Bush Takes S. Carolina in Landslide : Dole Places Second, Robertson Third in Key GOP Primary

Despite every effort by opponents to slow him down before he runs away with all of the South, George Bush overwhelmingly won the South Carolina Republican presidential primary Saturday.

The vice president, who just a month ago limped out of Iowa a humbled loser, now stands exactly where he wants to be: a big winner, the wind at his back, with just two days to go to the colossal 17-state GOP Super Tuesday contest.

Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas edged former religious broadcaster Pat Robertson for the distant runner-up spot in South Carolina, and Rep. Jack Kemp of New York was running last.

Bush Wins 48%

Final unofficial returns showed Bush with 94,358 votes, or 48% of the total; Dole with 40,217, or 21%; Robertson with 37,243, or 19%, and Kemp 22,407, or 12%. Bush won all of the state’s 37 convention delegates.

In Saturday’s other presidential contest, in Wyoming, Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr. and Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis split the prize in the state’s Democratic presidential caucuses, while Republican returns showed Bush and Dole running even.

Dole also picked up 14 delegates as the Kansas GOP convention completed its allocation of convention delegates. That gave the Senate minority leader a sweep of his home state’s 34 delegates.

Including results from South Carolina, Wyoming and Kansas, the Associated Press total delegate count gave Bush 127, Dole 65, Kemp 35 and Robertson 8. A total of 712 delegates will be at stake on Tuesday, nearly one-third of the Republican convention total.

Bush’s South Carolina sweep is likely not only to dominate the political news and conversation for the next two days until Super Tuesday, it is bound to reduce the size of the GOP field--or at least reduce the credibility of back-of-the-pack challengers.

Speaking at a rally in Charlotte, N.C., Bush called his showing a “tremendous overwhelming victory.”

‘Tremendous Impact’

“On we go now to the future,” he added. “I believe what happened in South Carolina will have a tremendous impact on the Super Tuesday.”

For Robertson, his showing was a far cry from the outright victory he had in mind just a couple of weeks ago--an event that would have turned the GOP race upside down and proved him to be more than a crusader with limited appeal.

In a statement he now must regret, Robertson began his campaign for South Carolina saying: “There isn’t any question about it. If I lose this one, I’m in trouble.”

But on Saturday night, Robertson was boldly portraying his showing as “a great victory. . . . It ain’t over until the fat lady sings, and she hasn’t sung yet,” he said.

Robertson laid claim to the constituency of Kemp, declaring: “If you put Jack Kemp’s supporters and mine (together), we’re way up in the middle 30%.”

Bush, however, was not letting Robertson off the hook. He likened Robertson to a soldier who makes a landing and is so determined to win that he burns his boats so he cannot flee. “Well,” Bush told reporters, “the boats are there, they’re burned, and he can’t get away from the beach.”

Dole, who had hoped to do well enough to deny Bush a landslide, struggled to put the best face he could on the result and said his showing in Wyoming and victory in Kansas had somewhat offset Bush’s triumph in South Carolina.

He also said his second-place showing was “very good,” considering the late start his campaign got in the state.

“We knew we had an uphill fight,” Dole said in Miami. “Two weeks ago, it was a Bush-Robertson race.”

Kemp, who has yet to show himself a contender in any of the 1988 primaries or caucuses, was reportedly preparing to meet with his staff and family and reassess his candidacy.

“More is to come,” Kemp told supporters here. He said Saturday night that he planned to campaign through the Republican convention, but he talked more about the triumph of his ideas than of his candidacy.

Each Claims Victory

In the Wyoming contest, Gore and Dukakis each claimed victory on the Democratic side, Gore of the state convention delegates, Dukakis of the straw vote. They both won four national convention delegates.

With results in from all 23 county caucuses, Gore won 79.5 of the state convention delegates, Dukakis had 77 and Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt had 68.

Dukakis Tops Popular Vote

However, in the popular vote at county caucuses, Dukakis narrowly won with 766 votes, followed by Gore 747, Gephardt 685, the Rev. Jesse Jackson 439, Illinois Sen. Paul Simon 108, uncommitted 191 and former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart with 32. This straw vote does not affect selection of national convention delegates.

