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The campaign has, perhaps inevitably, turned harsh. Yet when Bond and Lewis, now both 46, discuss the old days, a wistful tone creeps into their voices. Lewis recalls the time they brought some donated textbooks to Birmingham and hatched a plan, which involved pretending to be working for a white volunteer who was with them, in case they got stopped by state troopers. And the time he was host at a birthday party for Bond's 16-year-old daughter. And the times he had to wake Bond up in the morning. "We used to call him God's greatest sleeper," Lewis says. Bond, for his part, remembers that the early-to-rise Lewis would fall asleep when they went to the movies, "even if it was Conan." And he remembers how they would sit around the bars of Holiday Inns while traveling through the South and elicit personal confessions from each other. "We used to visit five or six towns a day together," he recalls, as he flips through old scrapbooks picking out pictures of the two of them.
The seat they are seeking is being vacated by Wyche Fowler Jr., who is running for the nomination to oppose Republican Senator Mack Mattingly. Facing Fowler in the Democratic primary is Hamilton Jordan, President Carter's former chief of staff, who while recovering from lymphatic cancer last year ! decided to launch his own political career.
Their contest involves the split between what has become known as "the two Georgias." Jordan, affecting a down-home and folksy style, is popular in the rural areas and farm towns, which still have more than half the state's Democratic primary voters. Standing on the deck of Spivey's pond house near Swainsboro or appearing at a fish fry at Mutt Kennedy's place in Midville, he swaps family tales and corny jokes before giving his stump speech about the need to bring the Democratic Party back to the center.
Fowler, far more urbane and polished, is stronger in Atlanta. He has a wry sense of humor, which he uses to deflect Jordan's charge that he is too far to the left. It reminds him, Fowler smiles, of the time he was marching in a small-town parade and heard an old country boy on the sidewalk growl, "That Fowler even looks like a liberal, don't he?" With its city-slicker vs. good- ole-boy flavor, the Fowler-Jordan race is in some ways a reflection of the Bond-Lewis contest.