Getting a Second Look

By George J. Church.

The shift in momentum began to be felt almost as soon as the cameras blinked off on the first debate. In Manhattan on the morning after, Walter Mondale exuberantly flashed a double thumbs-up signal countless times to a crowd of tens of thousands that cheered as he led the Columbus Day parade up Fifth Avenue. In Cincinnati the next day, he swung a baseball bat after Ohio Governor Richard Celeste introduced him to another enthusiastic crowd as "the Louisville Slugger," a term the most zealous Democrat would not have dreamed of using before the debate in that Kentucky city. In Columbus later in the week, Mondale broke into a litany of sentences addressed to the President that began "You may think . . ."; after each the crowd, picking up a line from the debate, joined him in shouting "It just ain't so!" As at many Mondale rallies in September, a group of hecklers began a pro-Reagan chant. But this time the hecklers had trouble making themselves heard above a spontaneous (and obscene) counterchant set up by Mondale supporters.

"It's like a huge switch was thrown," exulted Mondale in an interview with TIME. "Enormous crowds, but not just that; the nature of the crowds too. Every time you shake hands, it's like a pile-up on the goal line. Several hundred people trying to get to you. I've never experienced anything like that."

While Mondale glowed, on the attack at last, Ronald Reagan grumped, on the defensive for the first time in the campaign. The loser in Louisville by common consent, the President seemed off stride early in the week; he meandered through speeches in Charlotte, N.C., and Baltimore, drawing only polite applause from friendly audiences. But by midweek he had regained his form. He began to counterpunch, denouncing by name an adversary he had loftily ignored in most of his appearances before the debate. "My opponent in this campaign has made a career out of weakening America's armed forces!" cried Reagan at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Warren, Mich. Edward Rollins, director of the Reagan campaign, left no doubt that Reagan would voice this new tough line until the vote. Said Rollins: "The debate made Mondale a credible candidate. He took some of his negatives down. We have to put some negatives back on him."

The President seemed especially nettled by widespread speculation that his hesitation and fumbling in the debate meant he was feeling, and showing, all of his 73 years. On the White House lawn, Reagan remarked to reporters that "if I had as much makeup on as he [Mondale] did, I'd have looked younger too"-a surprisingly catty comment from a President who before had always joked about his age. (Reagan does not use makeup for his television appearances. Nor, he claimed last week, did he ever wear any "when I was in pictures." An old Hollywood makeup artist promptly surfaced to say that he had slapped some makeup on Reagan before an episode of Wagon Train.) Meanwhile, the President's men broke into public recriminations about the debate preparations as they searched for explanations of what went wrong. Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, general chairman of the Reagan campaign, charged that Reagan had been badly served by White House aides who had plied him with facts and figures and given him too little time to relax. Said Laxalt: "He was brutalized by a briefing process that didn't make any sense."

So the debate changed the tone and atmosphere of the campaign. Did it change the odds on who would win the election? Not much. Not yet. The same polls in which respondents judged Mondale to be the winner of the Louisville confrontation disclosed a rise of only four to five points in the percentage of people who actually intend to vote for him, a shift within the margin of error of most of the polls. Those gains left Mondale trailing Reagan by 15 to 22 points in the national surveys. Interestingly, the President's private polls put the gap at 14 points, down four points in the first four days after the debate, partly because Reagan Pollster Richard Wirthlin cautiously includes more women, blacks and Hispanics in his samples than some other pulse takers do. But even that number poses an enormous handicap for Mondale to overcome in the three weeks remaining before Election Day, and Wirthlin's polls showed little movement after midweek.

But numbers can change, and fast. One indication: in a New York Times/CBS News poll of 329 voters taken immediately after the debate on Sunday night, 43% thought Mondale had won, while 34% judged Reagan the victor. But after two days of press and TV post-mortems and innumerable private discussions of the outcome among voters, 515 people responding to a Times/CBS poll on Tuesday awarded Mondale the victory by an overpowering 66% to 17%. This seemed to be a political application of what in physics is known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the very act of measuring a phenomenon changes the phenomenon being measured in such a way as to make future readings unpredictable.

