With Stances So Similar, Watch for Unruly ’88 Race

After one lap around the track, Gary Hart, front-runner in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, is already splattered with mud. This isn’t exactly what he had in mind when he recently announced his candidacy with a call for a campaign about issues, not personalities, for a national forum about the future, not the political equivalent of mud wrestling.

Hart is likely to be disappointed. The Democratic contest’s internal dynamics are pushing candidates toward a race that is both personal and nasty. How nasty? Just one day after his announcement speech, Hart backed off a statement in which he appeared to accuse opponents of spreading rumors about his sex life.

It’s not the differences, but the similarities between the candidates that are leading them into those murky waters. Fundamental distinctions between the 1988 contenders are few. In 1984, Hart was able to present his challenge to Walter F. Mondale as a choice between the new and the old. Hart could have offered that again if New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo had joined the field. If a conservative Democrat such as Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) were running, the Democratic electorate could debate whether the party ought to turn right.

But Cuomo and Nunn are on the sidelines, leaving six contenders--Hart, Sens. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, former Arizona Gov. Bruce E. Babbitt and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri--who could all answer the same casting call. Only Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, a professorial, self-described “traditional” liberal, and Jesse Jackson, the most left-leaning and incendiary contender, stand apart in ideology or style.

Because they are all so alike, Hart’s little-known challengers will find it hard to differentiate themselves from each other, not to mention the front-runner. Issues are not likely to filter out the candidates because, by and large, they agree on matters that most concern primary voters. None of the candidates supports aid to the Nicaraguan contras, restrictions on abortion or deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative.

Only trade issues have set off sparks so far, with Gephardt assuming an aggressive protectionist stance that Hart has condemned. But most Democrats, including the Gephardt camp, don’t expect the next nomination to be decided on trade--or any other issue on which the candidates disagree. That’s likely to leave them debating their personal fitness to hold the nation’s top job. “Other than trade I can’t think of many issues where there are pointed differences between the candidates,” says Fred DuVal, Babbitt’s campaign manager. “That makes the character issue more important.”

Outside events also push the race in that direction. After the Iran- contra affair, the Wall Street indictments and the Tower Commission’s findings that President Reagan seemed airily disengaged, most political strategists believe voters will measure the candidates’ characters--their competence and honesty--more skeptically. “Clearly there is a cultural environment out here that the voters are going to react to,” says William A. Carrick, Gephardt’s campaign manager.

Character is likely to eclipse issues for a final (and decisive) reason: Character is where the challengers consider Hart most vulnerable.

This conclusion reflects Hart’s strengths as much as his weaknesses. Hart has responded skillfully to the charge raised in 1984 that there were no new ideas behind his slogan, pouring forth detailed positions on virtually all issues facing the electorate. He has grounded his claim to speak for the new.

At the same time, Hart reaffirmed his liberal credentials with a Senate voting record even Jackson couldn’t find objectionable. Standing on that block of votes--prominent among them opposition to the Gramm-Rudman budget cutting legislation that some other Democratic contenders backed--Hart’s camp believes he can present himself as the custodian of traditional Democratic values even as he remains famous as the voice of change.

Hart’s opponents, though, believe he has not inoculated himself against doubts about his character. After his rush to fame in 1984, Hart was battered by questions about his name (changed from Hartpence), his age (misstated in a campaign biography), the stability of his marriage, his relationship with congressional colleagues, his values and a personal style that critics found remote, even wintry. To some, especially old-style Democrats, Hart was the man who fell to Earth: a candidate with no past, no roots, no blood.

Eventually, Mondale took these swirling questions and branded them into the public’s consciousness with three words: Where’s the beef? His opponents don’t believe Hart can respond any more effectively the second time. Hart has tried to reframe the issue, arguing that he has shown real character by proposing specific solutions to difficult problems, and urging voters to hold his challengers to the same standard. But his opponents, opting for more traditional political definitions of character, are already criticizing Hart’s failure to repay fully his 1984 campaign debts, and expecting more articles like the recent Newsweek profile that again portrayed the former senator as enigmatic and aloof--and spiked the portrait with often-discussed but rarely reported rumors of womanizing.

None of Hart’s competitors, though, are eager to throw the first stone. A personal attack on the front-runner might open the door for someone to take down Hart, but it probably won’t be the candidate who draws first blood. Campaign strategists warn candidates who aren’t well known, such as Hart’s opponents, that it is dangerous to make your first impression on voters as a hatchet man. Remember how quickly Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), rocketed from obscurity to infamy after his slashing performance as Gerald R. Ford’s running mate in 1976?

Mindful of that lesson, Hart opponents are waiting for the press to knock down the front-runner. That isn’t likely, but the other candidates won’t volunteer for the kamikaze mission of attack until they are positive journalists won’t do the job.

Partially for this reason, the Democratic race remains remarkably undefined. With Cuomo out of the picture, Hart is facing Jackson, who most Democrats believe cannot be nominated, and a pack of contenders that most Democrats have never heard of. Nothing that happens between now and the Iowa caucuses next February is going to change that.

Surrounded by unknowns and uncertainties, many major fund-raisers and most elected officials have remained uncommitted. Still an outsider, Hart probably won’t command much support from the unallocated party powers. But there hasn’t been a stampede toward any of the other candidates either. The AFL-CIO probably won’t endorse a candidate, and the bulk of Democratic fund-raisers in a big-money group called IMPAC ‘88, after hearing all of the contenders, decided they wanted Gore, a 39-year-old freshman mentioned only rarely before the group indicated interest.

Though Gore is a talented politician, IMPAC’s anointment of such an untested senator says more about the Democratic Establishment’s confusion than anything else. In this race, confusion may be as inescapable as acrimony, for both have their roots in the same unsettled question: How do voters really feel about Hart? The answer is no one knows, and no one will know until the first Iowa Democrats go to the polls next winter.