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NATIONAL POLITICS: DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION RACE 1984

Reforming the Nomination Process—Again

While President Ronald Reagan sat unopposed in the White House, enjoying the incumbent's privilege of acting statesmanlike and above the fray of mere politics, the Democrats took potshots at each other along the primary trail. Having reformed the nomination process to give representation to all its various minorities and interest groups, the party had discovered unforeseen snags in 1980 and subsequently tinkered with the rules again. Among the reforms was a requirement that all delegate selection, whether by primary or caucus or open meeting, take place within a three-month period—an attempt to reduce the cost of drawn-out primary-season campaigns and lessen the impact of media reporting on later contests. The states were also given more flexibility in the methods by which they selected delegates. To avoid dividing up delegates among many candidates with only limited support, a new rule required that an individual receive a minimum percentage of the vote (usually 20 percent) in a caucus or primary before he or she could win any delegates. Another rules change reserved 14 percent of the total number of delegate places as special seats for Democratic senators, representatives, governors, mayors, and top national and party officials. These "superdelegates" would be officially uncommitted, a move designed to give the party some of the maneuverability in candidate selection that it had lacked in 1980.

The New Rules Favor Mondale

Whatever the intention of these rules changes, they favored the well-known, well-financed, well-organized candidate. In 1984 that candidate was former vice president Walter "Fritz" Mondale, who was not only well connected within the party but had begun in November 1980 to build what became widely recognized as "the nation's most elaborate presidential campaign organization" (New York Times, 26 September 1983). Once Sen. Edward Kennedy announced in 1982 that he would not run for president in 1984, Mondale was widely acknowledged to be the Democratic front-runner. He was also helped by the AFLCIO, which endorsed his candidacy in October 1983—breaking with its tradition of waiting until after a candidate was officially nominated to announce its endorsement of him.

Match-ups with Reagan

Neither Mondale nor any other Democrat did well when matched against Reagan in public-opinion polls. In a series of sixteen Gallup polls conducted between April 1982 and February 1984 Mondale led the president by margins of 5 to 12 percent in six of the first eight and beat him again in November and December 1983, but by February 1984—with the improving economy—Reagan had pulled ahead of Mondale by ten percentage points and stayed ahead for the duration—usually by margins of 15 to 20 percent, Early on only 14 percent of Democrats liked Mondale, while 10 percent preferred Kennedy. By January 1984 a majority of Democrats expressed a preference for Mondale, but support for him dipped during the primary season—only to return to the level of January after the final primaries. In general Democrats did not dislike Mondale, but their enthusiasm for him was limited.

A Democrat with the "Right Stuff."

In 1982 and 1983 Sen. John Glenn of Ohio was considered Reagan's toughest challenger. He beat the president in the first eight of the Gallup polls mentioned above by margins of 4 to 17 percent. As a former astronaut, Glenn had the right image. He was widely perceived as the patriotic hero who could counter Reagan's attempt to preempt patriotism for the Republicans. A new movie about the astronauts, The Right Stuff, released in November 1983, was expected to help Glenn win votes. Yet by February 1984, with Reagan ahead of him by fifteen percentage points, Glenn was losing supporters among Democrats as well. British journalist Peter Preston summed up the problem: calling the Ohio senator "a solid, able, tolerably modest fellow,…a hero and celebrity," Preston added, "The legend of heroism carries charisma but Glenn himself—apart from an odd resemblance to the Pope—has no charisma" (Manchester Guardian Weekly, 4 December 1983).

The Rest of the Field

Sen. Alan Cranston of California, former governor Reuben Askew of Florida, and Sen. Ernest "Fritz" Hollings of South Carolina showed regional support. George McGovern, the antiwar candidate who had been so resoundingly defeated by Richard Nixon in 1972, came in third in one Gallup poll. Yet Mondale's most serious challengers were Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado, whose association with Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign seemed to lend him some of the Kennedy charisma, and civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, the first African American to launch a full-scale campaign for a major-party presidential nomination.

