Charms and Maledictions

After Louisville, a national pageant takes on new possibilities

Searching for a street-level reading of the nation 's political mood, and the nuances of its shifts, Senior Writer Lance Morrow traveled with the Reagan and Mondale campaigns for 2½ weeks, before and after the presidential debate. His report:

The atrium of the Hyatt Regency in Louisville is a bright interior shaft that rises up 16 stories from the lobby-an impressive effect. It makes the inside of the hotel look Like a shopping mall that has ambitions to become a cathedral. Or, on the night of the presidential debate, like a sort of gala high-rise tenement. Tiers of balconies, one on every floor, overlook the lobby. They were festooned that night with American flags and sheets emblazoned with Republican slogans, and the faithful leaned out over each ledge to cheer Ronald Reagan when he returned from the debate: "Four more years! Four more years!"

Reagan, mounting a stage in the lobby, down at the bottom of this festive well, may have been relieved to be working with a script again. In the soft and almost purring voice that he can direct with such intimacy at a crowd, the President gave a short talk, part inspiration ("Fly as high as you can!"), part politics as manly game ("Come November, we're gonna tell Coach Tax Hike [Walter Mondale] to head for the showers"). The Republicans hollered and whooped. It had been a long night. Ronald and Nancy Reagan made their way to one of the glass elevators that run up one wall of the atrium. The Reagans walked inside and turned and waved through the transparent doors.

And then, an astonishing apparition: the glass capsule abruptly whooshed the Reagans-still waving-skyward, as if it were speeding them back up into the clouds, back into the fleecy, mythic realm from which they had come. A hallucination out of Erich Von Daniken: Elevators of the Gods.

Louisville can only have left the President wishing that he could so easily sail back into his magic. Until the debate, the presidential campaign had been a disengaged and ghostly pageant, on either side a kind of somnambulation: Reagan working under a charm, Mondale under some sour malediction. After Louisville, the campaign began to develop, Like a Polaroid picture in one's hand as the images start to come clear.

One sometimes thought that the author of the Mondale curse was Mondale. He seemed somehow to be psychically disconnected from his own passions, to be neutralized by an internal maze of deflectors and scruples. He displayed a genius for undoing his successes. In any case, he had no political traction. For some reason, people heard not so much the substance of his words as his voice, an instrument that tended to reduce his strongest convictions to a whine. Maybe it was the upper Midwest talking, the boyhood as a Norwegian minister's son. In the vibrations of his voice, like wind through fence wire on a gray day, one heard the coming of a Minnesota winter.

If Mondale seemed at a psychic remove, Reagan worked at a physical remove, not talking to reporters, heading out perhaps twice a week to address rallies of his believers, to congratulate Americans for acting American and to dismiss the opposition-and, indeed, most complexity in the world-as being archaic, depressive and implicitly unmanly.