The Dukakis Camp Was Right to Tell on Biden, but the Methods Were Off the Mark

The Democratic Party finds itself once again on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, but for all the wrong reasons.

This time it is the Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate, Michael Dukakis. After days of vigorous and increasingly exasperated denials, Dukakis said that his presidential campaign had indeed given the famous “attack video” of Sen. Joseph Biden quoting verbatim from British Labor leader Neil Kinnock to the New York Times, triggering the downward spiral that ultimately forced Biden out of the presidential race.

Dukakis named his campaign manager, John Sasso, as the culprit, but declined to fire him--until, a few hours after his press conference, Dukakis realized that the criticism and political fallout would intensify until he jettisoned the perpetrator.

The reaction to Sasso’s actions and the Dukakis campaign’s involvement in this affair has been swift and condemnatory. Nearly everyone has said that the leak of damaging information from one campaign about another is wrong. But is it?

Candidates for president, after all, are running against one another, and the give-and-take of that process should be one of the strengths of our political system--another check and balance, or screen on the selection of a president.

Had John Sasso merely said to New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd, “Can you believe what Joe Biden said at the Iowa debate? It was taken word for word from a Kinnock speech,” it would have been in my view perfectly appropriate. But Sasso went well beyond simply pointing out another candidate’s failing or misdemeanor. He produced--not just provided, but created--a video tape intercutting Biden with Kinnock.

Following up on a story of this sort--tracking down the videos and uncovering the evidence--is the obligation of a reporter who sees the story as newsworthy. For Sasso to have gone to those lengths goes beyond the legitimate function of a rival campaign to critique into the less legitimate realm of assault. The damage was compounded when copies of the tape were provided by others in the campaign to the Des Moines Register and NBC, making it look like an all-out organized effort to damage Biden on the eve of his chairing of the highly-charged Senate committee hearings on Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Worst of all--from Dukakis’ standpoint--was that his campaign aides kept him in the dark, letting Dukakis go further and further out on the limb of denial before admitting their transgressions and handing him the saw to cut off his own limb. That alone was a compelling reason for Dukakis to summarily fire his manager; his failure to do so, in the face of these actions, made him look both weak and indecisive at a time when strength and tough leadership were becoming his calling card.

Dukakis has been damaged, but not fatally. He has lost two tremendously talented campaign aides, Sasso and deputy manager Paul Tully. He has had a layer of his protective armor stripped off, but other layers remain. At this early stage of an extraordinarily fluid campaign, there is plenty of time for this issue to fade--and it is clear from the campaign so far that other political stories will quickly emerge to crowd this one out.

The greatest damage in fact may be to the Democratic Party itself. As the major new Times Mirror poll shows, many core groups that are critical to the Democrats’ ability to find an electoral majority have severe misgivings about their own party’s ability to get its act together. The Hart and Biden withdrawals contributed to this negative party image. The Dukakis debacle reaffirms it.