Battling to take on Reagan

Mondale gets off to a fast start, but it is a long way to '84

Walter Frederick Mondale, front runner among the seven Democrats who would be President, was on a roll last week. The board of directors of the 1.7 million-member National Education Association formally en- dorsed his candidacy for the party's nomination. So did the general board of the AFL-CIO, and this week leaders representing all 14 million AFL-CIO members are expected to ratify that decision, enter- ing Big Labor, with all its organizing muscle and money, into a Democratic pre-convention campaign for the first time ever. On Saturday a caucus of Maine Democratic activists yielded Mondale a satisfying if relatively meaningless (there would have been meaning only if he had lost) 51% victory. Next week Mondale hopes to announce the public support of two prominent Democratic Governors, 100 Senators and Representatives, and 200 or so leading business people.

Such a sunburst of triumphs and pledges could lead the proverbial visitor from Mars unacquainted with the intricacies of American politics to assume that the quest for the Democratic nomination in 1984 at San Francisco is all but over. Walter Mondale knows better, but he also knows the rules of the Democratic game have changed since the last time around and that there is an advantage to a fast start. A decisive advantage, he hopes. As he puts it, mixing his sports images: "It's like playing a sudden death inning at the beginning of the game." So many delegates to the convention will be chosen in the early innings—some 45% in primaries and state caucuses between late February and the end of March—that an initial big score could indeed be decisive; an early goose egg may be fatal.

So Mondale, 55, is swinging from the heels at a stage that in earlier campaigns would have been analogous to batting practice. Says he: "By Jan. 1, you have to have the money, the structure, the policies. You have to be ready—bang!" If anything, he is seriously understating the case so far as his own campaign goes. It began "within weeks of Ronald Reagan's Inauguration," in the sarcastic phrase of his chief opponent, Ohio Senator John Glenn, 62, and already is humming with World Series efficiency. Take money, for example: Mondale collected so much so early that by Jan. 1, according to some calculations, he will have raised $9 million and spent $8 million. Bang!

Organization? Bang, again. "Fritz" Mondale's troops even now are deployed throughout the country, wooing the bewilderingly diverse elements of the Democratic coalition: labor, teachers, feminists, blacks, Jews and legions of party officeholders. Long before the first delegates are selected, these efforts already are paying off, as the endorsements last week and this amply demonstrate. Though the teachers and union leaders cannot always deliver the votes of their followers, the endorsements will certainly mean more volunteers and telephone banks for the Mondale campaign, not to mention the ballots of many N.E.A. and AFL-CIO officials who will be delegates in San Francisco. Three years ago the N.E.A. alone supplied about 15% of Jimmy Carter's delegate total.