Campaign Issues

Mondale, Hart, and Jackson were all from the liberal wing of the party and in basic agreement on the major issues. All three called for cuts in defense spending, higher taxes on the rich, a freeze on nuclear testing, expansion of civil rights, increased spending on social programs, and creation of more job and affirmative-action programs. They also supported the ERA and freedom of choice on the abortion issue.

Jackson

Jackson's main emphasis was on social issues, as he called for a "rainbow coalition" of blacks, other racial and ethnic minorities, poor people, women, homosexuals, and others left out of the Reagan vision of America. With his sympathy for Third World radical liberation movements such as the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Jackson's foreign policy, while not clearly defined, frightened some Democrats, who believed it would alienate the Jews, conservative Catholics, and moderates whose loyalty the party needed to keep if it wanted to win the election. Jews were in fact alienated when the press reported that Jackson had privately referred to Jews as "Hymies" and when he refused to repudiate anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan until June 1984, after Mondale's nomination had become a certainty. In the end Jackson's support came mainly from African Americans, but he brought so many new—especially young—black voters into the electoral process that he established a formidable power base. Almost 20 percent of the voters in the 1984 primaries were African Americans. To maintain the loyalty of these voters the Democratic Party knew it had to accommodate Jackson. Yet it also feared alienating two other important groups in its New Deal coalition, Jews and white southerners.

Hart and the Yuppies

The core of Hart's support came from affluent members of the "baby boom" generation—many of then drawn by Hart's association with Robert Kennedy's antiwar campaign of 1968. Hart's staff called these young urban professionals yuppies, a play on the antiwar Yippies of the 1960s, and once the media picked up the term, it became part of the American language. (A more accurate acronym used by political analysts, yumpies, for "young upwardly mobile professionals," never caught on.) Hart appealed to this group with his call for "a new generation of leadership" with "new ideas." Yet many of his supporters were uncertain what his ideas were. Hart was a stronger advocate than Mondale of environmental protection, an immediate nuclear freeze, and defense spending cuts. Yet his campaign tended to blur his stands on the issues in order to attract as many followers as possible to his camp, a situation that caused Mondale to quote a popular hamburger-chain commercial by asking, "Where's the beef?" Hart's greatest appeal to his supporters came from his attacks on the "Establishment," which included Mondale with his support from the labor unions—for which yuppies had little sympathy. By late April Hart was attacking Mondale for taking "hundreds of thousands of dollars" from union PACs and implying that he would be under the thumb of organized labor. Though the union contributions were legal, Hart called on Mondale to return them, and soon he had crowds at his campaign rallies chanting, "Give the money back, Walter!" (On 17 May Mondale announced that he would return $400,000 of the PAC contributions. Hart called the amount "not enough.")

Mondale Gets a Head Start—and Fades

Even before the Iowa caucuses on 20 February 1984, Mondale was ahead in the delegate count. House Democrats had already selected their 164 superdelegates, and though superdelegates were officially uncommitted, virtually all favored Mondale. The front-runner won easily in Iowa with 48.9 percent of the vote and picked up thirty-four delegates. Hart came in second with 16.5 percent and eighteen delegates, while Glenn—then considered Mondale's strongest rival—came in sixth with 5.3 percent of the vote and no delegates. Looking for news in an election year when both major-party nominations already seemed sewn up in February, the media began talking about Hart's surprisingly "strong" showing as proof that Democrats were unhappy with Mondale. This interpretation seemed borne out in New Hampshire (28 February), where Hart won with 37.2 percent of the vote to 27.9 percent for Mondale and 5.3 percent for Jackson. Columnist Murray Kempton quipped that New Hampshire Democrats "were tired of Mondale, who is the husband type, and they turned in their weariness to Hart, who seemed the boyfriend type." Though Hart's victory seemed significant percentagewise and gave him momentum for later contests, in real numbers and actual delegates won it was less impressive. In the small, heavily Republican state of New Hampshire slightly more than one hundred thousand people had voted in the Democratic primary, and Hart's margin of victory was only about nine thousand votes. More important, because delegates were selected district by district rather than state-wide, Mondale ended up with eleven delegates while Hart got ten. The third-place winner, Jackson, got none because he was below the percentage threshold set by the party in that state. New Hampshire was not the only state in which Hart came in first with impressive percentages of the popular vote but came away with fewer delegates than Mondale. On 13 March he beat Mondale by 40 percent to 32.4 percent in Florida but came away with fifty-one delegates to Mondale's seventy-seven; and in other cases, such as Rhode Island (13 March) and delegate-rich Ohio (8 May), he came out ahead of Mondale percentagewise but ran even with him in numbers of delegates. There were also cases in which one of the three major candidates scored under the percentage threshold but would have won delegates if it were not for the threshold rule.