At the least, Mondale's articulate, forceful performance and Reagan's hesitant one seem to be prompting a second look at both contenders by voters who had decided to tune out the campaign as a boring exercise leading to a foregone conclusion. The Democratic challenger buried his "wimp" image in Louisville. Even poll respondents who do not intend to vote for him are giving him higher ratings on leadership ability. And some doubts are appearing among Reagan supporters who have not yet changed their allegiance. Mondale has no doubt about the reason for the reassessment. Says he: "If I were the person I'd read about in the paper [before the debate], I wouldn't vote for me. Suddenly they saw me; the contrast between what I'd been described as being and what they saw was very helpful . . . Because of that, people are listening to me on the issues."

Perhaps, but the only solid movement detectable so far is the beginning of a trend both candidates had long been expecting: a drift by disaffected Democrats back to their party's nominee. "They wanted to know their tiger was in the game," says one Democratic planner. A Reagan strategist agrees that the debate "will accelerate the return-of-the-native phenomenon" but quickly adds: "That won't overcome a lead of 15 to 20 points."

At most, then, Mondale has a second chance. He could conceivably win the presidency, but only conceivably, and then only if he does everything right and Reagan does a lot wrong for the rest of the campaign. More realistically, Mondale has an opportunity to keep shaving Reagan's margin, thus making the race interesting enough to draw a large turnout, keep the final result respectably close and influence congressional and state races. Even that would be a feat of no small importance.

Before the debate, Republicans had been speculating euphorically, and Democrats apprehensively, about an epic Reagan landslide that would bury not only Mondale but many Democratic congressional, state and local candidates across the country and perhaps put the Republicans in a position to become the nation's majority party. Talk of such a "realigning election" stopped abruptly on the morning after the showdown in Louisville, and Democratic candidates took new heart.

In Massachusetts, for example, Mondale has pulled into a virtual tie in the polls with Reagan. As a result, supporters of Democrat John Kerry are far more confident that he can defeat Republican Raymond Shamie for a U.S. Senate seat. "We have been running 14 points ahead of Mondale," explains one Kerry strategist, and that now looks like a sufficient margin. In Illinois, Congressman Paul Simon scents a gain for his bid to defeat Republican Senator Charles Percy. Says Simon: "Until the debate, whenever I called ward committeemen, I'd hear all sorts of moaning about Mondale's being a dead weight, that the party couldn't do anything with him. There has been none of that since Louisville. The debate has created a totally new attitude that is clearly helpful to Mondale and to me and to everyone else on the Democratic ticket."

Even if Mondale winds up losing after all? Yes, says Matthew Flynn, Democratic Party chairman in Wisconsin, where the party is struggling to maintain its shaky hold on the state legislature. "If Mondale picks up even five points, we could hang on to those seats," says Flynn. "If he gets blown out, there's no way we can hold on. So it's terribly important to us how he does relatively as well as absolutely." All this recalculation, however, assumes a reversal of the candidates' histories: Mondale repeatedly failed to sustain momentum during last spring's primary campaign, while Reagan recovered convincingly from early setbacks in both 1976 and 1980.

Reagan's efforts to do so again were boosted, then apparently set back, by Vice President George Bush last week. In a televised debate in Philadelphia Thursday night with Mondale's running mate, Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, Bush presented the Administration's case more ably than Reagan had four nights earlier. Indeed, though Ferraro also argued impressively, most analysts gave Bush a slight edge (see following story). But the next day, Bush squandered some of the benefits with one of the silliest blunders of the campaign. After a rally in Elizabeth, N.J., on Friday, a television boom mike caught him whispering to a longshoreman that "we tried to kick a little ass last night." Realizing that the mike was on, the Vice President then exclaimed, "Whoops! Oh, God, he heard me! Turn that thing off."

At a press conference in Birmingham later in the day, Bush proceeded to dig himself in deeper. Asked to confirm the wording of his remark, he replied, "I didn't use 'a little' " (the tape established that he had, though). He agreed that he had used "an old Texas football expression" and added, "I stand behind it." He would not apologize to Ferraro, he said, because the remark was not aimed at her. "It was a way of assessing victory. She would understand this. She's a good competitor." Ferraro's comment: "I would not address my opponent in the same way."

