Mondale said he was interested in the environmental protection unit run by the Navy.

The media have a hard time with Walter Mondale. Dole is related to pineapples, though he’s supposed to have the personality of a radish. Ford is a dependable, unexciting four-door. And recently, I heard two women in a supermarket wondering if Carter’s election would affect the price of peanuts. Somewhere maybe there’s a vacuum cleaner or a pipe joint called a Mondale, but the media haven’t heard about it yet.

“This was my old history professor," said Mondale. “He gave me an F.”

Consequently, when the Eastern Airlines jet pulled to a stop and blew the reporters’ hair straight up, they were all wondering at the same time, probably, what label to pin on this guy. The reason for Mondale’s visit to San Diego’s Navy base last week, according to Brady Williamson, his sad-eyed, distracted press secretary, was to educate himself in the workings of the base; and also because the vice-presidential candidate is interested in the environmental protection unit run by the Navy. The tour was to be closed to the public.

Mondale breezed by and clapped the congressman on the back. “Van Deerlin’s a good man.”

Congressman Lionel Van Deerlin would later turn to a group of sailors and pronounce all such mandatory tours as, “great gobs of horse manure.” The sailors would look at each other like they didn't understand what he said, or at least weren’t prepared to hear an actual congressman make a stab so near to the truth.

Nevertheless, most of the people waiting as Mondale came down the ramp the workers, the dignitaries, Margaret Castro, recent head of the Chicano Federation, King Golden, a current congressional candidate, and Larry Kapiloff and Ron Kirkemo, assemblymen—all were swelling with pride. They had already received the news that Mondale is a good man, a decent man, a bit on the hypertensive side perhaps, but solid still. They were ready to be swept along in his tide, to feel a part of some important change in the direction of American politics. You could almost see it on their faces.

The San Diego Union that same day carried the results of the Hart poll, which estimated that only 46 percent of voting-age Americans will vote this Fall. This would be the first time voter participation dropped below 50 percent since a 43.9 percent turnout swept Coolidge onto the White House lawn. Hart feared that, unless there is some way to gain the interests of Americans born during the post-World War II baby boom, there will be a “lost generation of voters.”

A good part of the crowd of a hundred or so guests and press was of that generation. They gathered around the candidate and listened carefully.

There was a big black man with a blue pin-stripe suit, a green Carter button, a pink necktie, and a gold-plated peanut hanging around his neck. There was a grayhaired man sporting a tie clip of a shoe sole with a hole in it—which used to be Adlai Stevenson’s emblem. There was television newswoman Cathy Clark and three swearing cameramen huddled around the Insta-cam, which apparently had a busted cam. One of them reminded Cathy that the Insta-cam. which can instantly transmit irnportant events like the Symbionese shootout to millions of homes, was the wave of the future. The other cameraman kicked it. Apparently, the solenoids were tripped then, because the reporters rushed toward the candidate.

Mondale was hugging a professor. The professor had a little gray goatee. His name was Yahya Armajani, and he was retired, living at Rancho Bernardo. Mondale had him in a neck vice.

“This was my old history professor," said Mondale. “He gave me an F.”

Mondale let loose, and the reporters jumped on the professor. Suddenly Mr. Armajani looked like a pin cushion, with all those microphones sticking from his head.

They wanted to know the Story. When was he Mondale’s teacher?

He seemed confused for a moment and then said in a meek voice, “I never flunked him. I never even had him in class. I had his wife in class at Macalester. She was a very good student ...”

Suddenly all the pins were pulled out at once, and the press was gone, chasing the candidate. Professor Armajani was left reeling a little after all of this, turning around all alone now on the empty runway.

Dan Pichonchuk is one of those press photographers known as hard-bitten, crusty, an old salt. A San Diego Union photographer, he has been covering these public baptisms for 19 years. He is short, thick, and tough, like a fireplug equipped with 50, 80, and 28 millimeter lenses. Later, I watched him slip through the crowd like a ballet dancer.

On the press bus moving down Pacific Highway toward the base, he started talking about hands.

“Mondale knows how to use them,” he said, smiling. “Puts them up in the air, palms out, like this."

