Battling Down the Stretch

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

Debates in Tehran and Cleveland bring the campaign to a climax

Seldom has an American election headed into such a wildly unpredictable windup.

Suddenly, the years of campaign planning, the months of oratory, the endless procession of TV spots, handshaking tours, charge and countercharge seemed little more than an arduous overture to the possibility that Iran would decide to release the 52 American hostages, and to the reality of the face-to-face TV confrontation this week between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. How the debates in Tehran and Cleveland are decided could fulfill the dreams of one candidate while shattering those of the other--or, possibly, result in inconclusive dithering.

Neither event has any solid precedent.

To be sure, world events, real or promised, such as the Suez war and Hungarian revolt in 1956, and Henry Kissinger's "Peace is at hand" statement in 1972, have influenced voters on the eves of past elections. But neither of those was a close race, and never before has the decision on so emotional an issue as the hostages been so totally under the control of a foreign government.

The Kennedy-Nixon and Carter-Ford debates in 1960 and 1976 are equally irrelevant to this week's face-off. Those earlier debates occurred in series of four and three beginning early in September, giving the candidates ample time to polish their arguments between rounds and pound them home in later campaign appearances. This time Carter and Reagan have taken flie gamble of facing each other just once, in full knowledge that any mistakes they make cannot be repaired or retouched in the week remaining before the vote.

That the choice of who will govern the nation for four years may well depend on the acts of a hostile, often irrational Iranian government and the impression two carefully rehearsed politicians make in a fleeting 90 minutes of TV time is deeply disquieting. But in a sense the election has been building toward that kind of bizarre climax. For more than a year, two flawed candidates have been floundering toward the final showdown, each unable to give any but his most unquestioning supporters much reason to vote for him except dislike of his opponent. Carter has been dogged by inflation and unemployment at home and turmoil overseas during his years in office, Reagan by a reputation for right-wing extremism and simplistic thinking. Each at some point held a lead in the polls: Carter early in the year, Reagan immediately after the Republican Convention. Each was unable to hold his advantage.

The release of the hostages, both candidates' camps agree, would give the President's campaign a powerful boost. The Republicans would have to join in the national rejoicing. Says one Reagan adviser: "We would grit our teeth and say how delighted we are."

But there are hazards for the President. Carter's advisers know that he will be suspected of having cut a cynical deal with Iran to have the hostages returned just when their release would most affect the election. Says one of the President's confidants: "The way the release is done and the way it is seen--particularly if people think it has been a manipulative exercise--are very important and could cause a real negative backlash." Much will depend on the terms of the release. On Sunday the Iranian parliament debated the fate of the hostages in a stormy, secret session, but did not agree on what these terms would be. Carter would be put in a tight political bind if the Iranians should demand an apology, which he has already ruled out, or the sale of new weapons, which would be seen as a reward for perpetrating an international outrage as well as a break from the U.S. position of neutrality in the gulf conflict. But the other conditions that have been discussed publicly by Iran seem mild enough; Reagan has called most of them acceptable.

Fearing a backlash if the hostages were not released, Carter took great pains last week to warn that he could not be sure what would happen. Speaking to a small group in Gloucester, N.J., he warned that too much optimism could "lead to very bitter disappointment in our country if they don't come home when we think they might."

The hostage issue set off one of the angriest exchanges of a vituperative campaign.

In Louisville, responding to a Carter gibe that he did not understand foreign affairs, Reagan ticked off a sarcastic list of other things he did not understand. Last item: "I don't understand why 52 Americans have been held hostage for almost a year now." To reporters he added later: "I believe that this Administration's foreign policy helped create the entire situation that made their kidnap possible. And I think the fact that they have been there that long is a humiliation and a disgrace to this country." In Herrin, Ill., Reagan said that he had "some ideas" about how to free the hostages but would not elaborate, faulting the President for "negotiating in the press."

Carter hit back hard, and a little low. He accused Reagan of breaking a pledge to keep the hostages out of the campaign, "complicating an already grave situation," and added piously that the issue "is too important to be made a political football." At a rally in Waco, Texas, he sneered at Reagan's "some ideas" remark: "I noticed that Governor Reagan announced he has a secret plan to get the hostages back. Do you remember when Richard Nixon said just before an election in 1968 that he had a secret plan to win the war in Viet Nam? Well, we still don't know what Mr. Nixon's plan was."

Carter indeed was in a swaggering mood. He appeared at the Waco rally in red hand-tooled cowboy boots and told the crowd why he was wearing them: "The Republicans have a habit of spreading a lot of horse manure around right before an election. Lately, it's been getting pretty deep all over the country."

