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Senator John Glenn's fortunes apparently were the next to rise, especially after a survey by Carter Pollster Pat Caddell showed him and Maine's Muskie to be the most popular choices on one list of 14 possible candidates. Glenn flew to Plains, Ga., where he got along famously with Carter's family (he was eight-year-old Amy's favorite). But his relative inexperience (18 months in the Senate) and seeming malleability weighed against him.
Muskie had the obvious advantages of his distinguished Government experience (17 years in the Senate, two terms as Maine Governor) and his Catholicism. Carter sensed trouble with Catholics; Muskie might help there.
When Fritz Mondale made the pilgrimage to Plains—to what the Chicago Daily News' Peter Lisagor referred to as "the Court of St. James"—Carter found himself immensely and unexpectedly impressed. Mondale, known as one of the most reflective and studious men in the Senate, had thoroughly backgrounded himself on Carter. He made a point of reading Carter's autobiography Why Not the Best?, which he kiddingly referred to last week as "the best book ever written." Although Mondale is one of the most liberal men in the Senate, Carter found him undogmatic, practical and ideologically as well as personally compatible. Carter was impressed that Mondale served on the Senate Finance and Budget committees; that proved a distinct plus in the eyes of the Georgian, a trained engineer who relies heavily on concepts of planning and management. Unlike Muskie, Mondale is a new face, a new generation. What is more, as a friend points out: "He is an ideal choice in the post-Watergate period. He is the world's straightest arrow."
As the selection process neared an end, Carter's campaign manager Hamilton Jordan smilingly told TIME: "Jimmy ordered a pair of dice sent up to his room last night." That was a joke, of course, but the fact is that though Carter proceeded methodically, in the end, as he said, "it was a subjective analysis" —a matter of chemistry. He liked Mondale's intelligence, self-sufficiency and dry humor. The earnestly handsome Mondale, like Carter, is a Protestant (Presbyterian), but as the Georgian said: "I can't balance a ticket all that many ways."
Carter admitted he had been troubled that Mondale had aborted his early presidential bid in 1974 on the grounds that he lacked the stomach for a long, grueling race. He was the first man out on the track and the first one off it. In just six months in 1974, Mondale gave more than 100 speeches, traveled nearly 200,000 miles, visited 31 states and made image-building trips to Moscow, Paris and Israel—only to discover that no one seemed to care. In the presidential preference polls, he was getting the support of only 2% of the voters, a figure that put him, he wryly notes, "three percent behind 'don't know.' "