Battling to take on Reagan

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Like another former Vice President, Richard Nixon in 1968, Mondale is reaping the reward of years of faithful speechmaking at rubber chicken dinners for party candidates throughout the country. Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, a leading liberal, made a splash in June by endorsing Glenn as the more electable candidate. Shortly before, in Michigan, a state with more delegates, Mondale quietly signed up 139 elected Democratic officials, including Governor James Blanchard and Detroit Mayor Coleman Young. In Pennsylvania, which has a potentially important April primary, Mondale can count on so much help from the regular Democratic organization that he has not bothered to put together one of his own. Pittsburgh Mayor Richard Caliguiri is grateful for federal cash that Mondale steered to the city when he was Jimmy Carter's Vice President, and Mondale has raised $50,000 for Wilson Goode, who is likely to be elected mayor of Philadelphia next month. Unlike some other black leaders, who are poised to support the Rev. Jesse Jackson if he declares his candidacy, Goode probably will be with Mondale all the way.

On the hustings, Mondale presents himself as the Compleat Democrat "who cares" about all the causes of all the party's various constituencies. His game plan is to appeal unashamedly to interest groups by plugging the issues each holds dear, hoping to weld them into a majority coalition. An incomplete list of the promises made in a single speech in Rochester, last week: for labor, to "put all Americans back to work"; for teachers, to "lead a renaissance in American education"; for business, to force foreign competitors to "open their markets to us as much as we've opened ours to them"; for hawks, to use military might to keep the peace and project American moral authority around the world; for women, to win ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment; for the elderly and sick, to put a lid on hospital costs; for blacks and minorities, to crack down on civil rights violators. Seeking to increase his already strong support among Jewish leaders, Mondale had earlier asserted, contrary to his old boss Carter, that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are legal. Glenn tried to sound equally pro-Israel with a speech repudiating "evenhandedness" in the Middle East.

Just how Mondale would fulfill his pledges is usually left vague, but there is one clue: when asked if he would favor this or that new federal program, he almost invariably agrees. A new Civilian Conservation Corps? Yes. A national bottle bill? Sure. A Peace Academy? Why not?

This very strategy, however, is simultaneously Mondale's greatest weakness. It opens him to the charge that he has sold himself piece by piece to special-interest groups, to the point at which he can no longer say no to any of their demands. "It's not that he likes labor," says one Democratic Senate aide, "it's that he's captive of labor." Mondale indignantly replies that there is nothing so "special" about the groups he courts. Women, blacks, labor and the elderly, he says, are a majority of all people in the country. But the charge clearly has hurt. Says one Democratic Senator: "The special-interest rap is the Sword of Damocles hanging over Mondale's head."