Pichonchuk said a candidate who knows about photographers always knows about hands. A lot of the candidates are coached about hands, of course.

“It’s like golf, which is one of the hardest sports to cover. Certain golfers never react. After a long putt, they just stand there. They don’t do anything. A lot of them hate photographers; they hate the sound of all the shutters going off while they're trying to concentrate. So they get mad at us. But if they were coached—well, they could just get the photos over with. All they’d have to do is do something, just once, like throw their club up, or bang their hand against their forehead, or hold their hands up in the air. Then they could get rid of us. and they wouldn’t have to be distracted after that.. But a lot of them never learn that. They just stand there, and the shutters keep clacking and clacking and clacking . . .”

The Kennedvs had a grasp of that, he added. He sat there for a moment the way most people do when John or Robert Kennedy is mentioned. Then he talked about the day he spent with Robert Kennedy the week before he was assassinated. Pichonchuk rode around all day with RFK in the back of a convertible through the hot, glaring streets of Chula Vista and down into San Ysidro where all the Mexican-Americans pulled at Bobby as if he were made of small relics, the bones of saints.

“We were all roasting and sweating," said Pichonchuk, looking out the window as we approached the dry dock. “Bobby stopped the motorcade and went into a liquor store and bought the press a whole case of cokes and handed them out to us. I thought that was pretty thoughtful of him. but smart, too. He knew what we wanted. LBJ, he was the worst. He didn’t give a damn about anything. Maybe the pictures we got of him were just as good as if he had cared. But he didn’t make it easy.” .

When we caught up with the candidate he was using his hands, pointing out weird arcs and arms on top of the surrounding ships and asking what these arcs and arms meant. Standing next to him and leaning over him in a motherly sort of way was Captain Bill Marin, Commanding Officer of the San Diego Naval Station, the largest operating naval facility in America. Marin was giving Mondale what could be called “ Here-we-have-a-ship-a-ship-is-not-a-boat” guide. Mondale was being whisked around by the public relations officers. The candidate kept saying, yes, yes, yes, at all the appropriate moments, but you felt he wasn’t really listening.

The Navy had provided all the reporters with a press release about the base. Along with the expected self-congratulations, the release made a point of referring to the heavy influx of ships and congested ship berthing, the overcrowded bachelor enlisted quarters, and the 28,000 vehicles which each day try to fit into 8,000 parking spaces. But Marin and Mondale didn’t talk about that, or about much of anything for that matter, except the size and shape and gender of each ship. They oohed and aahed together.

Up on the ships, leaning against the life-lines, the sailors watched with leaden eyes.

I watched a campaign worker who was falling farther behind as the crowd walked along the dock. She seemed like the kind of nice, gentle, well-meaning suburban woman who had made the small leap from Junior Women's Club to political organizing, and had started the morning with breathless wonder as the big campaign jet had breathed toward her. But now her eyebrows were knitted together, and her shoulders sagged. She was falling away from the group, just tagging along.

I went over to her and asked her how she was feeling about all of this.

“He didn’t even talk with the campaign people,” she said. “He hasn’t shaken one dock worker’s hand. He hasn’t said anything. That Captain isn’t saying anything. Nobody’s talking. This whole thing seems kind of . . . dehumanizing. It’s just for the media, but the media don’t even seem to care.”

The crowd was moving on toward the Navy’s environmental protection unit, which included some strange-looking barges parading around, waiting for Mondale’s review. The barges were designed to scrape up oil spills from the surface of the ocean.

The Junior Woman said, “Here go the sheep to the next watering trough." She trailed off after the crowd.

R.R. Richardson, labor representative at the gathering, was leathery and slicked-back and was talking about Mondale’s commitment to labor. Richardson has been involved in the labor movement for 30 years. “Mondale is a protege of Hubert Humphrey,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you where Humphrey and labor are, do I?” Richardson’s eyebrows flew around his face. He looked' meaningfully at my notebook.

I took down the quote and moved over to Congressman Van Deerlin, who was telling the sailors about the “great gobs of horse manure.”

