Charting the Big Shift

By KURT ANDERSEN

With his wins in New England, Hart becomes the man to beat

New Hampshire? Sure, Hart may have won, but only thanks to a bunch of idiosyncratic Yankees, Volvo-driving Boston commuters and anti-union farmers, all of them living in an antique backwater. Mondale still has the money, the fully packed delegate slates.

Maine? Granted, another Hart upset. Granted, the union muscle did not amount to much. But Mondale's aides say he was catching up at the last minute.

Vermont? A landslide for Hart, admittedly, but with thousands of Republican cross-over votes. Again, New England: some kind of regional quirk...

It had become practically impossible by week's end to explain away the swift, spectacular surge of popularity for Gary Hart. It was also practically impossible to explain. All sorts of Americans, Western conservatives and Eastern liberals, clean-cut Jaycees and long-haired factory workers, seemed to fall head over heels for the concept of Gary Hart. For a year he had been one more dark horse in a forgettable pack of dark horses, a sleek but uninspiring Senator from Colorado. His campaign of "new ideas" went nowhere. Walter Mondale, the shoo-in, treated him like an earnest graduate assistant.

The cathartic upset in New Hampshire seemed to liberate voters last week in nearby Maine (Hart over Mondale, 50% to 44%) and neighboring Vermont (Hart, 70% to 20%). That infectious sense of political possibility caught on and spread west and to the Deep South, where the contenders, variously giddy and panicked, prepared for this week's contests.* "The situation has changed totally," said Joan Bowen, Hart's coordinator in Alabama, where virtually no organization existed last month. "With a victory under his belt, people say, 'Hey, I like him!' They're coming out of the woodwork now."

Last Saturday afternoon Hart won 61% of the Wyoming caucus vote to Mondale's 36%, adding to his political velocity. By then Hart had achieved a kind of effervescent mass appeal, his popularity fueling itself. His surge was not altogether political: a CBS News exit poll in Vermont found his greatest strength among self-described conservatives, while a poll in Massachusetts found that he is preferred most by liberals. Quickest to embrace him were upscale members of the baby-boom generation, known as "initial tryers" to professional marketers. "If you've got a new concept or a new product," said Atlanta Pollster Claibourne Darden, "those are the first people who are going to examine it and evaluate it."

In a matter of days, even hours, after the New Hampshire primary, polltakers from Boston to Birmingham detected shifts in voter sentiment so rapid and large that at first they seemed a matter of sampling error, a computer blip. Vast numbers of citizens who had barely heard of Hart in mid-February had decided, literally overnight, that they would like to see him become the Democratic nominee. Three weeks ago Mondale thought he had Massachusetts locked up. Only ten days later, Mondale had written off the state. "It's the most incredible shift in public opinion I've ever seen," said Chester Atkins, Massachusetts party chairman. "Nothing else even comes close."

In late February a CBS News poll found that Hart had the support of 7% of Democrats for the nomination; by last week that figure had shot up to 38%. A Gallup poll completed last Tuesday, ages ago by the speed-of-light standards of this race, found that among all American voters, Gary Hart was preferred over Ronald Reagan by 52% to 43%. In the same Gallup sampling, Reagan beat Mondale (50% to 45%) and Senator John Glenn (52% to 41%). Of course, the voters scrambling to support Hart might leave him tomorrow, or next week in the important Illinois primary. Indeed, most polls showed that his following was not deeply committed. Hart must be concerned that his support is faddish and could collapse.

But for the moment Hartmania infused the campaign. Newspaper pundits and political analysts, professional know-it-alls caught knowing almost nothing, chased after the phenomenon. Their continuing embarrassing bewilderment made many of them uneasy. "You can feel a terrible shaking of the earth," said New Republic Editor Hendrik Hertzberg, "as new conventional wisdom struggles to be born." New York Times Columnist Tom Wicker observed that "the publicity that the press gave to the 'upset' of its own erroneous expectations" was responsible for Hart's sudden, starry prominence.

Hart himself ventured a pretty good explanation last week. "What I think I may have tapped," he said, "is a reservoir much vaster than anyone ever contemplated, [a reservoir of] that pent-up, latent need to reidentify with national purpose." Hart, a canny political tactician, has taken full advantage of the gusher. He knew the media, eager for a loner-strikes-it-rich drama, would devote columns of type and hours of television air time to him. "It's like riding the wave," says Kathy Bushkin, his press secretary. "There's not much we can do to direct it."

Not much, perhaps, but Hart skillfully exploited the burst of TV exposure. His elaborate policy prescriptions were distilled to catch phrases such as "new leadership" and "move into the future." His adoption of John F. Kennedy's mannerisms became more blatant. Addressing the Alabama legislature, Hart chopped the air in J.F.K. style and recapitulated the 1961 Inaugural Address. Said Hart: "We must once again have Presidents...who ask what we can do for our country and not what our country can do for us."

Hart had been the campaign's cold, hopeless egghead; now he was confident and beaming. Hart had used Mondale's pile of endorsements to make the former Vice President look beholden and dull. Last week, however, when Hart was endorsed by disparate bigwigs--South Carolina Senator Ernest Rollings, former House Speaker Carl Albert, a trio of liberal Los Angeles Congressmen--Mondale could only joke about the irony.

