The Goal: A Landslide

By Evan Thomas

Reagan pads his margin while Mondale tries to buffer his party

For more than two years, he had run and run. He had stumped in more cities, slept in more hotel beds, flown more miles, spoken more words than any other presidential candidate in history. Now, sitting in his shirtsleeves in a Milwaukee hotel last week, Mondale got the bad news: barring a miracle, his long quest for the White House was over.

The grim tidings came in the form of polling results read to him by James Johnson, his campaign chairman. The unflappable Johnson was matter-of-fact, but the numbers could hardly have been worse. Not only had the Democratic challenger failed to gain on Ronald Reagan after the second debate, his last clear shot to catch up, but he had fallen even further behind. Said Johnson: "It looks very tough." By Wednesday, Mondale's daily tracking polls showed him trailing Reagan by 16 points, a dispiriting 6-point drop in the four days after the debate.

Mondale was undaunted. To his aides, he insisted that the large and buoyant audiences he had been attracting all week were not "loser's crowds." He simply did not believe the polls. He went out the next morning in Cleveland and shouted to a cheering rally of 5,000 people: "The victory march begins here. I can feel it. We're going to win." By week's end, however, he was on the defensive, denying reports that Johnson had told him that Reagan's lead was insurmountable. He was obviously hoping to head off a stream of gloomy headlines that could dog him through Election Day. "I'm going to campaign with everything I've got," Mondale vowed.

The impression that Mondale's campaign was nearing its last hurrah was reinforced by public opinion polls taken after the second presidential debate. A Washington Post/ ABC survey showed Reagan's lead steady at twelve points. The New York Times/ CBS poll put Reagan ahead by 17 points, a gain of 3%. A TIME/ Yankelovich poll showed Mondale trailing by a whopping 24 points, 54% to 30% (see following story). In London, the U.S. presidential race is considered so foregone that bookmakers refuse to take bets on it.

Reagan's polls had the President leading by 20 points, and aides were making a determined effort to avoid appearing complacent. "We're not taking anything for granted," insisted Edward Rollins, political director of the Reagan-Bush campaign. "We know we've got a lot of work to do." In fact, the Reaganauts are not worrying about whether their candidate will win. They are worrying about how much he will win by, and whether the President's coattails can carry into office enough Republican Congressmen to complete the "Reagan Revolution."

The Republicans' goal is to win back the 26 House seats lost to Democrats in the '82 election. Such a turnaround, they believe, will give Reagan working control of the House, since many Southern Democrats ("Boll Weevils") can be counted on to support the President. It would take a change of 51 seats to give the G.O.P an actual majority, an unrealistic prospect considering the large number of entrenched Democratic incumbents. The Republicans confidently assume they will maintain control of the Senate, where they now hold a 55-to-45 edge.

Reagan will try personally to help out a few precarious Republican incumbents in the Senate with campaign swings through their states over the next week. But the Reaganauts' main concern is scoring a big national victory. Even if Mondale manages to cut the popular vote margin to less than 10 points, Republican strategists believe, Reagan can achieve an electoral landslide that would give him enormous psychological leverage over Congress next year. Their definition of a landslide: anything as big as the 489 electoral votes they won in 1980.

With little more than a week of the campaign left, Mondale is ahead in only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia. He has at least a shot at winning more than a dozen more states: New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Maryland, California, Ohio, Illinois, Rhode Island. But the South and most of the West now seem out of reach, and Mondale's aides appear to be facing up to that reality. Indeed, according to some campaign insiders, Mondale plans to concentrate on winning back traditionally Democratic voters, particularly in the industrial Midwest, in an attempt to keep Reagan from sweeping away Democratic Congressmen and state officials. Says a Mondale strategist: "He is determined that his candidacy not be used by the Republicans as a weapon to hurt the Democratic Party."

Mondale will make a last foray into California and Texas this week, but some Lone Star Democrats are already complaining bitterly that the Mondale campaign is using money originally targeted for a get-out-the-vote effort in Texas to retire his heavy debt left over from the primaries. "That means," says one Texas political consultant who is an avid Mondale supporter, "that the Mondale leadership has thrown in the towel."

"The bottom line is that this is an incumbent President who never lost his grip," says one Mondale aide. White House strategists say that the President was shaken only once, when he stumbled in the first debate. Otherwise Reagan has been able to float along, sounding broad themes, flexing the power of his office, and reinforcing his image as a strong leader. Rather than outline what he would try to do in the next four years, he contrasts his first-term record against the "Carter-Mondale" Administration. He asks voters, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" and boasts that the "misery index" (the rate of unemployment plus the rate of inflation) has dropped from 20% to 11% in his term.

Reagan also invokes bitter memories of the Soviets marching into Afghanistan and the Iranians holding 52 U.S. hostages for more than a year. "I'm proud to say that during these last four years not an inch of territory has been lost to the Communists," he declares. Last week he presided over a White House ceremony celebrating the first anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Grenada. On a swing through California, he stood in front of a production model of the B-l bomber at the Rockwell International plant in Palmdale and reminded workers there that the last Administration had tried to kill the plane. Said Reagan: "Mondale has made a career out of weakening America's armed forces."

