Primed for a Test

By Ed Magnuson

Mondale's campaign: A glass train or an unstoppable iron horse?

It has been a cake-walk--so far. He has raised almost twice as much money as his nearest competitor. The AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, the National Education Association and the National Organization for Women all support him. So do Tip O'Neill, Robert Strauss, perhaps 100 members of the House, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. Concedes a top strategist: "The worst Pollyanna in our bunch wouldn't have been able to predict last December that we would be in this position now."

But one question remains, and it is the most important one of all: When the voting starts, will people line up behind Walter Mondale? Despite the gathering momentum of his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, skeptics note that Mondale has not aroused the electorate, that his support, in the words of one, is "a mile wide and an inch thick." Another doubter likens Mondale's campaign to a glass train: one bump, and it is sure to shatter.

After long months of polishing and revving up, the Mondale locomotive is poised for its first tests, in the Iowa caucuses next week and the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 28. Mondale, 56, will be running against seven other Democrats and the high expectations generated by his picture-perfect campaign. "A win's a win," argues acting Campaign Chairman James Johnson, who rightly scoffs at the claim of rivals that Mondale must get 60% of the votes in Iowa and New Hampshire or be seen as slipping. Still, anything less than a 10% margin of victory over the runner-up in New Hampshire--and at least 40% of the vote in Iowa--might be interpreted by the press as a defeat, and this has filled Mondale staffers with gloomy imaginings. What if Jesse Jackson surprises in New Hampshire and siphons votes from their man? What if Mondale supporters stay home, assuming their votes will not be needed? What if cantankerous Democrats register their protest at the notion that they are being run over by a Mondale machine before they can even be heard?

All of the fretting is prudent in the unpredictable arena of primary politics, but it is probably unwarranted. A new nationwide poll of Democrats and independents taken for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, Inc. shows that Mondale is still on a roll. Last December his lead over John Glenn was 34% to 18%; now it has jumped to 50% to 18%, a leap of 16 percentage points. Worse yet for Glenn and the other candidates is that the undecided vote has fallen from 26% to 14% in that period, with most of those who made up their minds apparently choosing Mondale. Perhaps wishfully, the other campaigners had considered the uncertain voters as likely to be anti-Mondale. Jackson is a distant third at 6%.

Mondale holds commanding leads in Iowa and New Hampshire as Democrats in those states prepare to make their choices. A mid-January poll by the Des Moines Register gives him a 49%-to-20% margin over Glenn. Alan Cranston and George McGovern tied for third place at 6%. A Boston Globe survey late last month shows Mondale ahead of Glenn, 42% to 19%, in New Hampshire. Jackson is next with 10%, ahead of Gary Hart's 8%.

Mondale owes some of his lead to the failings of his rivals. Most disappointing has been John Glenn, the astronaut turned Senator. His hero status and centrist politics made him a logical match for Ronald Reagan. But the more Glenn hit the stump, the further he fell in the polls. He comes off as a good, gray technocrat, offering facts, not vision, often lapsing into jargon and digressions that leave audiences drowsy. He can show zest, though, sometimes speaking clearly and substantively on favorite issues, such as arms control and cutting the budget deficit. Since his positions are closer to the center than Mondale's, Glenn theoretically has a larger pool of support. But he needs to rebound quickly if he is to challenge the front runner.

Few of the others are doing any better. Cranston jokes that "I had a full head of hair until Reagan became President," but even his TV ads bring out a flaw that is not the California Senator's fault: in an age of imagery, his bony build and glistening skull are unpresidential. With his brains and looks, Gary Hart should be a winning candidate. But his natural reserve makes him seem cold, even condescending. Ernest Rollings looks like a President, yet his quick tongue outpaces even his nimble wit; he rambles, improvises and seems to startle himself, as well as his audiences, by what he has just said. George McGovern's sincerity, clarity and professorial calm have piqued the interest of a new generation of college students who were children when the former presidential candidate led his party against the Viet Nam War in 1972. To the mainstream of voters, however, he appears quaint, quixotic and too liberal. Reubin Askew remains a blur, with low name recognition even among recent residents of his home state, Florida. Only Jesse Jackson, irrepressible and sometimes outrageous, seems to be gaining converts in his long-shot crusade. But while Jackson has shown that a black can be a potent force in the primaries, he seems more of a lever for black demands than a legitimate threat to win the nomination. His campaign is disorganized, and he delivers messages rather than programs.

