Aiming for a good show

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

It should be a heady, optimistic time for Walter Mondale. The bitter and exhausting primary campaign is a fading memory, and his coronation as Democratic presidential nominee is at hand. It is his golden chance to get the drive against Ronald Reagan off to a rousing start by performing crisply some of the normally pleasant rituals of leadership: selecting a running mate, pulling the party together for the fall campaign, writing the script for the convention that next week will surely hand him the nomination he has so long sought.

Yet somehow the preconvention period has turned into a time of pressure and worry in the Mondale camp. There is pressure from feminists to choose a woman as his vice-presidential candidate, which threatens to put him in a damned-if-he-does-and-damned-if-he-doesn't dilemma. And there is tension over the still uncertain prospects of striking a deal with Jesse Jackson that would avoid both a disruptive convention battle and any appearance that Mondale had surrendered principle for the sake of party peace.

Worst of all, perhaps, the latest polls show Mondale badly losing ground with the voters while attempting to steer between these minefields. Gallup now finds the former Vice President running 19 points behind Reagan, a gap more than twice as wide as the one that existed a month ago, when Mondale became the all but official Democratic nominee. A New York Times/CBS News poll puts the current Reagan lead at 15 points. Surveys this early in the campaign are no reliable guide to the outcome in November, but senior Democratic leaders are concerned. The polls, says one, "mean that since the end of the primaries to today, Walter Mondale has only turned off more people."

There were signs, though, that the approach of the convention was beginning to concentrate Democrats' minds on the campaign against Reagan rather than on their internal quarrels. Twenty-three female Democratic leaders visited Mondale in Minnesota and down-played the threat the National Organization of Women had made the weekend before to stage a floor fight for a woman vice-presidential candidate. NOW's president, Judy Goldsmith, stressed that nomination of a woman from the floor would be "a last resort." Mondale soothingly commented: "I understand .. . that's politics."

Jackson met with Mondale in Kansas City, where both had gone to address the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and at a press conference afterward the two leaders were no more than stiffly correct. Jackson sounded ambiguously conciliatory. He spoke both of "matters yet unresolved" and of "a time to cooperate." He pledged "a lively convention" but added, "Every debate does not mean division." The Mondale camp's hopeful interpretation: While Jackson's forces will wage floor fights in support of four amendments to the party platform, there is a strong chance that the battles will be conducted without great heat and that Jackson will urge his legions of black followers to vote for the ticket in November.

None of this means that Mondale's problems in organizing the convention are necessarily over. He still risks giving the appearance of having caved in to feminist pressure if he chooses a woman vice-presidential candidate, or of grievously disappointing many of his female followers if he does not. Until the convention is over, Mondale's backers will be nervous about what the mercurial Jackson might do; even if Jackson does climb aboard the Mondale bandwagon, he might turn out to be more of a liability than an asset on the campaign trail.

The Democrats were working feverishly to make sure they put on a ringing rather than a raucous show once the convention opens hi San Francisco next Monday night. For the first time in three decades they will not be assured gavel-to-gavel coverage on network TV. All three networks are abandoning their traditional formats for a mixture of live action and taped highlights in segments of varying length. On some nights, portions of the proceedings on one network may be competing against entertainment programming on another. Similar arrangements will be in effect for the Republican Convention in Dallas in August. The networks' reasoning is simple: gavel-to-gavel coverage is very expensive, and the number of viewers it attracts, in the words of NBC Anchor Tom Brokaw, "has been diminishing and diminishing."

Mondale's forces have tentatively lined up a parade of some of the party's best speakers to stir up interest. Monday night, after the opening ceremonies, New York Governor Mario Cuomo will deliver the keynote address. Cuomo has a reputation for thoughtful as well as polished oratory; he is a New Deal liberal who appeals to old-fashioned family values.

Tuesday come the platform debates, five in all. Jackson's forces will offer minority planks calling for the U.S. to adopt a "no first use" policy on nuclear weapons, cut defense spending sharply, commit itself to enforce affirmative-action goals in the hiring of minorities, and end the second, or runoff, primaries used in ten states when no candidate wins a majority of the vote. (Jackson argues that runoffs are discriminatory because blacks have a better chance of winning a plurality in a multicandidate field than outpolling a white in a head-to-head race.) Gary Hart, who commands roughly 1,250 of the 3,933 delegates and is still under consideration for the second spot on the ticket, will push a plan advocating that the nation seek remedies other than the use of military force to resolve international conflicts; he will specifically mention the Persian Gulf. That will renew a primary debate in which Mondale successfully argued that the use of force, while never desirable, is sometimes unavoidable.

