Battle for Soul of Democratic Party : Dukakis vs. Gephardt: Struggle Runs Deeper

In Waco, Tex., Richard A. Gephardt kicked off his Super Tuesday campaign by deriding Michael S. Dukakis as the Democratic presidential candidate with the most money and “the least message.”

The next day, in Deerfield Beach, Fla., Dukakis castigated Gephardt as “the prince of darkness” for appealing to the angry side of America with his complaints about unfair foreign economic competition.

In part, the two candidates generally deemed the front-runners in the Democratic race, who came here last week for a debate before the cream of the Southern Democratic Party, are flinging rhetorical brickbats at each other because of the 20-state treasure-trove of delegates up for grabs in Super Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses.

Another Struggle

But Massachusetts Gov. Dukakis, the winner of the New Hampshire primary, and Missouri Rep. Gephardt, the winner of the Iowa caucuses, are locked in another struggle as well, one that transcends even as rich a prize as Super Tuesday. At stake is nothing less than the heart, mind and future of the Democratic Party.

And that deeper struggle has injected a bitter, biting element into the campaign because the cleavages between the two leaders are sharply drawn along class, cultural and regional lines.

To put the matter in starkly simple terms, Dukakis, with his core support in the suburbs and among upscale city dwellers, reflects the beliefs and values of the party’s Eastern liberal Establishment, and the interests of the nation’s thriving bicoastal economy.

Gephardt, hailing from America’s economically hard-hit hinterland with his Missouri legacy of Harry S. Truman populism, is striving to speak to and for working-class voters. Such voters have been the foundation of classic Democratic majorities of the sort the party has seldom managed to assemble in recent years.

“Nothing is ever 100% black and white in politics,” says Southern pollster Claibourne H. Darden Jr. As he suggests, the realities of the immediate battle for votes are so complex that the underlying struggle may not be precisely reflected in the election returns across Dixie or the rest of the nation.

“But there’s a real socioeconomic division here,” Darden says. “Gephardt is after the ‘Bubba’ vote--the good old boys, the middle-middle section of the Democratic Party. And Dukakis is the darling of the educated liberals and the suburbanites.”

In a sense, their battle is a sequel to the 1984 contest between Walter F. Mondale and Gary Hart, in which those two argued essentially over whether the Democratic Party needed to change. Although Mondale won the nomination, he lost the election and thus the argument: Virtually everyone entered the 1988 campaign agreeing that the Democratic Party needed to change.

The battle between Dukakis and Gephardt will help to settle the remaining question: In what new direction will the party now move?

Of course, Dukakis and Gephardt have to reckon with two other major rivals in the Southern contests--the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr.

Jackson is expected to run very well here Tuesday, perhaps capturing more states than any of his rivals. But most analysts doubt that he can sustain that success outside the South on the scale needed to make him a serious threat for the nomination.

As for Gore, few believe the only white Southerner in the race can do well enough in his home region to make up for his lack of achievement in the early contests elsewhere.

Meanwhile, what seems to be happening in the competition between Gephardt and Dukakis is that their debate is redefining the governing grammar of the Democratic Party, creating a new syntax in which the definitive phrases are not “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “change” and “pain.”

To a considerable extent the dividing line between Dukakis’ supporters and Gephardt’s backers is based on the degree to which any group of voters feels hurt by current economic conditions and prospects and the urgency with which they want to alter those conditions.

By using his argument against unfair trade practices as an expression of the case for broader change, “Gephardt has found a clean way to tap into the anger of voters who feel the circumstances of the economy are working against them,” said Paul Tully, former political director of Dukakis’ campaign.

Last January, just before the Iowa caucuses, Gephardt defined his populism in the rhetoric of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he described as “the greatest populist of the century.” Recalling F.D.R.’s celebrated vow to crush “the forces of greed and privilege,” Gephardt called that dictum “the legacy and the life force” of the Democratic Party.

Listen to Gephardt 10 days ago at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Atlanta, where he warned 3,500 Democrats that America was in decline and demanded change to reverse the tide.

“I want to put a Democrat in the White House in 1988 so we can make America move and soar again,” he declared. “But to move in that direction we must change America in fundamental ways. That’s what the election in 1988 is all about.

Must Stand for Change

“A lot of people don’t want change,” Gephardt warned. “Strong forces resist change for a whole lot of different reasons. You must understand that if you want to change America the only way it will happen is if you stand for change in the Tuesday, March 8, primary.”

This message, says Tully, has visceral appeal to “those Democrats who live in places where the economy is threatening or not encouraging.” Moreover, Gephardt’s insistence on tougher trade policies, denounced as “protectionist’ by the well-educated middle-class supporters of Dukakis, appears to strike a responsive chord among the blue-collar workers Gephardt is trying to reach.

For many of them, political professionals point out, the idea that it is time for the United States to get back at foreign competitors has not only economic significance but also patriotic resonance.

