Walter Mondale: Getting a Second Look

The shift in momentum began to be felt almost as soon as the cameras blinked off on the first debate. In Manhattan on the morning after, Walter Mondale exuberantly flashed a double thumbs-up signal countless times to a crowd of tens of thousands that cheered as he led the Columbus Day parade up Fifth Avenue. In Cincinnati the next day, he swung a baseball bat after Ohio Governor Richard Celeste introduced him to another enthusiastic crowd as "the Louisville Slugger," a term the most zealous Democrat would not have dreamed of using before the debate in that Kentucky city. In Columbus later in the week, Mondale broke into a litany of sentences addressed to the President that began "You may think . . ."; after each the crowd, picking up a line from the debate, joined him in shouting "It just ain't so!" As at many Mondale rallies in September, a group of hecklers began a pro-Reagan chant. But this time the hecklers had trouble making themselves heard above a spontaneous (and obscene) counterchant set up by Mondale supporters.

"It's like a huge switch was thrown," exulted Mondale in an interview with TIME. "Enormous crowds, but not just that; the nature of the crowds too. Every time you shake hands, it's like a pile-up on the goal line. Several hundred people trying to get to you. I've never experienced anything like that."

While Mondale glowed, on the attack at last, Ronald Reagan grumped, on the defensive for the first time in the campaign. The loser in Louisville by common consent, the President seemed off stride early in the week; he meandered through speeches in Charlotte, N.C., and Baltimore, drawing only polite applause from friendly audiences. But by midweek he had regained his form. He began to counterpunch, denouncing by name an adversary he had loftily ignored in most of his appearances before the debate. "My opponent in this campaign has made a career out of weakening America's armed forces!" cried Reagan at the Ukrainian Cultural Center in Warren, Mich. Edward Rollins, director of the Reagan campaign, left no doubt that Reagan would voice this new tough line until the vote. Said Rollins: "The debate made Mondale a credible candidate. He took some of his negatives down. We have to put some negatives back on him."