Three weeks ago, Mondale seemed to be sauntering directly toward the nomination. He smiled always and stayed above the fray. His campaign logistics, from scheduling to delegate counting, were said to be unprecedented in sophistication. Suddenly cracks began to appear. In Birmingham he showed up to shake hands at the wrong factory gate; in Florida reporters covering him had to pile into taxis--the press bus had disappeared. By the middle of last week he looked desperate ("I'm in trouble, I need your help"), making lame excuses for losing primaries ("We didn't really contest Vermont") and attacking Hart for petty deviations from liberal doctrine.

Maine may have been the most telling display of Hart's strength and Mondale's weakness. Mondale had tried hard there, outspending Hart $400,000 to $40,000. Perhaps a third of the Democrats were from union households, Mondale's supposed mainstays. And voters chose delegates at caucuses, the system that favors Mondale's efficient organization. In Vermont, Hart campaigned extensively and was given the edge in the final week. But the dimensions of his victory--51,703 votes to 14,896--were stunning.

The political fight promptly turned mean. First Hart gloated, but after he was booed by an audience of Democratic regulars in Boston, he tried to be a graceful winner--at least on network TV and in interviews with national journalists. "Walter Mondale and I share a deep and abiding commitment to the values of the Democratic Party," he said, looking relaxed. "Our values are very similar, and that's why we're both Democrats." Mondale, however, would not play along. "For a Democrat," Mondale said, Hart's "concern expressed for people who are suffering the most is pretty limited." Hart slashed back. "Compassion is not just getting red in the face and waving the arms," he said.

Mondale was suddenly deriding Hart as if Hart were Reagan and not a kindred Democrat. The former Vice President accused his opponent of declining to fight for the nuclear freeze. Mondale made a tub-thumping speech in Tampa suggesting that Hart is for "Big Oil" and "the hospital lobby," that he "attacks entitlements" and that he would force "working families to pay more taxes." (At a 1979 Senate campaign fund raiser for Hart, Mondale had extravagantly praised the Coloradan. "Gary Hart is one of the most decent and compassionate public servants I have ever known in my life. He is brilliant...thoughtful and perceptive.")

At times last week it seemed as if the campaign's speedy whirl might reduce all the candidates to caricatures of themselves. Mondale struggled to make a virtue of his pure liberalism. "I don't know what else to do," he said. "What you see is what you get." In Florida, standing in a grove of winter-ravaged oranges, Mondale conceded that Senator Edward Kennedy had refused to endorse him; at that moment, the once invincible candidate seemed an authentic underdog. Hart, meanwhile, was using the words "future" and "new" over and over again. The candidate of youth was often asked how a year had been lopped off his age in the mid-1960s. "If I had wanted to appear younger," he insisted, "I would have done it by more than a year."

Glenn made fun of Hart's J.F.K. evocations but then rhetorically fumbled. "I'm not trying to imitate anyone," he said, "but John Glenn." In a sense he is doing a self-impersonation: after down-playing his astronaut background through much of the campaign, he used "the right stuff' as a tag line in his Southern television ads and played up his military past. In Pine Bluff, Ark., he piloted an antique Stearman training biplane ("That was fun!" he said) and at Ozark, Ala., drove an M-60 tank in figure eights ("That's fun!").

But the South was not just fun and games. The candidates tended to their big-picture strategies too. For Glenn, said his aide Boyd Campbell, Alabama was "the goal-line stand, the whole ball of wax." Mondale predicted he would win unionized Alabama (214,000 AFL-CIO members), where the Mondale family has campaigned in 63 of 67 counties, and was also hoping to finish first in Georgia. In the South, Hart might be satisfied to win only Florida. Jesse Jackson's biggest test had arrived: if he does not do well in Southern states where blacks constitute 20% to 25% of the electorate, his role in the nomination process is sure to shrink considerably. His federal matching funds will stop flowing early next month if he does not get at least 20% of one primary's vote.

Whatever the results, Jackson and Glenn seemed peripheral to the central issue between Hart and Mondale: the character of American liberalism and, even more clearly, the generational claims on the Democratic Party. "This is not just a 5 horse race," Mondale told an attentive audience in Tampa. "This "has become a battle for the soul of the party and for the future of this country." For Hart and other neoliberals, standard-issue Great Society policy should be replaced when it does not work and reshaped when it lacks political support.

Said Hart in Birmingham last week: "I would say the principal difference is one of outlook. It's the formative experience an individual's generation goes through. For many people my age and younger, Viet Nam, the assassinations, Watergate...have been very powerful." He has a point: Mondale, 56, is a young member of the New Deal generation, while Hart, 47, is an old man in his 1960s cohort. Youngish voters clearly see Hart on their side of the epochal line. Charles Reed, 42, an aide to Florida Governor Robert Graham, was a bit cautious about Hart but not about the political winds he is riding. "We still don't know everything about Hart," Reed said. "But if he holds up under scrutiny, and this generation takes him as theirs, then it could be the start of a fire storm." --By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Sam All is with Mondale and Jack E. White with Hart, and other bureaus

* Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island will hold primaries; Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Michigan, Mississippi, Nevada, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Washington will hold caucuses. At stake: 1,003 delegates.

With reporting by Sam Allis, Mondale, Jack E. White