Charting the Big Shift

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At times last week it seemed as if the campaign's speedy whirl might reduce all the candidates to caricatures of themselves. Mondale struggled to make a virtue of his pure liberalism. "I don't know what else to do," he said. "What you see is what you get." In Florida, standing in a grove of winter-ravaged oranges, Mondale conceded that Senator Edward Kennedy had refused to endorse him; at that moment, the once invincible candidate seemed an authentic underdog. Hart, meanwhile, was using the words "future" and "new" over and over again. The candidate of youth was often asked how a year had been lopped off his age in the mid-1960s. "If I had wanted to appear younger," he insisted, "I would have done it by more than a year."

Glenn made fun of Hart's J.F.K. evocations but then rhetorically fumbled. "I'm not trying to imitate anyone," he said, "but John Glenn." In a sense he is doing a self-impersonation: after down-playing his astronaut background through much of the campaign, he used "the right stuff' as a tag line in his Southern television ads and played up his military past. In Pine Bluff, Ark., he piloted an antique Stearman training biplane ("That was fun!" he said) and at Ozark, Ala., drove an M-60 tank in figure eights ("That's fun!").

But the South was not just fun and games. The candidates tended to their big-picture strategies too. For Glenn, said his aide Boyd Campbell, Alabama was "the goal-line stand, the whole ball of wax." Mondale predicted he would win unionized Alabama (214,000 AFL-CIO members), where the Mondale family has campaigned in 63 of 67 counties, and was also hoping to finish first in Georgia. In the South, Hart might be satisfied to win only Florida. Jesse Jackson's biggest test had arrived: if he does not do well in Southern states where blacks constitute 20% to 25% of the electorate, his role in the nomination process is sure to shrink considerably. His federal matching funds will stop flowing early next month if he does not get at least 20% of one primary's vote.

Whatever the results, Jackson and Glenn seemed peripheral to the central issue between Hart and Mondale: the character of American liberalism and, even more clearly, the generational claims on the Democratic Party. "This is not just a 5 horse race," Mondale told an attentive audience in Tampa. "This "has become a battle for the soul of the party and for the future of this country." For Hart and other neoliberals, standard-issue Great Society policy should be replaced when it does not work and reshaped when it lacks political support.