Convention planners are allowing roughly an hour for the debate and vote on each of the five minority planks, which are all virtually certain to be defeated. The planners' hope is to get all the controversy settled in an atmosphere of reasonable civility before Jackson mounts the podium on Tuesday night to deliver what is certain to be a rousing and rhythmic speech. The occasion will serve as a rare prime-time showcase for the free-verse Jacksonian oratory that stirred predominantly black audiences to near frenzy during the primary campaign.

On Wednesday night, the featured speaker is Edward Kennedy, who may place Mondale's name in nomination. The Massachusetts Senator is an inconsistent orator, but he can soar when the spirit moves him. Indeed, one of Mondale's minor problems is that his own acceptance speech Thursday night might sound a bit tame after the performances of Cuomo, Jackson and Kennedy. Mondale may ask a woman to introduce him, especially if he has chosen a male running mate and needs a show of solidarity from the women who will constitute slightly fewer than half of all the convention delegates.

Some of the most intriguing TV pictures, however, are likely to be flashed from outside the fortress-like George R. Moscone Convention Center.* Street demonstrations are an unofficial part of any national convention, and in San Francisco every kind of group from Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority to advocates of legalized marijuana seems to be planning a rally of some sort.

The big parades are scheduled for Sunday, when most delegates and reporters are arriving. Police expect 100,000 homosexuals to join a march from the Castro Street gay neighborhood to the Moscone Center, and an equal number of labor demonstrators to parade along Market Street to an AFL-CIO rally. Fortunately, the routes of the two groups will not cross. Police have set aside four acres of a parking lot across the street from the main entrance to the center, and 25 groups, ranging from the Marijuana Initiative to anti-Reagan rock musicians, have filed to use it more or less continuously. Even the Ku Klux Klan is said to be planning a demonstration.

Security will be tight for the roughly 5,300 delegates and alternates (who will be heavily outnumbered by the 12,000 print and TV journalists expected to attend). Delegates will be escorted by the California Highway Patrol from San Francisco International Airport to their hotels, and they will be hauled to the Moscone Center aboard buses. Inside the mostly underground and mostly windowless center, the delegates will be under watchful eyes too. Taking no chances on a surprise insurrection, the Mondale forces plan to put a staggering total of 600 to 700 whips on the floor, each relaying the word from Mondale headquarters to a handful of delegates.

Mondale's backers are counting on the convention hoopla, which will be led by hundreds of delegates from organized labor, to give their boss a badly needed boost in the opinion polls. Says one Democratic National Committee official: "We have a real opportunity to bring Mondale within five points of Reagan after the convention." That may be wishful thinking, but a well-managed convention could convey the take-charge image that Mondale has failed to project so far.

Since late June, Mondale's principal activity has been interviewing a parade of possible running mates invited to his $200,000, Frank Lloyd Wright-style home at the end of a winding private drive off Thrush Lane in suburban North Oaks, Minn. The meetings, now totaling seven, have settled into a routine.

The smiling candidate arrives, with spouse, by motorcade; Mondale crosses the brick bridge, spanning a small hollow that separates the house from its surroundings, to greet them and escort them inside; after about two hours, the participants re-emerge for a meeting with the press at which Mondale says very nearly the same thing about each interviewee.

Samples from last week: New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro has done a "superb job" as head of the convention's platform committee; San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros would make "a superb Vice President." Friday's talk with Kentucky Governor Martha Layne Collins was "useful and wide-ranging"--just like all six previous interviews.

To many voters and some party leaders, the succession of interviews seems less a display of thoughtful leadership than, to use Jackson's words, "a p.r. parade." The charge is that Mondale has been too obviously wooing party blocs: women (Ferraro, Collins and San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein); blacks (Mayors Thomas Bradley of Los Angeles and Wilson Goode of Philadelphia); Hispanics (Cisneros). Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas was the lone white male.

