Last Call, and Out Reeling

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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.