Mondale gets mad

We keep seeing on our screens on the telly a Roman profile which keeps saying to audiences all over the country, 'I'm angry, I'm mad'. It is the Roman profile of Mr Walter Fritz Mondale who's running, running almost breathlessly, for President of the United States.

Thirty-six years ago another Democrat with a distinctly non-Roman profile was shouting from the observation platform of a train also at audiences around the country, 'I'm angry, I'm mad'. He was Harry Truman. He, also, was running against a Republican who, every political expert agreed was invincible. Mr Truman's whipped-up indignation seemed like a desperate form of blindness to the political facts of life, the main one being that he was shouting himself down to certain defeat. Mr Truman was mad at what he called the do-nothing 80th Congress and, in his anger, he called it back into an unprecedented summer session.

Well, as we all know, to everybody's astonishment and to the great pain of the invincible Republican candidate who'd already announced some of his Cabinet before the election, Mr Truman went back to the White House. At some point in the plotting of Mr Mondale's campaign, his advisers looked over the very bleak map of the United States – bleak from the point of view of a Democrat looking for states coloured in red, as ones leaning to Mondale. Two weeks ago there were two of them or rather one state and an election district. West Virginia was leaning towards Mondale and so was the capital city of Washington DC.

All the rest of the country, 49 states, coloured blue, true blue for old Ronald Reagan. Old Ron! This time, four years ago, early in the year, the Democrats were pounding away at the terrible hazards involved in electing a man for president who was already in his 69th year. The Reagan campaign team countered this with a bold and sassy move. They had Reagan, himself, make jokes about his impending senility and, just before the New Hampshire primary of that year, they organised a national celebration of Reagan's 69th birthday. That was enough, once for all, to obliterate the age issue.

Well, here he is in his 74th year, four years older than any man who's ever found himself, even at the very end of his term, in the White House and the age issue is simply not there. I haven't heard any Democrat out on the stump wave spooky warnings before the voters that in the last year of his second term Mr Reagan will be in his 78th year, though it has crossed my mind when people lay flippant bets about who'll be the next President of the United States, it might be a winner's hunch to say George Bush.

Let's look for a minute at the latest breakdown of an electoral poll. It might tell us why Mr Mondale is so angry, so fighting mad. In a national poll, which as usual says if the election were held today 57 per cent say they would vote for Reagan and 35 per cent for Mondale, leaving an unusually small percentage of the undecided, namely eight per cent, Reagan is preferred by the young and the middle-aged and about 40 per cent of the people over 65. He's preferred by all but the poor and the blacks, by most Americans who went through elementary school, also by those who went through high school, by those who went through college, by Protestants, by Jews, by Roman Catholics. Don't forget that just about one American in three or four is a Catholic, one American voter in six, and, an astonishing statistic, one American voter in eleven is an Italian-American Catholic, like Mrs Ferraro, who is not, however, going to vote for Reagan.

The part of the country most committed to Reagan is the South which, for the first half of this century, was automatically committed to the Democratic candidate, whoever he was. It was, for complicated reasons having to do with its devotion and free trade and to the seniority system in running congressional committees which we won't go into now, the South was known far into my time as the 'solid South' – solid for the Democrats – and always the firmest enemy camp for any Republican to invade. Eisenhower did it and Nixon converted it into the Republican solid South.

Now Democrats, especially since that geo or demographic revolution, have always cheered themselves up by pointing out, correctly, that in this country there are three registered Democrats to every two registered Republicans. So that if every one of them went out and voted the party line, we'd have nothing but a succession of Democratic presidents.

A friend of mine who loves statistics is always stuck on this one and he's been saying for months, to the amazement of anyone who's listening, that he can't see how Mondale can possibly lose. He may, of course, be simply being cute, implying in a quiet, wise way that he knows something the rest of us don't. But the other evening I showed him the most significant figures in this latest poll. Significant, that is, if you're bearing in mind the three-to-two advantage the Democrats have in registered voters and, for the Democrats, here is the awful truth – two figures that are more dramatically tilted towards Reagan than towards any other Republican presidential candidate I can remember – Reagan is, at the moment, luring away 26 per cent of regular Democratic voters. Worse is yet to come. It has been noticeable in the past three or four presidential elections that the normal balance or imbalance, the swing vote, if you like, has been that of independents. Well, this latest poll shows that the independents would, today, vote 61 per cent for Reagan, 31 per cent for Mondale.