So how did Mondale, who has some deficiencies of his own, achieve such a solid lead in the Democratic race? Only a decade ago, he withdrew from the primaries with one of the most self-damning confessions in recent political memory: "I do not have the overwhelming desire to be President." Even his Minnesota mentor, Hubert Humphrey, wondered whether Mondale had "fire in the belly." That question, which once seemed an obstacle to Mondale's presidential ambitions, has been laid to rest. These days Fritz's boilers glow red hot as he assails Reagan for replacing the New Deal with "the double deal" and promoting "a jungle where only the richest and fittest prosper."

Oddly, Mondale's recent revival is reminiscent of Richard Nixon's nomination course almost two decades ago. Like Nixon, Mondale inhaled the thin but exhilarating air of the White House as a Vice President and concluded that he was big enough to fill the Oval Office. Like Nixon, he spent years courting his party's regional powerbrokers and filled his pockets with political lOUs. Also reminiscent of Nixon, Mondale found a prosperous law firm to replenish his meager personal finances while he ran virtually full time for the presidential nomination. Mondale draws a $150,000 annual salary from the Chicago-based law firm of Winston & Strawn, working out of its Washington office. He hit the lecture circuit, charging fees of up to $20,000 and earning about $110,000 from Jewish groups alone over two years. He taught periodically at the University of Minnesota and served on the board of Control Data Corp., whose headequarters are in Minneapolis. In all, he earned nearly $1 million in just two years, about four times his net worth when he left the vice presidency in 1981.

The Fritz blitz began while the wounds of the 1980 Carter-Mondale loss to Reagan were still smarting. Three months after the election, Mondale formed a political action committee called the Committee for the Future of America, which raised $2.1 million for Democratic congressional candidates running in 1982. Mondale shrewdly achieved two aims: he earned the gratitude of all those candidates and gained invaluable lists of likely donors to Democratic campaigns, most pointedly his own. (Today Mondale refuses PAC money, charging that PACs are used by special interests to buy political influence.)

In the summer of 1981, the Hunt Commission (named for its chairman, Governor James Hunt of North Carolina) met to draw up new rules for the Democratic Party's 1984 nominating process. The party pros had some valid complaints: the primary season was too long, overworking the candidates and turning off voters. Earlier reforms opening the party to more women, blacks and party neophytes had gone too far, reducing the rewards of longtime party loyalty and the influence of seasoned officials. Democratic stalwarts had been denied the nomination by comparative upstarts like McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Representatives of Mondale, Senator Edward Kennedy and organized labor dominated the commission. Their operatives devised a primary process stacked against underfinanced or late-starting loners.

The new rules expanded the number of delegate votes at the Democratic Convention from 3,331 to 3,933 (actually there will be 5,257 delegates in San Francisco this July, some casting only half votes). Elected Democratic officials and party activists were guaranteed about 850 seats, including 164 set aside for members of the House and 27 for Senators. States were permitted to require a candidate to win 20% of a congressional district's vote to qualify for delegates, or even award all the delegates in a district to the leading vote getter. Both methods favor front runners. Established candidates also got a boost from the decision to cluster 31 primaries and caucuses, in which almost half the total delegates will be chosen, within the first six weeks of the primary season.

Mondale knew it would take a big campaign kitty to run in all of those momentum-setting early primaries and that anyone without a lot of cash would have to pick his shots carefully. If a candidate guessed wrong, he might face a pivotal primary without enough money to compete.