While some of those visiting North Oaks are legitimate contenders, political pros cannot believe that others, such as Cisneros and Collins, have enough experience or clout outside their own constituencies to be under serious consideration. Mondale heightened these misgivings by saying that he might pick someone who had not come to North Oaks.

Keynoter Cuomo, meeting Mondale last week in Brookline, Mass., for a fund-raising affair, pleaded with the about-to-be nominee to end the parade and "make an early commitment." This might make Mondale seem decisive, but it also could dissipate the convention's remaining drama. Mondale is trying to arrange more interviews for this week, though a leading prospective invitee to North Oaks, Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers, is putting on what Mondale aides view as a Hamlet-like show of indecision about whether or not to come. he V.P. procession has had one highly uncomfortable result for Mondale: he and his advisers badly miscalculated how much feminist pressure he would inspire with his overtures to prospective women candidates. Not only did NOW threaten a floor fight, Goldsmith went so far as to talk of winning ?one. The realization spread that a -- pitched battle over Mondale's run-Sning mate would create a disastrous impression of a presidential candidate incapable of controlling his own party. The 23 women who journeyed to Minnesota to meet Mondale last Wednesday assured him they intended no such thing.

They said their demand was that Mondale choose someone dedicated to feminist principles, not necessarily a woman. Mondale's aides nonetheless do not rule out the possibility that a woman may be nominated from the floor if the candidate does not choose one himself. Says one: "If it happens, it's a diversion, and we don't need any more diversions."

Mondale's advisers are not yet totally convinced that a woman on the ticket would be a plus.

Georgia Democratic Chairman Bert Lance, for one, thinks a woman might hurt Mondale in the South and in blue-collar areas of the Midwest. But if Mondale chooses a man, he risks dimming the enthusiasm of some of his strongest followers, whose hopes have been raised very high. No one expects feminist leaders to sit out a campaign against Reagan, who is anathema to them. But one Mondale strategist concedes there is a question about "the number of phone calls that will be made, how many hours will be put in at the lower levels." Mondale could also lose the chance of winning a new constituency of women who are not political activists but might vote for him if he were willing to take the unprecedented step of putting a woman a heartbeat away from the White House.

One ironic effect of the feminist enthusiasm may have been to diminish the vice-presidential chances of Congresswoman Ferraro, once thought to be leading the female half of the procession. Before meeting with Mondale, she had said she might allow her name to be offered from the floor as a symbolic gesture. After that session, she asserted that she would not be part of any challenge to his vice-presidential choice, but her edgy, tight-lipped demeanor indicated her earlier statement had done her cause no good. The consensus among Mondale watchers was that Feinstein had impressed him much more, though she has the political liabilities of being Jewish and married three times (she was divorced from her first husband; her second died). Among the men invited to North Oaks, Mayor Bradley of Los Angeles seemed to score best. Of those who did not go to North Oaks, Cuomo might be at the top of Mondale's list if he could be talked out of his 1982 pledge to serve a full term in the New York Governor's mansion. Cuomo shows no signs of wavering.

Then, of course, there is Gary Hart, who matched Mondale almost vote for vote, though far from delegate for delegate, in the primaries and caucuses. The Colorado Senator last week came about as close as he could to saying he would take No. 2 without formally abandoning his campaign for No. 1. Asked at a press conference in Chicago what he thought of a Mondale-Hart ticket, he replied, "I like the combination, but I would prefer the reverse order." One reason Hart might take V.P. is that he has a $3 million campaign debt. Says one adviser: "If he doesn't get on the ticket, he won't get any help from the party on that debt. It would take him at least a year to clear it. Then he would have to raise a couple million more to run for the Senate again in 1986, then $25 million more to run for President in '88--all from the same people."

Hart's vice-presidential chances, however, could hardly have been helped by an article in Vanity Fair magazine quoting him as saying that Marilyn Youngbird, an Indian woman described as a "radiant divorcee," was his "spiritual adviser." The article, written by Gail Sheehy, an experienced magazine journalist (New York) and author (Passages), said that Hart and Youngbird had attended an Indian ceremony that was, in Youngbird's words, "sensual ... they brushed the front, and back of our bodies with eagle feathers."