A landslide, it appears, is in the offing. We shouldn't forget, however, that the so-called Reagan landslide of 1980 requires a very peculiar definition of a landslide. Because of all the democratic peoples, the Americans are the laziest or the least caring about using their vote. In 1980, only 51 per cent of Americans registered to vote went out and did so and, of those, 26 per cent voted for Reagan. In other, alarming words, one American in four believed in Reagan enough to vote for him. The other three were either against him or didn't care who got in.

Still, the general sentiment among voters in Reagan's favour today is overwhelming. It all adds up to a picture of despair for Mr Mondale and Mrs Ferraro – who, by the way, is not being helped by the decision of the House of Representatives Ethics Committee to begin a formal investigation into charges that she violated a law, the ethics in government law, in failing to disclose not only her own assets, but those of her spouse which the law requires for all members of the House of Representatives. This is quite separate from the charges about not revealing her husband's income tax records and what she might profit from him as a candidate for the vice presidency.

Anyway, there is the electoral map of the United States two months before the election. Mr Mondale's advisers stared at it and decided that their man had better cease to reason with his audiences in a reasonable way. He'd better do what Harry Truman did in a similar plight. He must get good and mad. Unfortunately, his anger is reflected or absorbed, it appears, only by the very poor and the blacks, whether they're registered or not registered.

Mr Mondale bleeds for the poor persuasively. He's angry on behalf of the unemployed. He's alarmed and mad at the huge national deficits, the prospect of $200 billion of debt. Unfortunately, he's doing this at a time when the unemployment figure is a little lower than it was during the Carter administration, during, as the Republicans love to remind us, the Carter-Mondale administration. It's also a time when more new jobs, seven millions of them, have been created in the past 18 months – an American record. A time when inflation, which Mr Reagan promised to reduce from 12 per cent to six or seven is done to about three per cent a year. A time when the Carter record of a one per cent in growth in the gross national product has gone up to six per cent. A time when nobody can tell us what deficits mean in human terms.

So, it's not surprising that the cheers of the people who come out to listen to Mr Mondale sound half-hearted, respectful, wanting to help, but not a cry from the heart.

A week or two ago, the Mondale team sat down again. Of course, they're sitting down all the time but I mean sat down in a grim session to invent some other tactic, some more resounding slogan. They found it in the forgotten fact that Mr Reagan is the first president never to have talked with a Russian leader since Herbert Hoover. Mr Mondale started intoning this dreadful charge day after day, though I should guess very many of his audience could barely remember who Hoover was and quite possible confused him with J. 'FBI' Edgar of that ilk. It's a point, not mentioned, that Franklin Roosevelt didn't talk to a Soviet leader either until he was in the eleventh year of his presidency and then, only, into the fifth year of the Second World War.

But, fair enough. Since the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as the only two superpowers, every president – since Eisenhower, anyway – has felt it essential from time to time to try and discover a secure way of living with the Russians in peace and without fear. We haven't done it and it's the Democrats contention and, to be truthful, the admission of many Republicans, that relations with the Soviet Union have never been more fractious, more fearful, more strained.

So, Mr Mondale seemed to have a good point in sharpening his attack on the president's bellicose attitude towards the Soviet Union by appealing for a summit meeting. He did it, of course, on the fair assumption that Mr Reagan would stand pat and stand off, certainly until the election.

But, after some keen and diligent exchanges between the White House and the Soviet embassy, Mr Reagan announces that he's going to talk with Mr Gromyko when he comes here for the United Nations' annual general assembly.

So, now Mr Mondale has to say, 'Well, about time! But how shocking you've waited so long!' It is not a response that stirs the blood. Sometimes it seems hardly worth running for president, does it, Fritz?

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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