Dole-Mondale Quests: A Political Analogy

By Rhodes Cook

For several weeks now, the presidential campaign of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas has tracked that of an earlier son of the Midwest, former Vice President Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota.

Mondale won the Democratic nomination in 1984. Dole has the Republican nomination in hand this year. But neither had an easy time getting there, and Dole can only hope that their paths sharply diverge soon.

Both Dole and Mondale were presumptive favorites for their party's nominations, won the Iowa caucuses in their political back yard, but were blindsided in the New Hampshire primary the following week by challengers who offered broad doses of freshness or passion.

Badly shaken, both Mondale and Dole turned the spotlight on their politically less experienced rivals. "Where's the beef?" Mondale asked of Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, the Democrats' New Hampshire winner in 1984. Too extreme, said Dole of conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan, the GOP's New Hampshire winner this year.

And as the momentum of their challengers stalled, both Mondale and Dole were able to regain the upper hand by exploiting the assets of familiarity, broad-based organization and big-name support that enabled them to be the front-runners in the first place.

But Dole has reached the point where he must hope that history does not keep repeating itself.

Mondale went on to win his party's nomination in 1984 but never fully recovered from the scars of the primary season. He was overshadowed by others at the Democratic convention in San Francisco and was overwhelmed that fall by President Reagan, who, like President Clinton this year, faced no more than token opposition for renomination.

Dole has shown signs of blazing a more successful trail this year. He has already demonstrated much broader vote-getting appeal in the GOP primaries than Mondale ever did in the Democratic primaries in 1984.

Mondale won only one primary state with a majority of the vote (West Virginia), failed to win a single primary west of the Mississippi River, and was unable to accumulate the delegates necessary to nail down the Democratic nomination until the final day of the primary season in early June.

Dole, by contrast, has won 22 straight primaries in all regions of the country and has rolled up a majority in most of them. The GOP nomination is his.

Dole has been propelled this year by several advantages that Mondale did not have. One is the nature of his opposition. Gary Hart, says Mondale pollster Peter Hart, was a blank slate to many voters. He adds that the Colorado senator "apparently was going to represent a whole new generation." Buchanan, says Hart, is a known quantity who "polarizes people" and has helped give Dole definition.

Dole has also benefited this year from a calendar filled to the brim with early primaries and a set of Republican rules that accent winner-take-all in delegate selection.

And he has a general-election opponent in Clinton who is showing signs that he might not be the world-beater that Reagan was in 1984. Reagan amassed a Soviet-style 98.6 percent of the vote that year in the GOP primaries.

Clinton has not done nearly that well in the Democratic primaries this year. In Oklahoma on March 12, for instance, Clinton lost more than 85,000 votes - nearly 25 percent of the total - to gadfly Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. and an Illinois woman named Elvena E. Lloyd-Duffie. And that in a state that borders Clinton's Arkansas and where voting in the Democratic primary was limited to registered Democrats.

Still, Dole clearly has his work cut out for him. In 1984, Mondale was backed by many leading labor, teacher and women's groups and was tagged during the primary season as the candidate of the "special interests." It was a label he could never shake.

Dole has been pilloried for months by his GOP opponents as an aging, tax-raising, Washington insider. It is a perception that his recent primary victories have been slow to erase.

Yet Dole possesses a valuable commodity that Mondale never had - time. A protracted nominating fight like the Democrats had in 1984, says Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel, "zaps your energy and doesn't give you time to regroup and aim at the larger target (the other party)."

Dole, though, has time to burnish his image, consider the endgame with Buchanan and strategize for a fall campaign against Clinton.

Dole "may be nicked up and scarred," Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., the Republican National Committee chairman in 1984, said not long ago, "but there will be four and one-half months before the (GOP) convention." And there are more than seven months left until the general election.

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