No matter how many Republican hearts Bush's debate performance may gladden, or how many Republican faces Bush's gaffe may redden, campaigns rarely if ever turn on the performances of running mates. The chief effect of the Democratic surge last week has been to set up the second and final Reagan-Mondale debate, scheduled for Sunday night in Kansas City, as perhaps the decisive event of the campaign. A strong performance by Reagan could silence the whispers about his age and competence and squelch any swing to Mondale well before it reaches the danger point. But a second Mondale victory could convert what is still only an incipient erosion of the President's big lead into mass defections. The subject, defense and foreign policy, holds some dangers for the White House. The first debate centered on domestic affairs and the economy, where Reagan could claim credit for some solid accomplishments: rising incomes and low inflation. The President has less to boast about in foreign affairs, and some serious public worries to overcome, notably about the nuclear arms race.

Mondale's preparations for the showdown will differ little from the way he got ready for the first debate. Once again he will go through a series of mock debates with Michael Severn, president of Columbia University, playing the part of Reagan. He will then study the tapes to isolate the words, tones and gestures that seem most effective. On substance he plans to press Reagan hard on a variety of issues: responsibility for American deaths in terrorist bombings in Lebanon, allegedly excessive reliance on force rather than diplomacy in Central America, neglect of human rights.

Most of all, Mondale will hit at the dangers of the nuclear arms race and the Administration's inability to engage the Soviet Union in any sustained arms-control negotiations. Some Democratic strategists predict that Mondale will try subtly, or perhaps not so subtly, to suggest that Reagan is too detached and insensitive to the details of policy to deal capably with the issue. "Think of the red phone," says one Democrat, harking back to an ad that Mondale used effectively in the primary campaign against Gary Hart. "Think of an arms-control debate in the context of the age and competence issues." Such an approach, if Mondale should actually try it, would be extremely risky, since it could easily slip into the kind of personal attack on a popular President that Mondale successfully avoided in the Louisville debate.

Reagan's preparations will be quite different from last time, or so everybody in the White House vows-including Nancy Reagan. A White House official described the First Lady as "unhappy" with the way aides had rehearsed her husband for Louisville. This time the President will hold fewer and shorter mock debates with Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman, who plays Mondale, and carry a thinner briefing book less crammed with facts. He will concentrate instead on articulating broad themes, at which he is usually a master. On Sunday he is likely to claim that he has rebuilt American military strength, increased respect for the U.S. abroad and prevented Communists from winning control of an inch of new territory during his Administration.

Why did the President so conspicuously fail to follow this thematic approach in the first debate? "We overscheduled him with preparations," confesses White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver. "We gave him no time to sit and think about what he wanted to say in his own words. We crammed the computer with material." Reagan's advisers are still arguing over who is to blame for this overcoaching. One Reagan associate points a finger at White House Aide and Chief Debate Coach Richard Darman. Says this adviser: "The whole attitude of Darman was to make sure that the President didn't screw up." Other aides insist that nearly everyone involved was equally at fault for putting too much stress on avoiding factual gaffes, and for that matter, the President was overly eager to rebut Mondale point by point and prove himself a master of detail.

Reagan had looked off form in some of the mock debates, but neither the President nor his aides had thought much about that. "It was just overconfidence on everyone's part," says one adviser. In particular, when Reagan resurrected his famous line from the 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, "There you go again," nobody had thought to warn him that Mondale might be waiting for it. The Democratic challenger, in fact, had reviewed the tape of the 1980 debate, noted the point at which the line occurred and rehearsed an answer to give if Reagan should try it again. But, says Mondale, "I didn't think he'd use it. I don't know why he did."