With the country at peace and the economy booming, any incumbent President would have been difficult to beat. But Reagan has not simply basked in the nation's sense of wellbeing, he has nurtured and defined it. With his reassuring voice and sunny disposition, he exudes an optimism that is astonishingly contagious. Says Reagan Aide Richard Darman: "The country's concept of itself is a crucial element in the size of Ronald Reagan's lead."

At first Mondale tried to dispute Reagan's rosy optimism by warning that the President had mortgaged the future with his huge deficits. Reagan's tax cuts may have made the rich richer, Mondale declared, but his budget cuts have created more poor people. Mondale's case may have had merits, but few listened to it. Says Washington Media Analyst John Merriam: "The public doesn't want to think about the poor . . . Mondale might have been able to make an issue of fairness, but he never dramatized it." Reagan, on the other hand, was able to make middle-class voters identify with the upwardly mobile by his preachments on economic opportunity.

Mondale next tried candor, saying that he would raise taxes to cut the deficit. Though Mondale's tax plan would not touch the poor and would cost families earning $30,000 a year less than $100, Reagan was able to frighten voters by claiming that it would set back the "average family $1,800 a year." The problem was neatly summed up last week by a student in Youngstown, Ohio. "I have a personal debt, and I can't afford taxes being raised," he said. "The national debt might hit me later in life but I've got to put bread on the table right now."

When the deficit fizzled as an issue, Mondale began harping on Reagan's competence to lead, picturing the President as dangerously detached: "a Commander in Chief who is not commanding and who isn't chief." Mondale used this theme most effectively in discussions of arms control, charging that Reagan's ignorance about nuclear weaponry doomed any chance of an agreement between the superpowers. Mondale also discovered, somewhat belatedly, that he could stir audiences by placing Reagan in the embrace of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of Moral Majority. Last week the Democrat seized on a letter Reagan wrote to Richard Nixon in 1960 comparing J.F.K.'s policies to Marxism and Hitler's National Socialism (see box).

But none of these thrusts inflicted lasting damage. Only Reagan, it seemed, could really hurt himself. When he appeared tentative and somewhat confused in the first debate, his age suddenly became an issue in the campaign. When he seemed in command in the second debate, the issue just as quickly receded.

Many political pros have long believed that Mondale's problem is not his message but his manner. "For the race to turn into a personality contest is devastating for Mondale," says Merriam. "Mondale's only hope was to win on the issues. He has more support on the issues than Reagan does, but except for U.S.-Soviet relations, issues have just about dropped out of sight."

Mondale never did find any overarching vision or themes that could match Reagan's simply stated program of less government and more defense. He conceded last week that even his best shots, such as his opposition to Reagan's Star Wars proposal, did not seem to be "resonating with the voters." So he began preaching his deepest beliefs, the gospel handed down to him by his mentor, Hubert Humphrey: that government is a force for good, that society has a duty to care for its weak and poor and dispossessed. Rising at 5 a.m., hitting three or four states a day, drawing large, enthusiastic crowds (20,000 in Philadelphia, 15,000 in Ann Arbor), Mondale seemed strangely liberated. He quieted thousands jammed into a Cleveland shopping arcade by quoting John Winthrop, the 17th century Puritan who envisioned a shining "city upon a hill." Mondale emphasized Winthrop's words: "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."*

However heartfelt and moving, Mondale's last appeal seems no match for the relentless Reagan campaign. In the final week Reagan's message will fill the air waves. A $19 million get-out-the-vote drive has already added 6 million Republicans to the rolls, and the G.O.P. has signed up legions of canvassers for Election Day. Says Political Director Rollins: "We know where our voters are and we'll turn them out."

Reagan's fine-tuned political machine was on display last week in Medford, Ore. To watch it closely was to see what had confounded and beset Walter Mondale for months. As the President mesmerized the crowd of 5,000, Darman closely followed a text labeled "core speech." He noted every line that drew applause with an asterisk and every line that drew a laugh with the notation "HA." Happy faces glowed in the pink sunset. About the only tense listener was Dale Schuman, owner of the Magic Man costume and fun shop, whose job it was to release the balloons at precisely the right moment. Reagan sounded his final call to glory: "America's best days are yet to come," he declared. "You ain't seen nothin' yet." The band swung into a country tune, God Bless the U.S.A. "Hit the balloons," said Schuman. As 10,000 of them--red, white and blue--rose into the darkening sky, the awed crowd waved tiny American flags and swayed to the music. Tears formed, to be rubbed quickly away, lest a neighbor see. It had been another bravura performance, calculated to make everyone feel good, very good--and to keep Ronald Reagan in the White House four more years.

--By Evan Thomas.

Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale and Laurence I. Barrett with the President

* Reagan often uses the "shining city" line to describe America as a land of security and success. At the Democratic Convention. New York Governor Mario Cuomo bitingly remarked that a shining city may be what Reagan sees "from the veranda of his ranch" but that he fails to see despair in the slums.

With reporting by Sam Allis, Laurence I. Barrett