, he was able to give his candidacy a coherence and theme that had not been readily apparent on the campaign trail. Reagan did not appear to do himself any serious damage, but he seemed somewhat hesitant and occasionally became tangled up in facts and figures. He lacked, for once, his uncanny ability to rise above the details of governing and strike overarching themes.

On the stump, Mondale has not had much success making an issue of the federal deficit. But on Sunday night he aggressively pressed Reagan for his "plan" to deal with the problem. "President Reagan takes the position [the deficit] will disappear by magic," scoffed Mondale. Reagan insisted that he would not raise taxes, and that the recovery would produce the needed revenues to close the budget gap. Reagan charged, "I don't believe that Mr. Mondale has a plan for balancing the budget. He has a plan for raising taxes." But at moments the President seemed defensive. He insisted that high interest rates were not caused by rising deficits, an assertion, Mondale pointed out, that did not square with the views of many of Reagan's own advisers.

One of the sharpest areas of disagreement came on the emotional issue of abortion. In attempting to tackle the question of whether the decision should be a matter of personal choice, the President asserted, "Isn't that what a murderer is insisting on, his or her right to kill someone?" Mondale argued that abortion was a difficult moral dilemma in every individual case, one in which Government should play no role. "Does every woman in America have to present herself before some judge picked by Jerry Falwell to clear her personal judgment?" he asked, raising as he did three times in the debate the specter of the influence claimed by the leader of the Moral Majority.

Mondale was careful not to attack Reagan personally. "I respect the President, I respect the Presidency, and I think he knows that," Mondale said. But when Reagan repeated a line he had used with devastating effect on Jimmy Carter in 1980--"There you go again"--to knock down Mondale's claim that whoever won the election would have to raise taxes, Mondale was ready with a pointed comeback. He reminded the President that he had said "There you go again" after Carter charged that Reagan planned to cut Medicare, and that after Reagan was elected he had tried to cut Medicare by $20 billion.

If Reagan was winged by such jabs, he did not appear to bleed too badly.

Mondale lacked a true jugular instinct, missing several openings to bore in. The debate clearly served to air issues that have been somewhat submerged in the campaign thus far. For viewers, the debate was a reassuring reminder of the fundamental strengths of America's democratic process. If it did not produce a closer race, it produced a far more interesting one.

Afterward, Mondale's men were ecstatic. "It was beyond our wildest dreams," said Richard Leone, a senior adviser. "The contrast was striking. It was a metaphor for what is wrong with America. Reagan had the opportunities to talk about the future and he said nothing." Said Campaign Chairman James Johnson: "The most important thing that happened tonight was that Walter Mondale took command of the stage on which Ronald Reagan was standing." But the Reaganauts claimed victory too. Said Reagan's debate adviser, White House Aide Richard Darman: "Mondale needed a knockout and didn't even get a draw."

Both sides affected a carefree attitude on the eve of the debate. Reagan shrugged that he was "as ready as I'll ever be," as he stepped off Air Force One into a steady rain in Louisville. Mondale chatted with reporters on his campaign plane, pretending to cringe and bite his knuckles when asked if he was nervous. Told that 120 million people around the world were expected to watch the debate, he cracked, "Gee, that's larger than my average crowd."

Working hard to present a confident air, Mondale Campaign Manager Robert Beckel told reporters to look for "hard kidney shots" from his man.

But there was no disguising the stakes.

Johnson declared that the debate "represents the most extraordinary opportunity of Mondale's career thus far for people to take a sustained measure of him as a person." White House aides said that for the first time in the campaign, the mood in the White House was tense. Given the right to veto reporters suggested by the League of Women Voters as panel questioners, the two sides rejected almost 100 before settling on Diane Sawyer of CBS, James Wieghart of Scripps-Howard News Service and Fred Barnes of the Baltimore Sun.

For most of four days last week, Mondale holed up in his Washington, D.C., home, diligently preparing. In white sneakers and an old pair of bell-bottom blue jeans, he slumped in an armchair, studying a black briefing book of some 25 likely questions. Then he moved into his dining room, temporarily transformed into a television studio, to engage in mock debates. The part of Reagan was usually played by Columbia University President Michael Severn, a former law professor of Mondale's at the University of Minnesota. Severn affected Reagan's affable style, even his phrasing and sentence patterns.

As a rule, sitting Presidents do not like debates, realizing that the challenger gets a boost simply by being elevated to the same stage. Richard Nixon, a quasi-incumbent in 1960 by virtue of his two terms as Vice President, took a drubbing in his first debate with John Kennedy and may have lost the election as a result. Sitting on big leads, Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Nixon in 1972 never came close to debating their opponents. Gerald Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 were willing to take the chance because they were locked in tight races. It was a losing gamble.

