Walter Mondale: Getting a Second Look

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The President seemed especially nettled by widespread speculation that his hesitation and fumbling in the debate meant he was feeling, and showing, all of his 73 years. On the White House lawn, Reagan remarked to reporters that "if I had as much makeup on as he [Mondale] did, I'd have looked younger too"-a surprisingly catty comment from a President who before had always joked about his age. (Reagan does not use makeup for his television appearances. Nor, he claimed last week, did he ever wear any "when I was in pictures." An old Hollywood makeup artist promptly surfaced to say that he had slapped some makeup on Reagan before an episode of Wagon Train.) Meanwhile, the President's men broke into public recriminations about the debate preparations as they searched for explanations of what went wrong. Nevada Senator Paul Laxalt, general chairman of the Reagan campaign, charged that Reagan had been badly served by White House aides who had plied him with facts and figures and given him too little time to relax. Said Laxalt: "He was brutalized by a briefing process that didn't make any sense."

So the debate changed the tone and atmosphere of the campaign. Did it change the odds on who would win the election? Not much. Not yet. The same polls in which respondents judged Mondale to be the winner of the Louisville confrontation disclosed a rise of only four to five points in the percentage of people who actually intend to vote for him, a shift within the margin of error of most of the polls. Those gains left Mondale trailing Reagan by 15 to 22 points in the national surveys. Interestingly, the President's private polls put the gap at 14 points, down four points in the first four days after the debate, partly because Reagan Pollster Richard Wirthlin cautiously includes more women, blacks and Hispanics in his samples than some other pulse takers do. But even that number poses an enormous handicap for Mondale to overcome in the three weeks remaining before Election Day, and Wirthlin's polls showed little movement after midweek.

But numbers can change, and fast. One indication: in a New York Times/CBS News poll of 329 voters taken immediately after the debate on Sunday night, 43% thought Mondale had won, while 34% judged Reagan the victor. But after two days of press and TV post-mortems and innumerable private discussions of the outcome among voters, 515 people responding to a Times/CBS poll on Tuesday awarded Mondale the victory by an overpowering 66% to 17%. This seemed to be a political application of what in physics is known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle: the very act of measuring a phenomenon changes the phenomenon being measured in such a way as to make future readings unpredictable.