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In the Hart camp, there was the unmistakable air of a campaign taking off—literally. The candidate who two weeks —ago had been trudging the back J— roads of Iowa and New Hampshire accompanied by about five reporters is now flying aboard a chartered 727 packed with a press contingent of more than 60. Says Hart: "The race we're in now is much more like a general election We're doing three states a day We're campaigning nationally."
Crowds are swelling and looking at Hart with new interest.
The change in atmosphere in the Mondale entourage was equally dramatic. For the former Vice President, the New Hampshire results were, in his words, a "cold shower." He still boasts advantages that neither Hart nor any of the other three candidates remaining after New Hampshire can come anywhere near matching widely known name, piles of money, nationwide organization, high standing in national polls, voluminous endorsements from party leaders and interest groups. But he has lost his all-important aura of invincibility; if he could be beaten in New Hampshire, he can be beaten elsewhere. That prospect is already forcing Democrats all over the country to think seriously about a choice many had assumed would be foreclosed by the time their states got around to voting. Those who fear that Mondale may be too bland and unexciting, too much of an old-fashioned liberal or too beholden to special-interest groups to give Ronald Reagan a hard battle for the White House now have an alternative—or two.
Mondale's assessment of the turnaround was both remarkably candid and, for him, rather somber. After some quick campaigning in Boston the morning after his New Hampshire defeat, he flew to Washington for a day of thinking over what had hit him. On Thursday, he met with the reporters who cover his campaign and gave them a lesson in what a difference a day can make. The candidate who on the eve of New Hampshire had been hoping to knock all his rivals out of the battle by late March now was claiming, rather speciously, that he should no longer even be considered the front runner.
Said Mondale: "There seeped into my campaign, and maybe even into my own mind, a kind of a front-runner inevitability psychology that maybe people smelled, and that's gone now... We're in for a long, tough fight, and it could well go right to the convention. It is clearly a two-man race, and it's very close."
Officially it is not quite a two-man race. The Democratic field did narrow, quickly and drastically, after New Hampshire. Cranston, South Carolina Senator Ernest Rollings and former Florida Governor Reubin Askew folded their campaigns within 48 hours of the tally there, which showed them with fewer votes than Reagan received as a write-in candidate in the Democratic primary.