To the Polls at Last

By LANCE MORROW

The long campaign was hard fought but maddeningly evasive

At last, the endless and surreal campaign would come to rest upon a hard fact: the vote.

It would be decided.

Americans would arrive at the polls that matter, the ones that are actually wired to a consequence.

The presidential race, like some old tribal agitation, had been noising around the landscape for almost as long as anyone could remember, or so it seemed: through snowy primaries and caucuses, through the various carnages of Iowa (Glenn nearly gone) and New Hampshire (Hart a sudden phenomenon, the "Mondale juggernaut" confounded), through Super Tuesday and Farrakhan, through Jesse Jackson's "Hymietown" and San Francisco and Dallas and Louisville and Kansas City and on and on.

The campaign had come to seem a sort of fixture in the American mind, like a long-running TV series by Norman Lear. It became a buzz in the background, sharp clusters of words emerging now and then ("Where's the beef?" . . . "You ain't seen nuthin' yet!"), the candidates orating in sound bites as they looped through the media markets. The contest was a procession of internal defeats and victories (Mondale won the first debate, Reagan tied the second, and so on), and yet by definition it was all inconclusive, conjectural, a pageant of popular mood capable of changing like the weather. Theoretically capable, anyway. The pollsters monitored the isobars and issued a unanimous forecast: Mondale would be inundated.

But to the last, Mondale, with the weird serenity of the underdog, cherished a mystical, or perhaps merely desperate, optimism. Transpose the last two digits, he suggested: 1984 is really 1948. Mondale is Harry Truman, with a handsome, vindictive grin, flourishing the headline of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Conjuring doubts to keep the pundits honest. The great hyperkinetic exercise had come to its final stage, like the jitterbugging burst at the end of a '30s dance marathon.

Whatever the outcome, most Americans greeted the end of the campaign with relief. It had been a strange presidential race, peculiarly disengaged, almost dis embodied. Why? The candidates differed fundamentally on the issues, on how the country should be governed, on what America should be. Yet they did not fully confront each other. As the campaign dragged on, their views inched closer together. Reagan talked about his commitment to arms control, Mondale about his determination to keep America strong. They did what presidential candidates usually do: they took refuge in the political center, where most of the votes are.

Americans tend to cherish the idea that a presidential campaign should be a dramatic examination of the nation's values and goals. Some such differentiation did occur, especially at the two conventions. In San Francisco, New York Governor Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson elaborated the Mondale theme of Democratic inclusiveness and Government as the agent of progress. In Dallas, the Republicans ridiculed that as a negative, weakling vision. To them, the private sector is America's genius.

For the most part, though, the campaign was a fairly shallow personality contest. It had a maddeningly evasive quality about it. It was as if television news, with its gift for dramatic fragments of reality, made Dada arrangements of each day's history. The rush of images seemed to give the entire political process a ruinously short attention span. As the English poet George Meredith once prayed, "More brain, O Lord, more brain!"

Presiding over a nation prospering and at peace, Reagan polished his luminous vision of America: bright, optimistic, powerful, successful. He did not talk about what he would do with the next four years if reelected. His campaign was blithe triumphalism. In his memoirs, Charles de Gaulle wrote, "I must, to serve [France], personify this great national ambition." In his very American way, Reagan had assumed a sort of Gaullist role for himself. "America is back," he would say.

What he meant was, in part, that America's manhood was back. By his account, the Administration of Jimmy Carter and, he always added, of Walter Mondale, had stood for weakness and inefFectuality, for letting foreigners like the Ayatullah kick us around and imprison our people. The theme of manhood ran deeply through the campaign. The U.S. had lost the long war in Viet Nam; the nation seemed smaller and diminished in the world: unmanned. Reagan restored a sense of what was good, what was virtuous, about being a man. A New York Times/CBS News poll showed that an astonishing 78% of American men view Reagan as a strong leader.

And so, in sometimes ludicrous ways, politicians were swaggering all over America in 1984. Walter Mondale, acutely aware of his "wimp" image, used the words tough or strength 25 times during the second debate. Reagan incessantly used sports metaphors: "Isn't it great to see America scoring touchdowns again?" When George Bush accused the Democratic ticket of saying that American Marines died "in shame" in Lebanon, Mondale denied it and said Bush didn't have "the manhood" to apologize. Bush, who merits consideration for the Ernest Hemingway Moveable Feast Invidious Braggadocio Trophy this year, replied, "I'll lay my record on any forum, whatever it is, on the manhood, up against his." After his debate with Geraldine Ferraro, Bush told a longshoreman, "Yeah, we tried to kick a little ass last night." That was rather cross-grained machismo, since it is not really the code of the locker room to brag about kicking a woman around.

But Bush's mouth was often in business for itself. He was notably rough on the English language in a campaign that as a whole must have brought down the IQ of the mother tongue by ten points. Bush said that the faces of America's Olympic athletes were filled with "optimism and determinism."

One night in Atlanta, he wheeled on reporters and said, "You guys are just a pack. You come zooming in on something. Just take what I said, take it literally, take it figuratively, anywhere else. Put it down. Mark it down. Good, you got it. Elevate it. Elevate it. Elevate it. Elevate it."

