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Remember 1984The year of the lengthy primary season we now long for.

By Jeff Greenfield
Posted Friday, Sept. 7, 2007, at 12:08 PM ET
Jesse Jackson and Walter Mondale, 1984. Click image to expand.

With the presidential nominating season now threatening to spill forward into early January—or Boxing Day—or Halloween—a lamentation is ringing through the land (or at least among the politically obsessed). It goes something like this: "Why can't a wide variety of states, small and large, have a genuine say in the nomination? Why can't the voters have the time they need to get a real sense of the candidates' strengths and weaknesses?"

Why not? For the answer, look to 1984—not Orwell's dystopian novel, but the Democratic nominating calendar of little more than 20 years ago. That year, Walter Mondale and Gary Hart battled for the chance to take on incumbent Ronald Reagan. And what now seems an impossibility—lots of states with real clout, lots of time for voters—was pretty much what happened. And while the process ended with the traditional gnashing of teeth and rending of garments that greets the end of every primary season, it seems a model compared to the truncated six-week campaigns of recent years and the real possibility of an even shorter season this time around.

In the beginning, it didn't look like a real fight at all. Former Vice President Mondale had a huge lead in all the early polls, and the opposition was scattered among Sens. John Glenn, Alan Cranston, Gary Hart, and Ernest Hollings, as well as Florida Gov. Reuben Askew and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. With backing from organized labor and most of the party's establishment, Mondale ran a Rose Garden strategy without a Rose Garden. "The sweetest primary in history," he called it, and when he won a landslide in the Iowa caucuses of Feb. 20, with 48 percent of the vote compared with 16 percent for runner-up Hart, it looked like the contest would be over almost before it began. Indeed, on the day of the New Hampshire primary a week later, the New York Times reported that "Walter F. Mondale now holds the most commanding lead ever recorded in a presidential nominating campaign by a non-incumbent."

It proved, however, to be a lead anchored in sand. By coming in second in Iowa, however distantly, Gary Hart became the unofficial candidate of the "not-Mondale" Democrats—voters who were younger, more educated, more affluent, whiter, and disenchanted with the orthodoxies of the Democratic Party. They had backed Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and George McGovern in 1972. And in New Hampshire, with the help of Mondale's complacency and Hart's message promising "new ideas" and "a new generation of leadership," these Democrats gave the underfinanced underdog Hart a near 10-point win. When Hart followed up with a landslide victory in Vermont a week later, Mondale found himself on the verge of political death.

And then the nominating process saved him. The progression of primaries from March to June gave voters time to take a longer look at the players. Even as Hart's face splashed onto the covers of news magazines, unsettling questions began to pop up. Why had he changed his name from Hartpence? Why had he dissembled about his age? Why had his signature radically changed? Then came a memorable moment during a debate in Atlanta, shortly before the March 13 primaries in several Southern states. Turning to Hart, Mondale borrowed a line from the famous Wendy's TV ad of the day: "When I hear your new ideas, I'm reminded of that ad: 'Where's the beef?' " (Mondale had actually never seen the ad; his campaign manager, Bob Beckel, had to act it out for him).

Mondale also had time to rally groups in the traditional Democratic coalition, which was suspicious of Hart's post-New Deal "new ideas" rhetoric. In two Southern states, it is not too much to say that Mondale's campaign was saved by the black vote. Mondale was a civil rights stalwart; Hart had entered politics after that movement's great victories and had once said of himself and his ideological contemporaries, "We're not a bunch of little Hubert Humphreys." To blacks (and to unions), that was not a recommendation. On March 13, already three weeks into the long primary season, Mondale lost the Florida, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island primaries. But with the support of civil rights leaders Julian Bond and Coretta Scott King in Georgia, and Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington in Alabama—who broke with other blacks and shunned the Jackson campaign—Mondale won those two states and survived to fight another day.

From mid-March to June, the contest went on, without a clear victor. On March 20, the remnants of Richard Daley's Chicago organization managed a five-point victory for Mondale over Hart. A week later, New York weighed in with a 17-point win for Mondale. But while Mondale re-emerged the front-runner, the contest was far from over. During the next two months, Wisconsin went narrowly for Hart; Pennsylvania went big for Mondale; Indiana went for Hart; Maryland and North Carolina chose Mondale; and Ohio gave Hart a two-point victory.

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Jeff Greenfield is the senior political correspondent for CBS News.
Photograph of Jesse Jackson and Walter Mondale by Jim Mone/Associated Press.
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Remarks from the Fray:

What if the primary schedule was based upon the margin of victory (or defeat) for each state from the previous election?

What I am proposing is that the more "purple" a state is, the closer to the front of the schedule the state belongs.

The idea being that states with narrow margins of victory have more potential swing voters than other states. And you want a candidate that will appeal to the most swing voters after the primary is over, for the die hard voters will most likely always vote for their candidate.

So imagine a primary schedule where Ohio, New Mexico, Florida, etc. are the first states with a primary. Now we have a whole different type of process which benefits the candidates who can appeal to the center, not the power brokers in Iowa, NH, and South Carolina.

And the greatest thing about the system is that the front runners will constantly be changing based upon the previous election. Now there is a real benefit for the local party organization in a very red or blue state to try to make the election closer so they can move up in the schedule.

Only downside is that NH and Iowa would probably be upset.

--locker1776

(To reply, click here.)

Fiddling with the order of the primaries is about money: it's about forcing the tee vee stations and the candidates to spend money in your state instead of some other state. Iowa at least forces a kind of labor-intensive campaign on the candidates, and New Hampshire wants to see their faces, but in the big states no matter when they have the vote it's all going to be about money.

The whole idea about having early primaries that would expose the faces and the speeches and give money a chance to be spent wisely on politicians who were performing in public is lost when you turn the primaries into a giant bum's rush. What you get instead is a REAL primary that happens in the months before the official season, when the skybox crowd gets its own early game and makes its own decisions. At least that was the way things were supposed to be, in the old New World with which Slate's Experts would be happiest: before Dean and the internet: before things started going wrong.

The argument now between Clinton and Obama both is and is not a repeat of the Mondale-Hart contest. Hart was supposed to be new and wasn't, and was supposed to have new ideas, but didn't. Hart had, after all, managed the McGovern campaign (and did a remarkably bad job at it). He'd had his moment of cathexis with Warren Beatty (a movie star and a political wonk meet and decide they want to be each other and, for a little while, are). So why were Hart's flaws such a surprise?

It's tempting for the Clinton people to try making the case that Obama is another Gary Hart, but his narrative arc is totally different: it's actually a lot like hers, if you pretend (as she seems, much of the time to do) that you can put all her time as The Wife in brackets. So who's the Hart, here? The DLC longs for a new Hart: he was the candidate of their golden youth. If they could only get Paul to run as a Democrat...

And of course, there's also no Reagan waiting in the wings. The republicans can't decide between Grumpy, Sneezy and Dopy. And is there a Mondale here? At the beginning and end of that 1984 season, Mondale was the best, and then he got beaten by a clown.

--Melvyl

(To reply, click here.)

(9/8)

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