While Mondale has been accused of being too cautious, his campaign strategy was the boldest of the bunch. It was to push for big bucks and run almost everywhere at once, trusting that his physical stamina and dollars would hold out. None of his competitors have tried to match his unstinting campaign.

Mondale did something else right: he gathered a team of seasoned pros, who seem unlikely to fold if things get tough. Acting Campaign Chairman Johnson, 40, a former aide to Mondale in the Senate and vice presidency, is cerebral, controlled and known for his keen political instincts. Campaign Manager Robert Beckel, 36, beefy and boisterous, handles the nitty-gritty details of daily tactics. Senior Political Adviser John Reilly, 55, came out of Jack and Robert Kennedy campaigns and has helped corral endorsements. Campaign Treasurer Michael Herman. 44, talkative, assertive and warm, has a firm grip on cash-flow problems.

Despite this formidable lineup, the Mondale camp occasionally seems insecure. The candidate and his aides are thin-skinned about criticism. Press Secretary Maxine Isaacs, in particular, turns icy when a reporter does not readily accept Mondale's interpretation of political issues. Some aides get rankled, especially whenever reporters note that a Mondale-supported bill requiring imported cars to contain certain percentages of U.S.-made parts and labor is "protectionist," as it clearly is. Mondale himself seems wary of journalists, rarely chatting informally with them on campaign flights.

The support of labor, whatever its impact on the public perception of Mondale as a captive of special interests, is a tremendous asset to his campaign. Some political analysts estimate that the combination of union organizational help and actual contributions is worth some $20 million, which is about a third of what Mondale expects to spend in the primaries and general-election campaign. Mondale's foes attack him for courting labor so assiduously, but most of them also did so and now envy his success.

In the early make-or-break primaries and caucuses, labor's manpower means more to Mondale's well-heeled campaign than money. In Iowa, for example, the AFL-CIO has some 100,000 members, a number roughly equal to the anticipated turnout in the caucuses. The national headquarters of the labor group has sent 35 organizers to the state to direct the drive to win delegates for Mondale. Using telephone banks, a direel-mail campaign and union newsletters, the leaders expect to reach all of the membership with pro-Mondale appeals. The U.A.W. will try to persuade its 40,000 members in Iowa to support Mondale in the caucuses. The United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which sent 3,500 of its members to the caucuses in 1980, expects to raise that figure to some 6,000 this year. This union is using about 900 volunteers in the state to run a voter-registration drive among its members. About 250 teachers are working 21 telephone banks for Mondale in Iowa.

New Hampshire is a less unionized state. But even there, the state AFL-CIO'S membership list of 37,000 is a fertile field for harvesting Mondale votes. Last month some 60 union volunteers kept eleven phone banks manned throughout the state, soliciting help for the Minnesotan. AFL-CIO Field Representative Charlie Stott estimates that 15,000 of the roughly 110,000 people expected to vote in New Hampshire will be members of the AFL-CIO. This kind of union activity can be duplicated in almost any state where Mondale needs the labor push. Glenn's aides said last week that they plan to ask the Federal Election Commission to investigate their charge that the Mondale campaign organization has failed to report fully the assistance it has received from labor in Iowa and New Hampshire.

On the issues, Mondale and his rivals are in surprising accord, though their emphasis and rhetoric tend to highlight their differences. All of the candidates favor some land of freeze on nuclear arms. Cranston, McGovern and Hollings urge that the U.S. try such a freeze unilaterally to see if the Soviets go along. Askew would freeze the number of warheads and missiles and the total destructive power but permit modernization of weapons under these limits. All would hold real military spending increases to 3% or 6% a year, except McGovern, who would slash such spending by 25%, and Jackson, who would cut it by an unspecified amount. All would kill the multiwarhead MX, and all except Jackson, Cranston and McGovern push for a single-warhead, mobile missile. (The Reagan Administration argues that the MX is needed to guarantee U.S. security until a new single-warhead missile is operational.) Only Cranston and Glenn would develop the B-1 bomber. Hollings alone advocates a draft.