Van Deerlin is a likeable, approachable man who looks like he had his small lips and eyes pasted on by a makeup man. He started his career in San Diego as one of the first television anchormen. Harold Green, the Channel 10 anchorman, says he cut his teeth on Van Deerlin, his boyhood hero. So Van Deerlin has seen both sides of the political-media fence and does not find the grass particularly green on either side.

“Well, Fritz wants to be informed," Van Deerlin said, fingering his green-and-gold tie, garishly painted with donkeys and capitol domes. “But I’m disappointed in this thing today. The election is only eight weeks away, and the public should be here, and something should be going on, some kind of exchange of ideas.”

He described this kind of visit as political insurance against small crowds.

“You have to admit, this is no failure. Look at all the press here. This kind of campaign became g more and more dominant in the late primaries this year. I was with Udall and we’d walk through with ^ the cameras and that would be that. There wasn’t any reason to try to arrange a crowd, because people weren’t showing up. So we’d stage these little media events with or without the public.”

Van Deerlin said politicians and their advance organizations are always worried people won’t show up. He remembered how nervous the campaign workers were when John Kennedy was to appear at Horton Plaza one noon. They figured he might be speaking to the Salvation Army band and a few shoppers from Chula Vista waiting for the 12:15 bus. But when Kennedy showed up there were more people waiting than appeared collectively for Nixon’s four visits during that campaign.

“The last time Nixon was here, his people planted a guy in the audience to yell, ‘We can do it, Mr. Nixon!’ Mister Nixon, yet.

“Of course, they’re all used that way. Adlai Stevenson was even used. There was a big deal about him coming to L.A. to visit the house he was born in. When he walked to the door, the woman opened it and practically read her lines off cue-cards. The whole thing was scripted.”

Back when Van Deerlin was a newsman, he was sensitive to those unscripted yet symbolic political items, like when he took his cameraman to two banquets during the same day, one for Republican Taft and one for Democrat Pepper. “I got two pictures of the food on each of their plates to show who was living it up and who wasn’t. I didn’t even have to make a commentary that night.”

Van Deerlin mused for a moment about how Carter might take Coronado this year, with his Navy background. Symbolically, Annapolis is as good as a Blue-Plate Special.

He leaned over confidentially. “Have you seen that female Secret Service agent over there? She won’t smile back at me for anything. You can always tell who the Secret Service agents are. They look like . . . thunderclouds.”

Just then. Mondale breezed by and clapped the congressman on the back. “Van Deerlin’s a good man,” he laughed. “He told me that just this morning. I can just tell he’s from Minnesota. Look in those eyes."

The caravan moved back toward the buses. Reporters and cameramen were jumping from dock to dock. Dan Pichonchuk did one graceful bound like a gymnast, cameras flying.

“Careful,” said Captain Marin. “We don’t want to lose any newsmen."

“They never get hurt,” said Mondale.

The group stopped for Mondale to say goodbye to Marin. They stood and shook hands, and Mondale patted the bellies of some sailors standing nearby. He looked like he knew that this tour didn't amount to much. “What I’ve learned here,” he announced to the sailors, “is that you want better food and more time off." He looked at Marin’s large belly like he wanted to pat it. too. Everybody was laughing and patting each other.

Back on the bus the Junior Woman was looking worse than when I’d last noticed her. “If only he could have sat down and talked to some of-the officers and sailors about their lives and what they’re doing. If only somebody had communicated. Wouldn't that have been newsworthy?"

I posed that question to Mondale’s press secretary. Brady Williamson looked at me from over his walrus mustache and out of his hooded, tired eyes as though he'd been asked every question and didn’t want you to ask him any more questions, so he kept asking you questions. He muttered something about the candidate needing to be informed and then asked me if the weather was like this all the time.

At the news conference back at the airport. Mondale said that this is the way politicians should campaign. Educational. Out under the hangar, though, the Junior Woman still wanted to believe. “He does tell good jokes," she remarked, softly. “I'm going to wait here for him to come out and see if he says anything interesting yet."

She still wanted to find some meaning in this wooden ballet. She seemed to me the quintessential American political creature, and I kept wondering: if she were to wander off down the barren runway, would anyone miss her?