The angry exchange broke off as the candidates brought their campaigns almost to a dead stop while they prepared for the debate. For both it was a hair-raising risk. Earlier debates have turned on the most inconsequential factors: Richard Nixon's 5 o'clock shadow in 1960, Gerald Ford's gaffe in saying that Poland was not under Soviet domination in 1976. But those candidates had weeks to refurbish their images; Carter and Reagan will have no such luxury. Yet neither candidate felt he could pass up the chance to score a breakthrough and win that final, elusive, decisive few percentage points of the vote. Nor could either candidate appear to be ducking the other's challenge in a race in which neither can any longer afford to give the other the slightest advantage.

For the fact is, entering the final round of the campaign, they have fought each other to a draw. The latest poll for TIME by Yankelovich, Skelly and White, Inc., shows Carter leading 42% to 41%, with 12% for Anderson and 5% undecided. But Carter's lead is so small, well within the range of a possible sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, as to be almost meaningless, particularly since it is not the popular vote that determines who shall be the next President. A "national" election, of course, is really an amalgam of elections in the 50 states and the District of Columbia; the winner has to assemble a combination of 270 or more electoral votes. Estimates by TIME correspondents show Reagan leading in states with 246 electoral votes, Carter in states with only 159. But many of the leads are so slim that Republican Pollster Robert Teeter estimates that a swing of a mere 3% in the national popular vote could switch states with 200 electoral votes--a remarkable number. Essentially the election is turning out exactly the way many political pros always thought it would: so close that almost anything could decide the outcome at the last minute.

Thus both men approached the showdown on TV with the caution the situation deserved. Their aides wrangled for hours last week before settling on Cleveland on the night of Oct. 28 as offered by the League of Women Voters. At one point Carter's camp proposed a debate on Oct. 26, the day the Iranian parliament had scheduled to discuss the hostages. The Reaganites refused because, as Campaign Aide James Baker candidly explained, "One thing we did not want was an announcement about the hostages by the President Sunday night during the debate." The later in the week, Reagan's advisers figured, the less chance there would be for Carter to steal the show with a dramatic announcement of good news from Tehran.

Carter came off the campaign trail Saturday afternoon to go to Camp David, where he planned to spend most of the weekend. He brought along a thick notebook crammed with analyses of Reagan's positions, past and present. Said Research Chief Martin Franks: "Carter knows how he ought to answer the questions himself. What he needs to study is how Reagan will probably answer." Mostly, however, the President intended to use the three days before the debate to rest, clear his mind and psych himself up for the confrontation.

Reagan retired over the weekend to his rented estate in Virginia to study Carter's style as intently as Carter was studying his. The challenger's aides spent hours viewing TV tapes of Carter's three debates four years ago with Ford. "At this point in the campaign, we're not going to teach Reagan anything new," said one adviser. "What we want to help him do is to figure out the rhythms of Carter's attacks and to help fashion responses." It seemed likely that Reagan would hold a full dress rehearsal, with one of his aides playing the role of Jimmy Carter.

Each candidate faced a serious problem striking the right attitude and tone. Carter's advisers warned him to curb his propensity for firing a confusing machine-gun barrage of statistics and instead to concentrate on making only a few points well. They also vowed to sharpen the differences between the President and the Republican. "If people switch off their sets and say there's no difference between the two, we've really got a problem," said one adviser. But another added, "Carter can't be humorless or preachy or press too hard, because that would just revive the meanness issue." Reagan's camp viewed the debate as their man's last, best chance to refocus the campaign on Carter's record, which they regard as one of general incompetence. So Reagan had to attack, while at the same time presenting himself to doubting voters as calm, dignified, "presidential." The compleat public personality, Reagan knows how to use a soft answer to turn away wrath and humor to score a point. He was a clear winner in the only joint appearance of the campaign with Carter at the Al Smith dinner in New York City, a relaxed Type B to Carter's forced Type A.

Their success at self-conscious image molding, of course, is just about the last ground on which the candidates should be judged. Some far more important points for viewers to keep in mind when trying to judge the men from what they see and hear: Which contender took the more serious approach, showed the best grasp of the issues, presented the most coherent arguments, marked out the most distinctive positions? How well did what each said fit in with Carter's record in office and Reagan's rhetoric in his years on the stump? Did either suddenly take a new position, and if so, did he explain why or blithely ignore the switch? The debate above all should not be viewed in isolation, but in the context of the political records that Carter and Reagan have been making for years.