Reagan did, and Mondale, turning directly to face the President, asked, "Remember the last time you said that?" Reagan nodded his head and muttered "Um-hmmm." Mondale: "You said it when President Carter said that you were going to cut Medicare ... And what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut $20 billion out of Medicare." (Actually, Reagan's proposal was not made until 1983; it would have involved higher premiums for Medicare patients and benefit reductions totaling $19.4 billion over five years.) For his closing statement, Reagan had prepared a thematic mini-speech on the improvement in the economy during his term, but on-camera he tried to blend it with a rebuttal of points Mondale had made earlier. The result was a meandering jumble filled with figures seemingly unrelated to one another.

By the next morning, in fact, the President's performance had broken the longstanding though unofficial taboo against press and TV discussion of his age. Columns and air waves filled with speculation about whether age had anything to do with Reagan's poor performance. Mondale vowed to stay out of that argument, but other Democrats were less cautious. Demanded New York Mayor Ed Koch: "Do you want his shaky finger near the button?" Reagan did not look or sound that different in the debate than in some press conferences, or indeed than in 1980.

Though Reagan made his share of dubious assertions and used some questionable statistics in the debate, so did Mondale. Indeed, it was the Democrat who had to explain later that at one point he had said the exact opposite of what he meant. He spoke of eventual "total repeal" of tax indexing, when he intended to advocate eventually making indexation universal. Indexing is a method of adjusting tax brackets to prevent inflation from raising an individual's tax bill, and under present, Reagan-inspired law, it goes into effect next year. Mondale has proposed to restrict its use temporarily in order to increase tax collections and shrink deficits. Mondale's error did not hurt him, at least not during the debate. Reagan inexplicably let it go by without comment, although later last week he quoted it verbatim, implying that it had been a kind of Freudian slip revealing Mondale's true intentions.

By then, Mondale was hammering hard at other themes he had raised during the debate. Reagan in Louisville pledged never to cut Social Security benefits of "the people that are now getting them"; his opponent immediately asked, in effect, What about those retiring in the future? The White House on Tuesday rushed out an expanded pledge never to cut benefits for anybody. It was the first time the President had felt obliged to reply so specifically to a Mondale barb.

Mondale promptly challenged Reagan to take the same pledge on Medicare. The President in Louisville had observed, correctly, that Medicare costs are rising drastically. He might have added, but did not, that Mondale in his September deficit-reduction package proposed putting a ceiling on federal Medicare reimbursements to states. Essentially, Mondale is using Social Security and Medicare as the emotional cutting edge of a more general, and more legitimate, assault against Reagan on the "fairness issue": the complaint that Reagan's approach to reducing federal spending unduly hurts the poor.

Another target that Mondale banged away at during the debate, and is likely to hit repeatedly during the campaign's closing weeks, is the Rev. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority. Insisting that abortion must be "a personal and private moral judgment" made by the woman involved, Mondale asked, "Does every woman in America have to present herself before some judge picked by Jerry Falwell to clear her personal judgment?" The question hyperbolically assumed not only that some language in the Republican platform about the selection of federal judges requires that they be antiabortion (the platform says, "We reafirm our support for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life"), but also that Reagan in a second term would appoint no judges to whom Falwell might object. Mondale was seeking to capitalize on what polls have shown to be a widespread fear that Falwell, an outspoken admirer of Reagan, will seek to impose his Fundamentalist values on abortion, school prayer and other issues on Americans who do not share those values.

Reagan by week's end was well into a vehement counterattack, focusing on a subject he failed to hit as hard as might have been expected during the debate: Mondale's advocacy of tax boosts in order to reduce deficits. Whistle-stopping through Ohio on Friday aboard a Pullman car once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Reagan at every stop lambasted his challenger's plans as a "mortgage on your future to pay for his campaign promises." Said the President in Dayton: "As he puts more heavy taxes on the people and their businesses, the economy will slow down and slow down. And after that kills the recovery, he'll want to raise your taxes again and again to make up for it."

So the debate, whatever its ultimate effect, has turned a once dull and predictable campaign into a lively, if not always enlightening, scrap. Close too? Not yet. But at least through this Sunday, millions of Americans who had been losing interest seem likely to stay tuned in.

-By George J. Church. Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale and Laurence I. Barrett with the President, with other bureaus

With reporting by Sam Allis, Laurence I. Barrett