Sheehy added that the Senator had accepted Youngbird's assurance that he had been chosen by supernatural forces to "save nature from destruction." Hart denied that Youngbird was any kind of guru and said the ceremony had been an innocuous dedication of a park. On top of that flap, Hart was quoted in the Denver Post as calling Mondale's interviews in North Oaks "something very close to pandering." His lame comment: "I don't recall the context."

The eagle-feather episode was merely a minor diversion in comparison with what one Mondale strategist says "is still the No. 1 problem around the convention": Jackson's role. Mondale Campaign Manager Robert Beckel detected a cooperative mood during a three-hour private dinner over ribs with Jackson in Kansas City Monday night, and after the two candidates met for two hours the next day, they sounded warily friendly. Jackson handed Mondale a list of black and Hispanic women who, he said, should be considered as potential Vice Presidents. More substantive, Jackson pledged that "together we will prevail in November" and even conceded that runoff primaries do not invariably discriminate against black office seekers. That indicated that Jackson might accept defeat gracefully on his minority planks and concentrate his incandescent oratory at the convention, and during the campaign, against Reagan.

Some Jackson supporters continue to talk a hard line about what Mondale must do to win their man's enthusiastic backing. They say Jackson will demand that Mondale appoint key members of Jackson's staff to top campaign posts, grant Jackson considerable influence over how the party spends its voter-registration funds, and give him a voice in appointments to the party commission that will study changes in the rules for selecting Democratic convention delegates in 1988. Above all, they say, Mondale must make a public concession of some kind to Jackson--never mind if that further troubles Mondale's Jewish supporters, not to mention other white voters. Says one Jackson adviser: "Mondale better realize that in November, 50% of Jews are going to vote Republican anyway." (In 1980, only 39% did so, and in 1976 only 34%.)

Speaking to the N.A.A.C.P. last week, Mondale called Jackson's campaign "a victory for all Americans." But he also insisted to reporters that his private talk with Jackson in Kansas City was a "discussion" and "not a negotiation," indicating that he wants to preserve some distance while still enlisting Jackson's support--a delicate task indeed. For all Jackson's unquestionable success at pulling black voters to the polls, he turns off many white voters, and presumably some blacks too, by inappropriate effusions like his praise for Fidel Castro and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas on his Latin American tour two weeks ago. Reagan last week foreshadowed the likely Republican attack on such ventures by asserting in a TV interview: "There is a law, the Logan Act,* with regard to unauthorized personnel going to other countries and in effect negotiating with foreign governments." Noting that Jackson had airily talked of following up his success in winning release of some Cuban prisoners by journeying to the Soviet Union to talk about freedom for Dissident Physicist Andrei Sakharov, the President said such a trip could complicate "things that might be going on in quiet diplomacy channels."

In the end, the avowed hope of Mondale aides for a "boring" convention is unlikely to be fulfilled. Some suspense, certainly over Jackson's role, is likely to linger until the opening bell sounds, and probably beyond that point. Democrats being Democrats, there will almost surely be enough spirited debate, if not acrimonious division, to make interesting theater.

It will take far more than a socko show in prime time, however, to give Mondale much chance against Reagan in November. Somehow he must simul taneously keep the support of his Jewish backers, attract the votes of blacks, par ticularly the younger ones who have been moved to register by Jackson, and appeal to women who think it is time that one of the parties put a female on the ticket. Even if he can perform that intricate balancing act, he faces the un enviable task of campaigning at a time of dropping unemployment, low inflation and no urgent foreign crisis, against a President who has proved remarkably adroit at claiming credit for all the visi ble successes and avoiding blame for any of the policy failures. Even to short en the odds, Mondale must pull together in a united effort all the multiple constituencies and showy personalities of his fractious party. That is fitting enough.

Such an effort, exercised in the nation as a whole, goes by the name of presidential leadership. -By George J. Church.

*Named for the mayor who was shot and killed by former Supervisor Dan White in 1978. *Enacted in 1799 after a U.S. doctor, George Logan, went to Paris to urge French officials to seek better relations with the U.S. Only one person, Kentucky Farmer Francis Flournoy, has ever been indicted under the act. He was charged in 1803 with violating the law by advocating that a new nation allied with France be created in the American West. The Louisiana Purchase rendered the issue obsolete, and Flournoy was never brought to trial.

With reporting by Sam Allis, William Stewart