On the deficit, Hollings' call for a flat one-year freeze on virtually all federal spending and a 3% limit on annual increases thereafter is the most sweeping proposal. The other candidates urge various combinations of defense-budget cuts; a delay in the indexing of income tax rates to inflation; postponement or cancellation of Reagan's third-year, 10% tax cut; surtaxes on high-income earners; and steps to close tax loopholes and to check the rise in medical costs.

In foreign affairs, all except Glenn stress the need for U.S.-Soviet summit meetings to reduce tensions. All would cut off U.S. aid to the rebels fighting the Marxist-led government in Nicaragua, and all would halt military aid to the Salvadoran regime unless death-squad activity stops. McGovern would withdraw U.S. military aid and troops from Central America, including Honduras. None of the Democrats would loosen U.S. ties to Israel, although McGovern and Jackson urge a more even hand in the Middle East. Yet even Jackson praises Israel as "the most brilliant flower in God's garden."

The candidates are jockeying for position on the ideological spectrum. Cranston, McGovern and Jackson dilute Mondale's image as a superliberal. Glenn is to the right of Mondale, but nevertheless supports labor's domestic-content bill, expanded Medicaid coverage and increased food-stamp benefits. Hart's generational politics, stressing "new ideas," makes him something of a neoliberal, but on many issues his liberalism is as traditional as Mondale's. Askew's qualified antiabortion position--he would allow it in cases of incest, rape, threat to the mother's life or fetal deformity--draws one-issue support from conservative Democrats. The fuzzy spectrum comes full circle with Jackson, who, as a clergyman, enjoys the backing of some religious fundamentalists despite his far-left positions on most issues.

Mondale's Democratic rivals have found him a rather elusive target. They have been hammering away at him for catering to special-interest groups, but Mondale can be a skillful counterpuncher. When Glenn put the question bluntly ("Will we offer a party that can't say no to anyone with a letterhead and a mailing list?"), Mondale coolly replied that the Reagan tax-cut bill of 1981 placed special interests above the national interest and noted that Glenn had voted for it.

Still, the fact that Mondale has made many promises to many groups continues to hurt him. Allied with it is the claim that he either cannot deliver on those promises or, to do so, will have to spend billions that the Government does not have. The Wall Street Journal estimated that the Minnesotan's pledges would cost a minimum of $45 billion, and possibly twice that much. Mondale replied that the Journal had compiled "false assumptions and misleading comparisons" from campaign generalities. Indeed, Mondale's numerous promises have been described in such broad terms that it is difficult to translate them into specific legislation, much less put a price tag on them.

Perhaps his most controversial promise was his pledge to labor to "match other countries' export subsidies, product for product and dollar for dollar." The Congressional Budget Office says that this might cost $50 billion. Mondale asserts that once a few key subsidies had been met, foreign countries would get the message and voluntarily cut their own supports.

Mondale has proposed $11 billion in additional federal aid to teachers, students and public schools. He would add $3 billion to the existing Title I program of special help to students from poor families. He advocates a $4.5 billion "fund for excellence" to be used by local school districts as they wish. Mondale claims he could pay for all of this with military savings, tax surcharges on the wealthy, and five other specific measures.

Mondale may have great difficulty fulfilling his promise to women to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which requires approval by three-fourths of the states. He wants the Federal Government to eliminate sex differentials in the pay of federal workers. He says he would take steps to remedy the pay disparities between jobs traditionally held by men and those dominated by women. Under the contentious principle of "comparable worth," he would equalize pay for jobs requiring the same level of skill and effort; a counselor for the handicapped, say, might be paid the same as an equipment operator. Most economists feel that comparable worth cannot be quantified, and would be prohibitively expensive even if it could. The only way to set pay scales in a large, complex economy, they say, is through the supply and demand of the market.

