Political Theater

...Campaigns are largely instruments to arouse party workers...

...To be sure, its benefits will largely flow to those with yearly incomes above BOOKS $250,000, but victors traditionally distribute spoils...

...Jack Germond and Jules Witcover, shrewd reporters, demonstrate in this entertaining account, Wake Us When It's Over, that Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and most of the others made the least of their limited opportunities...

...Their pursuit, however, has yielded some splendid stories...

...Similarly, the campaign produced the first woman to run on a national ticket...

...In 1984, this genuinely silent majority perhaps had special reason for sitting it out...

...The most important proposal, free television for candidates who are then barred from purchasing time, is treated all too summarily...

...A sheen of apparent well-being lay over most of the country...

...I have seen nowhere else their hilarious account of the two light-fingered lawyers in the Mondale camp...

...Germond and Witcover are disgusted with the campaign behavior of politicians, press, and voters, but it was not a total loss...

...Given this, there was little even a serious Democratic candidate could do...

...On the Republican side, Germond and Witcover discovered "The Great American Fog Machine," a battle plan drawn up by Reagan advisers in case he fumbled as badly in the second debate as in the first...

...White fundamentalists in the Sun Belt were inspired by Reagan's pieties, his implied promise to continue the good work of reversing civil rights, and his hostility to the liberated female...

...But the campaign of 1984 was no more trivial than those of the past...

...None of this happened, of course, although Hart flirted briefly with incomes policy, a critical point that Germond and Witcover somehow missed in an otherwise comprehensive and lucid account of the political theater in 1983 and 1984...

...Germond and Witcover offer some standard remedies to improve the process: compress the primary period and curb the influence of money in politics...

...On the morning after the last primary, these party leaders knew that Mondale had won in New Jersey but, because of the time difference, were mostly unaware that he had been trounced in California...

...Mondale pitched his campaign on, of all things, the alleged dangers of a budget deficit and the need for a tax increase...

...Reagan had successfully exploited the vulgar nationalism that periodically afflicts the country, winning gold medals at Los Angeles and in Grenada against bush-league competition...

...At a critical moment in the campaign, Mondale dutifully practiced pivoting from the podium toward his opponent...

...Think of "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" or Franklin Roosevelt promising a balanced budget in 1932...

...Uneasy Democrats swung back and forth between Hart and Mondale, men with almost identical voting records, first slapping down one front-runner and then the other...

...A daring candidate might have ridiculed the conventional wisdom about American security being endangered by small Marxist states in the Caribbean and Central America...

...Those with a reason to turn out did so...

...Jesse Jackson not only showed that a black could match whites in electoral entertainment but even touched on a few issues that mattered...

...That harsh judgment misses the point...

...Red-baiting is an old Republican ploy, but ordering generals to support the commander-in-chief in a political struggle is an original contribution...

...voters are educated daily and chiefly by the objective circumstances in which they find themselves...

...Among other things, this counterattack, in its own words, called for smearing Mondale as a "patsy for the Soviets" and violating "protocols [sic] by enlisting top Pentagon brass to help...

...Even a cautious Presidential hopeful could have displayed a genuine attachment to the restoration of detente...

...Newly registered Sun Belt whites rallied to the cause in even larger numbers than Jackson's army...

...Blacks registered in large numbers for Jackson but voted less heavily for Mondale in absolute terms...

...A bold Democrat would have challenged an absurd Middle East policy in which an Israeli client binds its patron to reckless adventure in a region where there Bernard D. Nossiter is a long-time journalist who has been looking at Third World economic problems for the Twentieth Century Fund...

...Like many of the best Washington reporters, Germond and Witcover are far more interested in what happened and how than in why, preferring inside maneuvers to substantive issues...

...Pat Caddell, a respected guru, instructed Mondale in the art of "invading" Reagan's debate space to demonstrate mastery...

...This misguided red herring earned him the admiration of bankers everywhere and many economists who should have known better...

...It wasn't Geraldine Ferraro's fault that her husband has the morals of a real estate operator...

...This pair, fugitives from the Marx Brothers, stole accounts from their own organization, books that described the flow of funds in and out of the dubious delegates' committees in Pennsylvania...

...by Bernard D. Nossiter The country's largest voting bloc, which chooses with its feet by staying at home, probably deserves more respect than it is usually accorded by right-thinking people...

...There remains only to explain how Mondale ever carried Minnesota and the District of Columbia...

...Apart from peacekeepers in Lebanon—and they were hastily withdrawn well before Election Day—American troops were not under fire anywhere...

...A brisk recovery from the prolonged slump created by the Federal Reserve with Reagan's blessing was still under way...

...Mondale predicted that Reagan would have to raise taxes, but that amiable showman has better instincts: He has now proposed a tax cut rather than an increase...

...are clear American interests in stability...

...It was a pity he clung to a psychotic anti-Semite, thereby enabling the Israel lobby to discredit his suggestion that Middle East peace depends on dealing with those who can disrupt it...

...Unhappily, there is no evidence that television viewers responded to this carefully rehearsed ballet...

...At home, some Democrat could have launched a discussion of policies to curb corporate and union pricing power, essential for the expansionary fiscal and monetary policies needed to regain the high-employment, high-growth, and low-inflation course of the Eisenhower-Kennedy years...

...Sometimes voters show a rare discrimination, and this was evident in the 1984 primaries...

...Indeed, Germond and Witcover suggest that Mondale, with all his heavy organizational support, might still be balloting at the convention if he had not deceptively gained last-minute support from about fifty "super" or independent delegates...

...Germond and Witcover epitomize the bizarre events in one telling anecdote...

...Like the rest of us, this group—almost one in two voters—can't escape the noisy Presidential campaigns...

...Unlike us, it presumably has reached an unspoken decision that the outcome can't substantially affect its life, that it is just not worth the effort to pull a lever for Tweedle Democrat or Tweedle Republican...

...Their real complaint is against voters whose attention span is said to resemble a twelve-year-old's...

...Nine of ten were at work, and inflation, although high by postwar standards, had come down sharply from Carter levels...

...It was as if Democrats were saying that neither was plausible, and they were right...

...For one thing, Reagan's re-election was a near certainty...

...The account of Mondale in sweat socks, T-shirt, and jeans, desperately working the telephone to con some of the more sophisticated politicians in America, is one of the several instructive tales that Germond and Witcover tell in this useful book...

...That the bumblers were forced to return the stolen records the next day only heightened the comedy...

...A more imaginative candidate might have laid some groundwork for 1988, much as Adlai Stevenson did in the 1950s...