Gephardt gets three Wyoming delegates and two will be uncommitted, according to Associated Press calculations. Jackson, Simon and Hart did not win enough delegates to the state convention to qualify for any delegates to the national convention.

“Three days before Super Tuesday is a pretty good time to have your first win,” Gore said in Roanoke, Va. “I’ve been telling you something was happening out there.

“This is the first level playing field we’ve had,” he said, adding that it was a state not affected by the “afterglow” of New Hampshire or Iowa, where he fared poorly.

The Dukakis campaign cited the straw vote totals and claimed victory. Campaign aide Leslie Dach said: “Today, Wyoming voters chose the one presidential candidate who can take charge of our economic future and win.”

Among the Republicans, who were choosing 12 convention delegates, unofficial returns gave five to Dole and five to Bush, with two uncommitted.

No Democratic Contest

There was no contest in South Carolina on Saturday among the Democratic candidates. That will occur in caucuses next Saturday.

However, because voters in South Carolina do not register by political party, Saturday’s primary was open to all--and Robertson and Dole both appealed to Democrats and independents for support.

Despite the high stakes and abundance of contenders in South Carolina, no single issue or theme seemed to rise up to move the electorate.

Dole tried textiles--promising limits on imports to save jobs in the South Carolina textile industry.

Robertson tried morality--advertising himself as a native son of the South, his father having been a senator from Virginia, and keeper of a “moral alarm clock” to wake up the nation.

Kemp tried to bring his I’m-the-real-conservative message down to earth, vowing to defend U.S. interests in Panama and preserve the unfettered right of citizens here to bear arms.

Only Bush remained aloof, cooly guarding his lead as an incumbent might. Indeed, his campaign leaned heavily on President Reagan’s popularity here. Bush also called in eight years’ worth of political friendships and IOUs he has cultivated in South Carolina.

Not only was the campaign the first trial of GOP candidates on the stump in Dixie, South Carolina also proved to be a test of each campaign’s overall sense of timing and tactics.

Early last year, Bush was perceived to be so strong among mainline Republicans here that a challenge would be futile.

But Robertson raised the stakes, gambling that he could outflank the vice president with a winning majority outside the party’s old guard. The preacher-turned-politician sought out evangelical Christians and disaffected Democrats.

“We’ve got the makings of a fight between K mart and the country club,” Earl Black, University of South Carolina scholar of Southern politics, observed at that time.

After the first big presidential contests last month--in Iowa and New Hampshire--the stakes went up again in South Carolina.

Robertson Draws Line

More than ever, Bush fell back on a strategy of sweeping the South. And Robertson, with surprising confidence, proclaimed it a do-or-die stand--a strategy of surviving in the South. Several reports indicated Robertson spent right up to the federal limit of nearly $900,000 in South Carolina, thought to be more than anyone else.

Bush advisers confessed they were rattled. “I was taken aback by his bold claims,” said Lee Atwater, campaign manager for Bush and a native of the state.

But Robertson seemed to stumble in mid-stride with a series of public remarks that landed him in controversy.

For one, he showed he was willing to complicate arms control talks by raising a suspicion that there might still be Soviet missiles in Cuba. For another, he suggested that Bush operatives had a hand in the timing of recent revelations of misconduct by television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart--revelations that tended to reflect poorly on TV evangelists generally.

Dole Escalates Stakes

Last among the candidates to plunge into South Carolina, Dole once again raised the stakes in the final week before voting. His entree included the 11th-hour endorsement of South Carolina’s senior senator, Strom Thurmond.

Dole set his sights on chipping away at Bush’s support from one side while Robertson hammered away on the other--a double-team effort to slow the front-runner.

Television advertising turned tougher as both Dole and Bush ridiculed each other’s commitment to stopping tax increases--while Kemp chimed in with accusations that both were soft on taxes.

By necessity, Kemp’s money-troubled campaign was lean. It also was forceful. Some observers felt that, driven by a feeling of now-or-never, it also was his best executed performance of 1988.

Staff writers Cathleen Decker, Lee May and Bob Secter contributed to this story.