Mondale's rhetoric sometimes borders on demagoguery when he addresses the elderly. "Reagan is trying to repeal Medicare by stealth," he tells residents of old-age homes, noting that the President has proposed a hike in some Medicare premiums from $14 to $40 a month. He accuses Reagan of slicing $80 billion out of future Social Security benefits without conceding that this was part of a bipartisan package to save the program from bankruptcy.

Mondale professes to relish a fight with the President over campaign promises and special interests. He cites Reagan's 1980 vow to balance the budget as the biggest unkept promise in political history. He charges that Reagan's tax and budget cuts were a sellout to corporations and the wealthy. Mondale ticks off the groups that he supports: the unemployed, workers needing retraining, schoolchildren, anyone who wants clean air and water, the elderly, blacks, Hispanics and women. "If those are special interests," he says, "count me in. I'm proud of every one of them."

Hart last week tried to exploit another potential Mondale liability, accusing him of being overly cautious. He noted that Mondale had not spoken out against the Viet Nam War until 1969, took 18 days before saying anything about the Grenada invasion, and waited months before calling for the withdrawal of Marines from Lebanon. Picking up on a maladroit comment by Mondale's media adviser Roy Spence that Mondale "dares to be cautious," Hart declared, "The future can only be secured with a different kind of President--who dares to be bold, not cautious." Mondale readily concedes that his slowness in turning against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam "was the worst mistake of my entire career." His aides insist that caution is a good thing when the international stakes are high. They claim that Mondale's deliberation contrasts favorably with Reagan's impulsiveness. The deeper question, however, is whether Mondale would be decisive in a time of crisis. Charges Cranston: "Mondale is unlikely to offer us bold leadership on the issues of war and peace."

Yet another question clouds the former Vice President's future: Can he generate a wider excitement over his candidacy? While he can rouse a hallful of supporters, Mondale is diminished by television, appearing too stiff and shrill. Reagan's presence, on the other hand, is magnified by a TV screen. Still, no other Democrat has inspired much voter emotion. "This is the most passionless campaign I've ever seen," says David Nagle, chairman of Iowa's Democratic Committee. "Nobody seems to care deeply about any of the candidates." New Hampshire Democrats seem equally bored, despite the quadrennial invasion of the candidates. Ironically, Mondale's big lead keeps enthusiasm down for him and for his rivals. Admits a downcast Glenn organizer in New Hampshire: "It's tough to get anyone excited if everyone has conceded first place."

For the other candidates, the time to generate some excitement of their own may be running out. Gerald Vento, Glenn's campaign manager, concedes that Mondale will win easily in Iowa but says Glenn could finish a strong second in New Hampshire. His man, Vento says, must do "extremely well" on Super Tuesday, March 13, when ten primaries and caucuses take place. Glenn will win in Alabama, he predicts, and must run "neck and neck" with Mondale in Georgia. Vento implies that a failure by Glenn to do so might just end his chances.

Hart and Cranston need third-place finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire to give them jumping-off points for the later primaries. Jackson hopes to run well in New Hampshire and then score an upset win in Alabama. McGovern is trying to hang on until the Super Tuesday primary in Massachusetts, where he thinks he can finish second. Askew is counting on a turnout of an ti abort ion voters to give him a respectable showing in Iowa, followed by a strong home-state vote in Florida three weeks later. As for Rollings, it will take a miracle to keep him in contention.

The Mondale planners are eager for a quick knockout. Says Fund Raiser Timothy Finchem: "Our concern is how soon we can put this thing away. It means a helluva lot in defeating Reagan." But not every Democrat is likely to simply bow out and join the Fritz blitz.

More than half of the delegates, moreover, would still have to be selected after mid-March, some in the larger states: California, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some voters might resent a process in which the outcome has been determined before they have a chance to participate. Feeling disenfranchised, they might lose interest, stay home, or turn out to register protest votes that would only hurt their party's eventual nominee. An apathetic or divided party would not be in competitive trim for the race against a popular President. Walter Mondale may be riding high, but hurdles and hazards are ahead. --ByEd Magnuson. Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale, with other bureaus

With reporting by Sam Allis