Top Democratic Party officials yesterday rallied around Walter F. Mondale as their 1984 presidential candidate, as he squeezed out the final promises of delegate votes he will need to confirm his nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month.
The latest United Press International vote count confirmed that claim, giving Mondale 1,969 delegates--two more than needed for a majority. Mondale won New Jersey and West Virginia by surprisingly large margins but Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) won California, South Dakota and New Mexico, winning California's rich delegate harvest by an astonishing ratio of nearly 3 to 1.
But rivals Hart and Jesse L. Jackson, who denied Mondale the popularly elected delegates in California he hoped would put him over the top, declined to concede his victory.
"Welcome to overtime," Hart said in Los Angeles, savoring his stomping of Mondale in the California delegate contests Tuesday that brought the lengthy and bitter primary season to an end.
Jackson told another Los Angeles news conference that, because delegates "can vote their conscience," he believed that the ultimate verdict may be changed by the fight he has said he will make on the party's delegate-allocation rules.
Hart ended the campaign with 1,212 delegates, while Jackson had 367. An additional 58 were committed to other candidates, and 219 remained uncommitted even after the Mondale endorsement blitz.
Before Mondale entered his formal claim of victory, big-name Democrats, led by House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill Jr. (D-Mass.), had asked Hart and Jackson to fold their tents and join in reunifying the battle-weary party.
The challengers, O'Neill told a steelworkers convention at the Sheraton Washington, "are needed badly in this party . . . . They've been great fighters. And America loves great fighters. We who are in the Democratic Party like great fighters. We love a fighter, but we hate a spoiler."
Responding to the words from O'Neill, who supports Mondale, Hart told reporters in Los Angeles that he would not be "a spoiler." But he resolutely refused to rule out a continued candidacy, saying it was too soon to declare the contest closed. He flew back to Washington to open a round of talks with party leaders and his political backers.
Mondale supporters in the capital orchestrated a chorus of discouraging words for Hart, persuading House Democratic Caucus Chairman Gillis W. Long (D-La.), an influential uncommitted leader whose endorsement Hart has coveted, to send Mondale a telegram of endorsement saying, "All Democrats must now unite behind your candidacy."
The same message went to Jackson from some influential black politicians, including Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, one of the unpledged delegates Mondale signed up in the early-morning telephone calls from his St. Paul hotel suite.
The flurry of phone calls, matched by his delegate-hunters in Washington, was triggered when the Mondale camp learned during the small hours of the night that Hart had demolished their delegate slates in California, leaving them short of a majority.
The candidate and his aides, exhausted from their cross-country campaigning in the previous 48 hours, had gone to sleep at 2 a.m., CDT, believing that his near shutout of Hart and Jackson in New Jersey, his gleanings from West Virginia (which he won) and South Dakota and New Mexico (where Hart came out on top) had made the vote-count in California almost a technicality.
As happened so often in the up-and-down Democratic nomination contest, that assumption proved to be unsafe. As the separate delegate battles in California's 45 districts were tallied, it became clear that Mondale was winning in only a few southern California districts. For a time in the pre-dawn hours, Mondale aides feared he would do so poorly that he would be shut out of any share of the 97 pledged at-large delegates.
They hit the phones, with Mondale personally pleading for help from three phones in his hotel suite, while others worked from Washington.
Most who came over were people who had long been in Mondale's camp but had maintained a posture of neutrality for personal or political reasons. Now, they were told, they were needed--to validate Mondale's three-week-old boast, at a low point in his campaign, that he would go over the top by 11:59 a.m. CDT on June 6.
Those who responded were a mixed crew, spanning the spectrum of the Democratic Party from liberal Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.) to Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, the one-time segregationist.
Mondale and his aides were able to pick off party and elected officials in states like Ohio, Nevada and South Dakota, where Hart had won the primaries--a fact that several observers said indicated the obstacles Hart will face if he tries to shake Mondale's majority by switching some of the "Super-delegates" in Congress, the state capitols and city halls.
"The last thing most of those people want is another month of infighting," said one knowledgeable Capitol Hill Democrat. "They think the nomination fight has hurt the party's chances already. They may not be crazy about running with Fritz Mondale at the head of the ticket, but if Gary asks them for help, most of them will tell him to forget it."
Hart faces divided counsel from his own supporters. Almost all of them interviewed yesterday want him to go into the convention as a candidate, but some argue that he should confine himself to presenting his views on platform issues and the future direction of the party, rather than continuing what they regard as a futile challenge to Mondale's nomination.
Behind the debate are differing expectations about Hart's possible role as a Mondale running mate or a 1988 presidential contender. But most of his counselors said they expected Hart to judge those questions for himself, as he has made most of the decisions in his often-improvised campaign.
Jackson's next step also remained ambiguous. He took a softer tone yesterday than he had on Tuesday night, when he expressed "grave reservations" about Mondale's leadership, but repeated his intention to press his challenges to party rules and to state election practices that he alleges are discriminatory.
The Mondale camp's hope is that Hart and Jackson will become more conciliatory as the tensions of the long campaign ease, but a number of Washington officials began urging Mondale, who is headed for a week's vacation, not to delay in offering an olive branch to his apparently vanquished foes. Democratic sources said that was the view of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who continued to hold his year-long silence on the course of the campaign and declined to offer any public congratulations to Mondale.
Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio) and Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) and former senator George McGovern (D-S.D.), who were early dropouts from the nomination fight, all withheld any comment on Mondale's victory claim, suggesting, in several instances, that they hoped to play a unifying role.
Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee began setting up the machinery for possible platform, rules and credentials fights when those committees begin pre-convention meetings, leading off with platform issues, next week.
Carefully avoiding any judgment on whether Mondale was certain to be the nominee, Democratic National Chairman Charles T. Manatt said he hoped everyone would remember "that the longer we have to unify our party, the greater will be our chance of victory."
