Walter Mondale: Getting a Second Look

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Reagan had looked off form in some of the mock debates, but neither the President nor his aides had thought much about that. "It was just overconfidence on everyone's part," says one adviser. In particular, when Reagan resurrected his famous line from the 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, "There you go again," nobody had thought to warn him that Mondale might be waiting for it. The Democratic challenger, in fact, had reviewed the tape of the 1980 debate, noted the point at which the line occurred and rehearsed an answer to give if Reagan should try it again. But, says Mondale, "I didn't think he'd use it. I don't know why he did."

Reagan did, and Mondale, turning directly to face the President, asked, "Remember the last time you said that?" Reagan nodded his head and muttered "Um-hmmm." Mondale: "You said it when President Carter said that you were going to cut Medicare ... And what did you do right after the election? You went out and tried to cut $20 billion out of Medicare." (Actually, Reagan's proposal was not made until 1983; it would have involved higher premiums for Medicare patients and benefit reductions totaling $19.4 billion over five years.) For his closing statement, Reagan had prepared a thematic mini-speech on the improvement in the economy during his term, but on-camera he tried to blend it with a rebuttal of points Mondale had made earlier. The result was a meandering jumble filled with figures seemingly unrelated to one another.

By the next morning, in fact, the President's performance had broken the longstanding though unofficial taboo against press and TV discussion of his age. Columns and air waves filled with speculation about whether age had anything to do with Reagan's poor performance. Mondale vowed to stay out of that argument, but other Democrats were less cautious. Demanded New York Mayor Ed Koch: "Do you want his shaky finger near the button?" Reagan did not look or sound that different in the debate than in some press conferences, or indeed than in 1980.

Though Reagan made his share of dubious assertions and used some questionable statistics in the debate, so did Mondale. Indeed, it was the Democrat who had to explain later that at one point he had said the exact opposite of what he meant. He spoke of eventual "total repeal" of tax indexing, when he intended to advocate eventually making indexation universal. Indexing is a method of adjusting tax brackets to prevent inflation from raising an individual's tax bill, and under present, Reagan-inspired law, it goes into effect next year. Mondale has proposed to restrict its use temporarily in order to increase tax collections and shrink deficits. Mondale's error did not hurt him, at least not during the debate. Reagan inexplicably let it go by without comment, although later last week he quoted it verbatim, implying that it had been a kind of Freudian slip revealing Mondale's true intentions.