Last Call, and Out Reeling

By Evan Thomas

Mondale, Hart and Jackson stagger through the final round

In the Olympics, marathon runners end the 26.2-mile race with a dramatic finishing kick into a roaring stadium.

But the interminable race for the Democratic nomination wound down last week like a 1920s dance marathon. Dazed by months of gladhanding and posturing, the candidates stumbled around in circles. Only the prize sustained them: 486 delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday III, the last leg on the long trail to the Democratic nomination.

For Walter Mondale, who has flown more miles, spoken more words and slept in more motel beds than any other presidential candidate in history, the final week on the stump produced no last hurrahs.

The nadir was Memorial Day, normally a flesh-pressing bonanza for a politician. For Mondale, it began in Fort Lee, N.J., with catcalls from the disciples of Lyndon LaRouche Jr., a demagogic conspiracy theorist who is running for President, and went downhill from there. On the Jersey shore, where a sunny holiday attracts upwards of 3 million bathers, Mondale found instead about a hundred hardy souls huddled against a driving rainstorm. The day ended at a hotel in Cherry Hill, where a waitress mistook Mondale for Gary Hart.

In a final burst of masochism this week, Mondale planned a "fly around" finale: a red-eye commercial flight from Los Angeles to Newark (E.T.A. 3:30 a.m.), a frantic last flurry of speechifying in New Jersey (107 delegates), followed by a flight back across the country to California (306 delegates)--via campaign stops in West Virginia (35 delegates) and New Mexico (23)--all in less than 24 hours.

While Mondale tortured himself on the road, his computer-guided organization did its own vital work back in Washington: wooing the roughly 400 uncommitted delegates who could hold the balance at the convention. A team of 14 workers each week sends out 2,000 letters to delegates and makes 1,000 phone calls, rounding up new pledges and fencing in old ones. As Mondale waded about soggy New Jersey, his campaign won the backing of two Governors (Mark White of Texas and William Sheffield of Alaska), nine uncommitted delegates in Mississippi and six in Hawaii. Mondale's aides predict he will have 1,750 of the 1,967 delegates needed to nominate before the voters go to the polls on Tuesday.

Hart insists that the Democratic Convention will not pick Mondale if he loses every primary this week, no matter what the delegate total. But Hart seems bent on self-destruction himself. In a classic campaign boner, he exposed his sarcastic side at a fund raiser in Los Angeles. The "bad news," he told a well-heeled audience standing on the lawn of a Bel Air mansion, is that he has to campaign apart from his wife Lee. "The good news for her is that she campaigns in California while I campaign in New Jersey." When Mrs. Hart interjected, "I got to hold a koala bear," Hart sniggered, "I won't tell you what I got to hold: samples from a toxic-waste dump." Voters in California chuckled; many in New Jersey smoldered. The blunder undercut Hart's best pitch: that New Jersey epitomizes the future he envisions, a state successfully making the transition from moribund heavy industry to high-tech growth.

Hart's last gasp may be to join forces with Jesse Jackson against Mondale. In several states, Hart and Jackson operatives are cooperating to elect more delegates and gain seats on the credentials and rules committees at the convention, where they can press charges that Mondale manipulated or evaded party rules to garner more than his fan" share of delegates.

A concerted Hart-Jackson "Stop Mondale" movement appears unlikely, however. Hart is scrambling to assure Jewish voters that he would not pick Jackson as a Vice President unless Jackson abandoned his pro-Arab tilt. Jackson, for his part, has been blasting Hart and Mondale equally for supporting the "supplyside economics" and "gunboat diplomacy" of President Reagan. He was swinging wildly and becoming increasingly moody and erratic as he tried to transform his flailing political crusade into a one-man peace movement. He has fired off a telegram to Syrian President Hafez Assad demanding the release of two Israeli diplomats, and proclaimed that he would venture to Nicaragua, Cuba and Africa. In a most unseemly move last week, he traveled to Mexico to attack U.S. "arrogance" toward Central America.

Politicians have often sought votes with good-will trips to such places as Ireland, Italy and Israel, and they rarely hesitate to meddle in foreign affairs for political purposes. (A fortnight ago, for example, Senator Edward Kennedy used his own political funds to bring a Miskito Indian mother from Nicaragua to Washington to testify about the death of her child at the hands of the CIA-backed contra rebels.) But it is unusual and inappropriate for political candidates to malign the U.S. on foreign soil. Either of Jackson's opponents would likely have been pilloried for such an act.

Jackson insisted that he was traveling to Mexico as a "private citizen," a claim made less credible by the presence of five campaign aides and six California supporters on board his chartered plane.

When questioned about how he financed his trip, he refused to give a clear answer.

Instead, he grew increasingly snappish with the press, joking that if he walked on water the headlines the next day would read JACKSON CAN'T SWIM.

With the primary season sputtering to a close, the looming question is whether the party can unify behind a nominee. As a first tentative step (and as a way to retire his $160,000 campaign debt), George McGovern last week tried to bring all three candidates together at a glittery Los Angeles fund raiser. Jackson, resentful that McGovern had endorsed a Mondale-Hart ticket, backed out. Some what wistfully, McGovern implored Hart and Mondale, "Go as gently as you can on each other." That brought grim smiles from the two adversaries, who were standing awkwardly ten feet apart. But no handshake.

-- By Evan Thomas. Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale and Jack E. White with Jackson

With reporting by Sam Allis, Jack E. White