In half a dozen odd ways, time itself became a player in the campaign: time as past, time as future, time as duration, time as age. Reagan's 73 years was a factor against him. The nastier comics referred to it as "the drool factor." His mind wandered, some said, and he got the facts wrong. In splendidly backhanded defense, Reagan supporters said it was not age: Reagan has always been sloppy with the facts. During the mid-'60s, Americans sometimes supported Lyndon Johnson's actions in Viet Nam by saying, "Well, the President has more information than we do, and so can more readily make these decisions." The implicit line of some of the Reagan defenders was the reverse: that the President has a mind unencumbered by facts--the sort of details, they mean, that used to bog Jimmy Carter down. Reagan can stand on the bridge of the ship of state, point the general direction, and let the subalterns worry about the navigation. In the second debate, Reagan scored with calculatedly offhanded brilliance when he said he was "not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."

The question of which candidate represented the past and which the future always rattled around on the margins of the race. The Republicans fired away effectively at Mondale as the candidate of a now sclerotic New Deal mentality. So the younger man had the old ideas (supposedly). Reagan became the candidate of youth. A Yankelovich poll for TIME showed that 63% of Americans age 18 to 24 favored the President.

Yet there were endless switchbacks and crosscurrents of time. Reagan stood for the past in a different way. The Democrats said he represented the past, populated by such candlesnuffers as Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. In the magic lantern of his own mythos, Reagan saw himself in a Norman Rockwell vision, an image of a clean and wholesome earlier America.

For all his sunburst cheer about the nation, however, Reagan's campaign brought up some darker American forces. He had met with right-wing Fundamentalists like the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, and the glow of presidential approval reflected off them to the religious fringe, on what might be called the Christian certitudinarians, the ones with a hard light of fanaticism in their eyes. These are the people who know they are right. One always wishes to press a copy of the Sermon on the Mount into the hands of a militant Reaganite Christian. Reagan also identified himself with those Christians who believe that Armageddon, the fiery consumption of the earth, is imminent, and it unsettled some voters to think of a President with the nuclear button close at hand who suspects the Apocalypse is inevitable.

Reagan enjoyed certain immense advantages going into the battle. He was not required to fight for the nomination, for example. His campaign could use the long primary season and its federally subsidized budget for planning and organization. The G.O.R recruited tens of thousands of volunteers to put together the flawlessly planned Reagan rallies.

Mondale, on the other hand, had to go into the trenches of the primaries and slug it out, state by state, in a field of eight candidates. It was, said one party official, a spectacle of eight Democrats standing in a circle and shooting at one another. The sight was not always edifying. They all got together for a curiously adolescent debate in Hanover, N.H., where John Glenn accused Mondale of spouting "the same vague gobbledygook of nothing," and Gary Hart zeroed in on Mondale's greatest weakness, his ties to Democratic interest groups--organized labor, Jews, teachers and so on. "Fritz," said Hart, "you cannot lead this country if you have promised everybody everything." The Reagan staff watched with broad grins.

The biggest question about Mondale and his party was whether they could any longer make the traditional constituent parts fit together to form a political majority. If they could not, Reagan's Republicans were dreaming of a realignment election that could change the American political landscape for a generation or more.

Mondale was known as the "man who dares to be cautious," or as Norwegian wood. He was the first to admit that he was stuck with himself. "What you see is what you get," he said. On bread-and-butter issues, Mondale did not stray much from the oldtime Democratic religion he had learned from Hubert Humphrey. He spoke a sweet and moving message about the values of America. In Cleveland, toward the end of the campaign, he explained his political vision: "We must strengthen, defend, preserve and comfort one another." Mondale paraphrased the words of John Winthrop as he led his flock of Pilgrims to New England in 1630:

"We must bear one another's burdens. We must rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together. We must be knit together by a bond of love."

But Mondale had difficulty dramatizing his themes. His early advertising spots focused on the deficit, but the issue would not catch on. It was too hypothetical. He raised the question of fairness. But in prosperous times, the middle class tends to focus its gaze upward, not downward.

Mondale spoke about the poor and jobless, and Bush, in pitch with a widespread mood, called him "the Great Depressor."

Mondale hammered at Reagan as the first President since Hoover not to have met with a Soviet leader. Then Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko came to call and somewhat stilled that talk. Reagan, who only 19 months before had lashed out at the "evil empire," had managed to neutralize the old anxiety that he is trigger-happy. In any case, the nation was at peace.

If both of the principals in the race were in different ways somewhat disengaged, two other figures, Jesse Jackson and Geraldine Ferraro, were passionately focused. They made history this year. Ferraro's value to Mondale as a vote getter may have been shadowed by questions about her family's finances. But the precedent that she set was historic. So was Jesse Jackson's. His campaign had its ugly side, but in running the first serious black challenge for the presidential nomination, he drew American blacks psychologically closer to full citizenship.

It is true that Walter Mondale and Ronald Reagan never entirely engaged during the race. But the long campaign did serve its purpose. In the arduous democratic process--entertainment and enlightenment and blood feud all mixed--the characters of the candidates unfolded. There was, God knows, plenty of time for the voters to make up their minds.

--By Lance Morrow