Walter Mondale: Getting a Second Look

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By then, Mondale was hammering hard at other themes he had raised during the debate. Reagan in Louisville pledged never to cut Social Security benefits of "the people that are now getting them"; his opponent immediately asked, in effect, What about those retiring in the future? The White House on Tuesday rushed out an expanded pledge never to cut benefits for anybody. It was the first time the President had felt obliged to reply so specifically to a Mondale barb.

Mondale promptly challenged Reagan to take the same pledge on Medicare. The President in Louisville had observed, correctly, that Medicare costs are rising drastically. He might have added, but did not, that Mondale in his September deficit-reduction package proposed putting a ceiling on federal Medicare reimbursements to states. Essentially, Mondale is using Social Security and Medicare as the emotional cutting edge of a more general, and more legitimate, assault against Reagan on the "fairness issue": the complaint that Reagan's approach to reducing federal spending unduly hurts the poor.

Another target that Mondale banged away at during the debate, and is likely to hit repeatedly during the campaign's closing weeks, is the Rev. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority. Insisting that abortion must be "a personal and private moral judgment" made by the woman involved, Mondale asked, "Does every woman in America have to present herself before some judge picked by Jerry Falwell to clear her personal judgment?" The question hyperbolically assumed not only that some language in the Republican platform about the selection of federal judges requires that they be antiabortion (the platform says, "We reafirm our support for the appointment of judges at all levels of the judiciary who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of innocent human life"), but also that Reagan in a second term would appoint no judges to whom Falwell might object. Mondale was seeking to capitalize on what polls have shown to be a widespread fear that Falwell, an outspoken admirer of Reagan, will seek to impose his Fundamentalist values on abortion, school prayer and other issues on Americans who do not share those values.

Reagan by week's end was well into a vehement counterattack, focusing on a subject he failed to hit as hard as might have been expected during the debate: Mondale's advocacy of tax boosts in order to reduce deficits. Whistle-stopping through Ohio on Friday aboard a Pullman car once used by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Reagan at every stop lambasted his challenger's plans as a "mortgage on your future to pay for his campaign promises." Said the President in Dayton: "As he puts more heavy taxes on the people and their businesses, the economy will slow down and slow down. And after that kills the recovery, he'll want to raise your taxes again and again to make up for it."

So the debate, whatever its ultimate effect, has turned a once dull and predictable campaign into a lively, if not always enlightening, scrap. Close too? Not yet. But at least through this Sunday, millions of Americans who had been losing interest seem likely to stay tuned in.

-By George J. Church. Reported by Sam Allis with Mondale and Laurence I. Barrett with the President, with other bureaus