Given the anxiety of both candidates that they might commit a fatal blunder, neither side would be surprised if the debate ended in a draw, with Carter and Reagan each essentially confirming the impressions, good and bad, already held about them by most voters. If so, though Iran's actions on the hostages could still upset all the odds, the stage seemed set for a nerve-rackingly close decision.

Before the campaign was, in effect, suspended for debate preparations, the momentum had seemed to be moving toward Carter, although Richard Wirthlin, Reagan's pollster, claimed his man actually was 6 points ahead as the week began. The President was benefiting from a variety of trends, including reluctant decisions by many disaffected Democrats --Jews in New York, Hispanics in Texas, blacks everywhere--to vote for Carter after all because they simply did not want Reagan in the White House. The same seems true of many liberals who once backed Anderson but now conclude that voting for him would be a futile gesture of protest.

Most of all, Carter's position has been improving because of his relentless attack on what his aides call the Tolstoy (i.e., war and peace) issue. When the President set out several weeks ago to slam home the fear that Reagan lacked the will and judgment to keep the U.S. out of war, the attack seemed a risky exercise that might backfire. But whatever may be thought of the fairness of the strategy, it has turned out that Carter's instincts, and the advice of Pollster Patrick Caddell, were politically sound: fear of nuclear war is indeed an issue the President can successfully exploit.

All last week, the President increased his assault. In a radio speech from the Oval Office, he asserted that "peace is my passion ... peace is my pledge." He added: "Over the last 20 years, we have taken some steps away from the nuclear precipice. Now, for the first time, we are being advised to take steps that may move us toward it." The next day, he explained by sardonically describing Reagan's arms-control policy: "First, throw the existing nuclear-arms limitation treaty [SALT ] in the wastebasket. Second, threaten the Soviet Union with a nuclear-arms race. Third, launch a quest for so-called nuclear superiority." Though it was Carter who requested that the Senate delay consideration of SALT II after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he now describes the pact as his "secret weapon" to reduce the Soviet nuclear arsenal "without costing a dime."

These onslaughts have forced Reagan onto the defensive at a time when his campaign script had called for him to focus voters' attention on Carter's economic record. Reagan tried repeatedly to raise it last week. As part of his "I don't understand" litany in Louisville, he asserted: "I don't understand why the elderly have to pay more and more for what they buy, while they are limited in the income they have. I don't under stand why his [Carter's] answer to inflation was to put 2 million people out of work." In a Friday night TV speech, Rea gan pointed out that the consumer price index rose in September at a 12.7% annual rate and declared that Carter's record on inflation and unemployment "is a failure on a scale so vast, in dimensions so broad, with effects so devastating, that it is virtually without parallel in Amer ican history."

But again and again Reagan had to spend precious time righting what he calls "this warmongering charge," and his replies had a petulant tone. In Cincinnati, he asserted: "The President seems determined to have me start a nuclear war.

Well, I'm just as determined not to." After he was endorsed by Viet Nam Dove Eugene McCarthy, Reagan said: "Maybe this will give some people confidence that I don't eat my young." On one of his tours last week he brought along former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Wil liam Rogers to demonstrate that he has the trust of men with deep experience in foreign policy.

Still, the peace issue is hurting Reagan. One example: in Illinois, a Republican has to run up big margins in the five "collar counties" around Chicago to offset the Democratic city tally and win the state's vital 26 electoral votes. But in DuPage County, where Ford took 71% of the vote in 1976, Democratic polls show Reagan pulling only 50%. Says County Democratic Coordinator Sue Ellen Johnson: "It's the feeling that Reagan is not up to it mentally and that he is not afraid of war as much as he should be." Republican leaders in DuPage admit privately that they are "very, very concerned."

But for every trend there is a puzzling offsetting countertrend. If some national polls show the President now leading by an eyelash, many state polls show Rea gan ahead by small margins among the people most likely to vote. If Anderson backers in most states are drifting toward Carter, those in Michigan are mainly moderate Republicans who are moving to Reagan, preserving the Californian's narrow lead in that all-important state.

If Carter is moving up in Washington and Oregon, once considered leaning to Reagan, the Republicans cherish rising hopes that they will carry some states in Carter's Southern bastion -- Mississippi, South Carolina, maybe Louisiana.

An election this close ought to be d cided by the voters carefully weighing the real and serious differences between the candidates. But as Nov. 4 draws even closer, the chance grows that the 1980 election will be swung by the decisions of an erratic government in Iran or by ephemeral images on TV .

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett with Reagan and Christopher Ogden with Carter

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Christopher Ogden

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