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By GEORGE BOWLES
The fallout from the first debate between President Reagan and his Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, is slowly settling upon and seeping into the politics of the Old Dominion.
In the wake of the candidates’ encounter a fortnight ago, strategists in both parties are groping for ways to deal with what they perceive as, at least potentially, a dramatically changed situation in the politics of 1984.
On the night of the debate Republicans had settled down confidently in front of their television sets to watch the President wrap up his re-election bid by verbally demolishing Mondale. The Democrats, on the other hand, grimly poured than*selves a%tiff drink and joyteMy* prepared themselves to see tbphr candidate demolished.
But as all the world now knows, it didn’t work out that way.
According to non-partisan polling organizations and the reckoning of just about every political analyst except those in the president’s inner circle, Reagan took a tanning in the face-off and a right spirited tanning at that.
As a result, the tacticians in both parties have rushed to revise their battle plans in the light of the post-debate realities.
Like Democrats across the country, those in Virginia were vastly heartened by Mondale’s showing in the debate. But as former Vice President John Nance Garner once said, politics is funny. And in no place is it funnier than in Virginia.
Indeed, in most recent presidential election years, including this one, Democratic campaigns in the Commonwealth have been run at two distinct levels. There has been the presidential effort run by the segment of the party which normally associates itself with that national Democrats, and then there have been the congressional campaigns. In many cases that latter have been so divorced from the national effort that they may as well have been conducted on another planet.
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