Mondale Courts Young Voters in Seeking Old Spot
Brief Campaign Aimed at Party's Liberal Base
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54145-2002Nov1.html
Republican candidate Norm Coleman greets well-wishers outside the Black Bear Lodge and Saloon in Baxter, Minn., before a rally yesterday. (Steve Kohls -- Brainerd Daily Dispatch Via AP)
By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 2, 2002; Page A06
MANKATO, Minn., Nov. 1 -- With scruffy twenty-somethings hopping up and down, Walter F. Mondale -- former vice president, senator and diplomat, and newly tapped Senate nominee -- awkwardly bobbed his head and tapped his foot to the thumping rock song he didn't seem to know.
Yet as family, friends and devoted fans swarmed the stage of the Historic State Theatre in Minneapolis late Wednesday night, Fritz, as the shouting crowd adoringly called him, looked right at home.
The grand patriarch of Minnesota's grieving Democratic family spread his 74-year-old arms and seemed to embrace them all: the teary-eyed admirers of the late senator Paul Wellstone, the power-hungry party activists and the family and aides of a political legacy now poised for a possible comeback that, until last week, seemed unthinkable.
What's left of this strange campaign for the Senate was supposed to be about Wellstone -- his shocking death in a plane crash, his liberal legacy and his unfinished business in Washington. But it has quickly morphed into the "Fritz Blitz," a 100-hour campaign, if it can be called that, to return Mondale to the institution he left a quarter century ago.
"It's like the world was turned upside down, like one of Shakespeare's plays, where they were preparing for a wedding but they had a funeral," Mondale told students at Macalester College in St. Paul Thursday afternoon. "As Shakespeare wrote, 'All things were to the contrary.' Yet, in an almost unseemly way, we are required to campaign for a political office."
So campaign he does, in what he alternately calls a mysterious, strange and weird affair. Mondale, who attended Macalester before Republican nominee Norm Coleman, now 53, was born, doesn't sound like a reluctant candidate. But he sometimes campaigns like one.
When he's on stage, he is energetic, even giddy, and eager to talk about his long career and desire to return to the Senate, where he served from 1964 to 1976. But even with Tuesday's election bearing down, he doesn't appear rushed. In his first two days on the trail, he held two short press conferences, attended three town hall meetings and skipped one public debate -- although he has promised to debate Coleman before Tuesday. It's very much a 9-to-5 affair, often more coronation than traditional campaign.
Day 2 started at lunchtime on the campus of Minnesota State University in Mankato, with another town hall meeting packed full of young liberal college students. It's as if Mondale is trying to connect with younger generations by surrounding himself with younger faces. His next stop was a high school cafeteria in Rochester.
"If there's one thing I know about students, you don't need sleep," he told students here. He implored them to "forget sleep" and go out and "make a difference" in Tuesday's election.
If this were a longer campaign under different circumstances, Mondale, an heir to New Deal liberalism, would be a prime GOP target, much as Wellstone was before the Oct. 25 airplane tragedy. Republicans have opted for a tamer TV ad that links Mondale to the high gasoline prices and mortgage rates of the Carter administration, when he was vice president -- and when many of today's voters were children.
Mondale boasts that, if elected, he will be an honorary member of the Democratic leadership, thanks to a rule adopted after the election of the last vice president-turned-senator, Minnesota's own Hubert H. Humphrey.
It's impossible to tell -- before Tuesday, anyway -- if today's Minnesotans want Mondale's brand of big-government liberalism, rejected by a large majority of American voters (but not Minnesota) in his 1984 presidential bid. As a senator, he might appropriate more money, oppose more judges and expand more government programs than many voters here would like. Such questions, however, may hardly matter in a quick-sprint campaign that offers little time for meaningful candidate comparisons. Five days are hardly enough to bring down a legend.
So Coleman, the fresh-faced former mayor of St. Paul, is making this a question of age, fitness and vision. He is storming the state and telling voters he's a "post-Cold War, post-9/11" Republican. He attended a rally tonight in Duluth with Vice President Cheney, and Sunday he welcomes President Bush for yet another visit.
Veiled or not, Coleman's every move seems to question Mondale's age. Even his campaign theme -- "the future is now" -- hints that Mondale is a relic. He talks incessantly about working hard and offering "21st century" ideas. The not so subtle message: Mondale is yesterday's politician.
There are several possible flaws in this strategy, though. For starters, 74 is not so old for a senator. Eight current senators are older than Mondale, including 99-year-old Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.).
And, in such confusing times with so little time to choose between candidates, many Minnesotans appear comforted by the steady hand of a grandfatherly figure who has served his country in Congress, the White House and, most recently, in Japan as an ambassador.
Mondale is recycling a famous line from his 1984 presidential campaign, which President Ronald Reagan, then 73, used against him: "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
To reassure voters, Mondale released a medical report giving him a clean bill of health, save for blurry vision in one eye from a blood clot. He promised to serve one -- and only one -- full six-year term, ending his career at 80.
Mondale calls his experience an asset, saying he would get off to a quicker start in the Senate than would Coleman. Trying to preempt harsher attacks, he has called for civil discussions in the campaign's final days. "Of all times, Minnesotans don't need a political dogfight," Mondale told the students here today.
For Mondale to win, he needs to connect with young activists who generated much of the energy that powered the grass-roots Wellstone movement -- the pro-environment, pro-abortion-rights crowd. If it means rocking to U2, he's trying to show he's up to the task and can find the beat.
Staff writer Robert E. Pierre and researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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