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Oddly, Mondale's recent revival is reminiscent of Richard Nixon's nomination course almost two decades ago. Like Nixon, Mondale inhaled the thin but exhilarating air of the White House as a Vice President and concluded that he was big enough to fill the Oval Office. Like Nixon, he spent years courting his party's regional powerbrokers and filled his pockets with political lOUs. Also reminiscent of Nixon, Mondale found a prosperous law firm to replenish his meager personal finances while he ran virtually full time for the presidential nomination. Mondale draws a $150,000 annual salary from the Chicago-based law firm of Winston & Strawn, working out of its Washington office. He hit the lecture circuit, charging fees of up to $20,000 and earning about $110,000 from Jewish groups alone over two years. He taught periodically at the University of Minnesota and served on the board of Control Data Corp., whose headequarters are in Minneapolis. In all, he earned nearly $1 million in just two years, about four times his net worth when he left the vice presidency in 1981.
The Fritz blitz began while the wounds of the 1980 Carter-Mondale loss to Reagan were still smarting. Three months after the election, Mondale formed a political action committee called the Committee for the Future of America, which raised $2.1 million for Democratic congressional candidates running in 1982. Mondale shrewdly achieved two aims: he earned the gratitude of all those candidates and gained invaluable lists of likely donors to Democratic campaigns, most pointedly his own. (Today Mondale refuses PAC money, charging that PACs are used by special interests to buy political influence.)
In the summer of 1981, the Hunt Commission (named for its chairman, Governor James Hunt of North Carolina) met to draw up new rules for the Democratic Party's 1984 nominating process. The party pros had some valid complaints: the primary season was too long, overworking the candidates and turning off voters. Earlier reforms opening the party to more women, blacks and party neophytes had gone too far, reducing the rewards of longtime party loyalty and the influence of seasoned officials. Democratic stalwarts had been denied the nomination by comparative upstarts like McGovern and Jimmy Carter. Representatives of Mondale, Senator Edward Kennedy and organized labor dominated the commission. Their operatives devised a primary process stacked against underfinanced or late-starting loners.
The new rules expanded the number of delegate votes at the Democratic Convention from 3,331 to 3,933 (actually there will be 5,257 delegates in San Francisco this July, some casting only half votes). Elected Democratic officials and party activists were guaranteed about 850 seats, including 164 set aside for members of the House and 27 for Senators. States were permitted to require a candidate to win 20% of a congressional district's vote to qualify for delegates, or even award all the delegates in a district to the leading vote getter. Both methods favor front runners. Established candidates also got a boost from the decision to cluster 31 primaries and caucuses, in which almost half the total delegates will be chosen, within the first six weeks of the primary season.