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Feinstein's hopes were further buoyed that same Sunday when two Mondale staffers, Peter Kyros and Michael Cardoza, arrived at her house and stayed for four hours. They asked questions about her health, children, previous marriages (Feinstein and one husband had divorced; a second had died) and finances. "They messed up my Sunday," Blum complained with mock seriousness. "They wanted to know everything all the way back to kindergarten." On Monday the aides spent 14 hours at Blum's downtown office, scouring financial records. Blum ordered sandwiches sent in so reporters would not spot the Mondale men.
Last Tuesday John Reilly, the senior Mondale aide in charge of the Veep hunt, also tried to slip into San Francisco. But spotted by a CBS camera crew at the airport, he explained candidly that he was there to see not Feinstein but Ferraro, who had arrived for the pre-convention planning. He met with the Congresswoman for two hours in her Hyatt Hotel suite, seeking assurances that there were no potential problems in her past. As he left in a cab for the airport, Reilly found a TV van following. "Lose it," Reilly barked at the driver, who raced the car through alleys and side streets. At the airport, Reilly hid in a phone booth until his plane was ready to leave. On the same day, Mondale-aide Michael Berman went over finances with Ferraro's husband in New York.
Now the Mondale advisers knew that their boss might very likely turn to one of the two women, but they did not know which. As he worked on the convention acceptance speech he is ready to deliver this week, Mondale kept his short list of candidates in mind. He was framing an address that would stress his desire to open new opportunities for all Americans, without abandoning the traditional values of family and hard work that Reagan has tried to seize for the G.O.P. "Writing the speech really crystallized his thinking about a running mate," says a Mondale aide.
As Mondale saw it, the choice of a woman would dramatically express his intention to open new doors. And the woman who most closely personalized what he would call the "classic American dream" was Ferraro, whose mother had worked as a seamstress to support her daughter after the father died. Ferraro, in turn, had worked as a teacher to finance nighttime law-school classes. She has been unusually close to her husband for 24 years of marriage and to their three children. Said a Mondale adviser: "She totally symbolized Mondale's fundamental case."
On Wednesday afternoon, Reilly was deputized to phone Ferraro in San Francisco and tell her to stand by for a call from Mondale at 6:30 p.m. But Mondale did not finally commit himself, even to his closest aides, until half an hour before the scheduled call. Then, in a meeting with Johnson, Reilly and Press Secretary Maxine Isaacs, he looked around the North Oaks den and finally said it, simply: "Let's go with Ferraro."