Mondale Regroups

Once Hart became the front-runner in the eyes of the media, he found himself in their spotlight, as they created a character issue from questions about his shaky marriage, why he had changed his name from Hartpence to Hart, and why his campaign literature subtracted a year from his age. Mondale recovered to win significant victories in the Michigan caucuses (17 March) and primaries in Illinois (20 March), New York (3 April), and Pennsylvania (24 April). From this point on he also led in the polls as his party's first-choice candidate. Hart's sweep of the western primaries and caucuses—which included a big 41.2 percent, 207-delegate win over Mondale (37.4 percent, 91 delegates) in California—could not prevent Mondale from ending the primary season with a commanding lead.

The Democratic National Convention

Two-thirds of the Democratic delegates who met in San Francisco on 16-19 July called themselves liberals, in contrast to the one-third of Democratic voters who gave themselves that label. In a conciliatory mood, Mondale supported the formation of a committee to rewrite the rules for delegate selection in 1988 in light of Jackson's and Hart's complaints about inequity in the process.

Keynote

In one of the most memorable keynote speeches of the 1980s Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York attacked Reagan's vision of America as a "City upon a Hill," saying that "the hard truth is that not every one is sharing in this city's splendor and glory" and adding: "There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city." For him the idea of family values, much touted by the Republicans, meant "Mutuality. The sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all." The speech fueled speculation that Cuomo might be the next Democratic candidate.

Platform

The platform committee, dominated by Mondale supporters, was so eager to accommodate the viewpoints of Hart and Jackson supporters that the platform mushroomed to an unheard of thirty-five thousand words. Only five items were left to be decided on the floor of the convention. The delegates accepted Hart's proposal to restrict the authority of the president to employ military forces abroad and Jackson's call for omitting opposition to racial quotas in affirmative-action programs. Following the lead of Mondale supporters, who hoped to appeal to moderate voters, they voted down Jackson's proposals to reject first use of nuclear weapons, to cut defense spending below current levels, and to eliminate runoffs in southern primaries (which tended to favor white candidates). In his acceptance speech Mondale spoke of a "new realism," promising: "By the end of my first term, I will reduce the Reagan budget deficit by two-thirds. Let's tell the truth.…Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." That statement alone may have cost Mondale the election.

Madam Vice President?

Before the convention Mondale had begun interviewing potential running mates, accepting input from all factions of the party. Feminists were especially vocal, announcing that they would take their cause to the convention floor if Mondale did not select a woman. Conservative columnist George Will observed, "Mondale bought his own paint and then painted himself into a corner.…He has no choice but to pick a woman, and he must not do it. If he does not, he will have got half of the population up on its tiptoes and then not kissed it. If he does, he will be the wimp who was bullied by the National Organization for Women" (Newsweek, 16 July 1984). Yet when Mondale tapped Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro of New York to be his running mate, many felt that he had made an excellent choice. Ferraro, who had chaired the platform committee, was seen as a vibrant, feisty campaigner who could make up for the stolid Mondale's lack of charisma. The Mondale-Ferraro ticket moved slightly ahead of Reagan and Bush in the days just after the convention, but instead of taking advantage of their momentum, Mondale went fishing, and questions about the financial dealings of Ferraro's husband, real-estate developer John Zaccaro, soon began to cloud the image of what had seemed a dream ticket.