Getting Ready for the Challenge

By Susan Tifft.

Reagan hits the road in spring training for his own campaign

The trips were billed as presidential, not political. But as he plunged into the nation's heart" land last week, shaking hands with some of the lunch-pail voters who helped give him his margin of victory in 1980, Ronald Reagan looked no less like a candidate than did Walter Mondale and Gary Hart.

At the cavernous Claycomo Ford assembly plant near Kansas City, Mo., he munched a hamburger in the employee cafeteria, walked an assembly line and spoke to a crowd of about 1,000 auto workers. "As I toured your plant, I couldn't help but think back to the days when America's economy had sputtered and stalled," said Reagan. The next day, after visiting a partially completed $98,000 home in the Oak Hollow development near booming Dallas, he addressed about 50 construction workers assembled outside. "This is a picture of what's happening all over America," he beamed, gesturing toward the struts and drywall.

Reagan has had the unexpected luxury so far this year of being able to keep above the campaign fray. Said one of Reagan's top advisers: "It's just what the doctor ordered, a long, bloody Democratic fight, a continuing wild card in Jesse Jackson and a good chance that Mondale wins the nomination in the end."

The downside of Reagan's Rose Garden respite is that when he does hit the road he seems out of practice. "He can get rusty if he doesn't get out," says one of his strategists. In Arlington, Texas, Reagan listened unsmilingly as a panel of builders and bankers voiced'their concern over the deficit. In his rambling answers, the President implausibly insisted that his doubling of the deficit would not necessarily raise interest rates. "The interest rates coming down at the same time that the deficit was going up indicates there isn't that tie," he argued. David Smith, vice president of the National Association of Home Builders, grimly informed Reagan that a crunch was inevitable. Said he: "Deficits keep interest rates high. Deficits are inflationary. Mr. President, time is running out." Reagan hardly reassured his audience when he noted that ending tax deductions for home mortgage payments might be one way to simplify the tax code, a highly impolitic suggestion that left the builders sputtering.

Vice President George Bush raised a more calculated political storm before a Jewish lobbying group in Washington,

D.C. He accused the Democrats of being soft on anti-Semitism for not forcefully attacking Jesse Jackson and his radical Black Muslim supporter Louis Farrakhan, who are still embroiled in the controversy over Jackson's reference to Jews as "Hymie." Bush's attack "was a beautiful stroke," explained one Reagan aide. "Hart and Mondale don't dare attack Jesse because they are afraid of him, but they are also feeling the heat from the Jewish community."

The Reagan-Bush re-election committee has already effortlessly raised $14.2 million, close to the $16 million limit allowed candidates who accept federal matching funds. Each Tuesday morning, key White House aides and campaign officials (called, appropriately, the Tuesday Group) meet in White House Chief of Staff James Baker's office to plot strategy. Last month they put together the first meeting of their newly formed Madison Avenue advertising agency, Tuesday Team, Inc., which plans to spend $4 million during the primary season touting Reagan's record.

To win in November, say G.O.P. strategists, Reagan must hold on to 80% of the Republican vote, steal at least a quarter of the Democrats, and take half of the independents. To this end, Reagan has been methodically working his way, bloc by bloc, through the constituencies that gave him a majority in 1980. For the past three months, he has been shoring up his core support among fundamentalists and conservative activists, resurrecting his social agenda of school prayer, anti-abortion and family values. Now he is making overtures to more centrist groups: blue-collar workers, who gave him 46% of their vote in 1980, and women, who still support Reagan less strongly than do men by about five to ten percentage points.

The Republican strategy calls for Reagan to sweep the West and the South, including the electorally rich states of California, Florida and Texas. With that base intact, he need only pick off a couple of large states in the industrial Midwest or Northeast to win. The stumbling block in this scenario: Jackson, who has stimulated record black registration in states such as Alabama and Mississippi, which Reagan carried by slim pluralities in 1980.

To counter Jackson's impact, the G.O.P. has launched its largest voter-registration effort ever. With a budget of $8 million, Reagan's re-election committee and the Republican Party hope to sign up 2 million sympathetic new voters. Independent groups, like the Moral Majority, and state party committees will spend another $2 million or so. Major targets of the combined effort in the South: conservative rural voters and the region's large population of military personnel. The G.O.P. makes no bones about its plans to exploit white fears of Jackson. Said one Republican strategist: "Those good ole boys would jump out of their skin if they thought Jesse was on his way to Washington--as anything."

In Florida's Dade County, where the staunchly anti-Communist Hispanic population proudly calls the Republican Party "President Reagan's Party," the drive has signed up more than 3,000 new voters this year. In Dallas and Houston, volunteers have registered an estimated 30,000 in a door-to-door campaign. In North Carolina, the Moral Majority is urging ministers to hand out registration cards from their pulpits. In Georgia, the state

Republican Party hopes to sign up 25,000 new voters in May alone, mostly through volunteer registrars staked out at suburban shopping malls. "It's beginning to come together," said one Reagan campaign aide. "Reagan is going to do very well in the South."

In most regions, Reagan now looks strong. His pollster Richard Wirthlin records a healthy job-approval rating of 60%. But White House strategists are not complacent. They are concerned that the bruising combat on the primary trail might actually get Mondale into prime fighting form while the President might lose his edge from lack of practice. Even more worrisome is that the home builders might be right in their fears about the economy. "If the economy goes belly up, so do we," says a top aide. "It's just that simple."

--By Susan Tifft. Reported by Douglas Brew/Washington

With reporting by Douglas Brew/Washington