Over the Top, Barely

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While the long argument over each candidate's relative electability lingered, so too did the personal friction among the three contenders. Their tenth and last major debate, televised nationally from Los Angeles two days before Super Tuesday III, showed again that the Democrats' wounds are deep and festering. Mondale glared at Hart and heatedly objected to the Senator's suggestion that the Justice Department may investigate the labor-supported PAC funds that had helped elect many Mondale delegates. NBC Moderator Tom Brokaw asked Hart, "Do you want to look him in the eye and say that you didn't accuse him of criminal activity?" Hart: "He knows I didn't." Mondale: "Did you not suggest a possible judicial investigation?" Hart: "I said that the Reagan Justice Department would be very likely ..." Mondale: "Now what do you think that suggests? Overparking?" Hart tried to deflect the direct challenge, claiming that "civil laws" were involved in election practices and adding, "I never said anything about criminal." Moments later, Hart accused Mondale of running "a campaign of distortion and"distraction." He cited a TV ad used by Mondale's campaign in New Jersey that attacked Hart's unwillingness to support legislation against handguns. Hart says he favors state controls on such weapons and contends that the ad portrays him as soft on criminals. But he described the ad's contents inaccurately and admitted later that he had not seen it.

Beginning to abandon his role of debate peacemaker, Jackson belittled the "rat-a-tat" of Mondale-Hart, while jabbing playfully at what he considered unfair media coverage of his campaign. Jackson's demeanor was much more strident, however, when he was away from the other two. Speaking on election day in Los Angeles, he said harshly that Mondale and Hart "mean well, but they aren't tough enough to lead." At the site of the Watts race riots of 1965, Jackson shouted: "There's Mondale—the same man who tried to defeat Harold Washington. The same man who sits on the board of Control Data doing business with South Africa [Mondale resigned last year]. The same man who can't make up his mind on voting rights. And there's Hart—don't bother."

Earlier in the acrimonious campaign Hart had told an interviewer, "Mondale is mush. He is weak and his managers know it." On the PAC issue he suggested that Mondale had adopted "the ethics of Ed Meese," a reference to Reagan's choice for Attorney General, whose financial dealings are under investigation by a special prosecutor. A Hart ad strongly implied that Mondale's Central America policies would lead to American battle casualties in the region. Mondale in turn termed Hart's foreign policy views "naive," suggested that he was not "seasoned and experienced" and did not "know what he is doing." Mondale dramatized the point in ads that showed a red telephone ringing in the night and suggesting that Hart should not be trusted with a potential doomsday decision.