Reagan was willing to take on Mondale because debates have become a campaign fixture and are risky to duck, and because he believed he could do well.

Reagan, too, boned up for four days last week, poring over a thick, white-covered briefing book and rehearsing with his sparring partner of 1980, Budget Director David Stockman. Mondale had wanted to meet the President without interlocutors, but at the insistence of White House Chief of Staff James Baker, the candidates were questioned by reporters, not each other. The President's men had figured, wrongly as it turned out, that Mondale would try to bait or rattle Reagan in the hope of making him seem shaky or befuddled, and they wanted to cushion the challenger's shots as much as possible. Baker insisted that the President, who is slightly hard of hearing, be allowed to attach an audio-amplification device to his lectern to enable him to hear questions better.

To do any necessary damage control and to help shape the all-important "spin" the press will put on the encounters, Baker ordered top White House aides to be available to reporters for debate postmortems, particularly televised ones. He believes that the voters await the judgments of pundits and TV commentators about who won and who lost before making up their own minds.

The days preceding the debate had not been particularly good ones for Reagan. He had been testy when asked about the indictment of Labor Secretary Raymond Donovan (see following story). The President accused the press of a "lynch atmosphere" and insisted that the only "sleaze factor" was "baseless charges and accusations" against officials in his Administration. Reagan aides doubt that the Donovan indictment in itself will have any lasting political fallout, although they worry that it will add to the impression that Administration officials have more than their share of ethical lapses and legal problems.

While campaigning last week, the Democrats treated the sleaze factor more gingerly than might have been expected, perhaps because they did not want to revive the controversy over the personal finances of Geraldine Ferraro and her husband John Zaccaro. Mondale allowed that "there has been a tacky element to the Administration" but said that he did not want to appear "pious" because other Administrations, including Democratic ones, had also suffered because of the peccadilloes of their officials. He was likewise restrained about Vice President George Bush, who revealed last week that he had been forced by the IRS to pay $198,000 in back taxes. Mondale did protest that it was "not fair at all" for a wealthy man like Bush to pay only 13% of his income in federal taxes last year, a point he struck at firmly during the debate (Mondale himself paid 31%). Running Mate Ferraro was even more circumspect, refusing to comment on Donovan because, "quite frankly, I've been the subject of a lot of unfair accusations."

With one poll showing Reagan winning as many as 49 states, congressional and local Democratic candidates are increasingly concerned that Mondale will drag them down with him. The only Massachusetts congressional candidate to invite Mondale to appear in the state so far was a Republican, Senate Candidate Raymond Shamie, who figured perversely that a visit by the top of the Democratic ticket would hurt his Democratic opponent. In Tennessee, Republican Senate Candidate Victor Ashe offered to donate $5 to the favorite charity of his Democratic opponent, Congressman Albert Gore, if Gore just mentioned Mondale's name.

Gore studiously ignored the gimmick.

A cornerstone of the national Democratic strategy has been to turn out a record number of voters on Election Day. In 1980, 86.5 million people voted; this year "if 100 million voters go to the polls, we win," says Ann Lewis, political director of the Democratic National Committee.

The Democrats claim they have registered at least 3 million new voters. But the Republicans boast that they have added as many to their rolls, and the conservative fundamentalist group Moral Majority claims an additional 2 million.

What is more, the polls dispute the assumption that a high turnout favors the Democrats. A Harris poll last week showed that while Mondale trails Reagan by 13% among likely voters, he trails by 17% among unlikely voters. In part, this may be because young people -- who tend to sit out elections -- are heavily pro-Reagan.

The Republicans have many intangibles going their way. Times are good. The people like Reagan the man. Last week, as the sun set slowly in a cloudless sky, some 40,000 turned out in Gulfport, Miss., to watch Reagan preach the politics of happiness.

"Don't trust the professional pessimists," Reagan told them. "Trust the American people. The shadows are behind us, and the bright sunshine of hope and opportunity lies ahead." He offered a string of patriotic homilies, and almost no substance.

His listeners interrupted his 24-min. speech 54 times with applause, and when Reagan shrugged, "Well, I've got to go now," they shouted, "No! No! No!" Reagan waved genially. A thousand balloons floated skyward. The crowd chanted, "Four more years! Four more years!"

Mondale was hoping that the debates would cut through the hoopla and concentrate voters' minds on specific issues.

While voters favor Reagan, they tend to agree more with Mondale's stands on specifics like the environment and arms control. Yet it remains to be seen whether issues, even fired by a second debate performance as impressive as Sunday night's, can compete with the powerful imagery of Ronald Reagan.

With reporting by Sam Mils with Mondale and Douglas Brew/Washington