Because of this, many Democratic politicians believe this issue could help win back former Democrats who have turned away from the party and supported Ronald Reagan in recent years because they believed that Democratic national leaders were namby-pambies in dealing with foreign nations.

“The trade issue is a metaphor for the sense that people have that they have lost control of their economic destiny, for the sense that many people feel that ‘my standard of living is slipping, we’re drifting and we’re slipping,’ ” says Rep. Sander M. Levin (D-Mich.), a Gephardt supporter.

Dukakis is for change too, Tully asserts. But the Massachusetts governor is a self-decribed optimist. And the kind of change for which he argues is more businesslike and less impassioned, more methodical and less fundamental than what Gephardt preaches.

“It is more of a roll up your sleeves and get on with the work approach,” Tully says. “And it appeals to people who want change but who have a lower level of anxiety than Gephardt’s constituents.”

Central to Dukakis’ optimistic view and to his message of moderate change is the economic recovery in Massachusetts, for which he claims a large share of credit and which he seems to argue has almost unlimited relevance elsewhere in the nation.

“Over the last dozen years I’ve seen the Massachusetts economy turn around and come back strong,” Dukakis declared in a speech last fall on economic policy. “And over the past few months, campaigning around this country, I’ve seen example after example of the kind of strength and determination and spirit it will take to get our fiscal house in order and restore our competitiveness abroad.”

If Gephardt seems to respond to anger and frustration among the voters, Dukakis appears to try to smooth over grievances.

When the Democrats hold their nominating convention in July, Dukakis told the Atlanta dinner audience that Gephardt also addressed, “I hope we as a party will have learned the lessons of division. Let’s make 1988 a year for the promise of opportunity and not the politics of resentment.”

Ultimately, the argument between these two points of view will be settled at the ballot box.

And ironically, the circumstances of these two candidates and the special nature of those who normally vote in Democratic primaries suggests that--as in 1984--the apostle of fundamental change could be hard-pressed to win the nomination, while the moderate could lose in November.

More Electable

A good many Democrats who have reservations about Gephardt’s policies, particularly his views on trade, are nonetheless interested in the congressman’s candidacy because they think he would be more electable than Dukakis in November.

“Dukakis’ message is competence in domestic policy and the rule of law in foreign policy,” says Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), one of the House members who--along with many leading Southern politicians--gathered here at Williamsburg for a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate-to-conservative office holders. “And, frankly, I’m not convinced it’s a winning message.

“The Gephardt message is very good for blue-collar workers,” continues Berman, who will not decide who to back until after Super Tuesday. “It could help us get back people we have been having trouble holding in general elections, people who were attracted to Reagan.”

Other Democrats are blunter in their assessment: “Dukakis looks like another 49-state blowout to me,” says a high-level Southern labor leader who declined to be identified. He thinks that Dukakis could not draw any significant amount of votes beyond what Mondale received in 1984, when he carried only Minnesota and the District of Columbia.

By contrast, this official believes that Gephardt would “bring the white middle-class and blue-collar vote in the South back to the Democrats. We have to be a party that’s not just interested in redistributing wealth, that’s also interested in helping the middle class.”

But for all Gephardt’s potential assets in the fall, some think he may never have the chance to cash in on them because of the practical realities governing Democratic primary politics, particularly in the South.

“(Dukakis’) is an elitist campaign,” Martin Linsky, a public policy specialist at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, says. “But the primary in the South is a setup for him. He gets the suburban, liberal upper-middle-class vote.” And, as Linsky points out, these are the voters most likely to go to the polls on Tuesday.

Gephardt Might Struggle

Moreover, while Gephardt’s message of change gives him much broader potential appeal than Dukakis, many professionals believe that without the financial and organizational resources Dukakis has amassed, Gephardt will have to struggle to get his potential supporters to the ballot box.

And Gephardt’s ability to win votes by emphasizing basic differences from Dukakis is complicated somewhat by the fact that neither man’s origins quite match his current billing.

As Gephardt’s rivals never tire of pointing out, while serving as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus he was widely considered to be a fixture of the congressional hierarchy. And the legislative connections he fashioned with lobbyists for business and labor have helped finance his presidential campaign--to the tune of more than $350,000, or about 6% of his total contributions.

“Dick, don’t give us that Establishment stuff when you’re out there taking their money,” Dukakis snapped at Gephardt during the debate here last week. And the Dukakis campaign released a negative commercial later in the week attacking Gephardt on just the same grounds.

For his part, Dukakis entered politics sounding more like a neoliberal than a traditional liberal. And even today his views embody his natural frugality and his abounding faith in the efficacy of high technology and rational management.

Dukakis campaign chairman Paul Brountas, who has known the governor all his political life, says: “Certainly Michael Dukakis is a progressive”--a term Brountas prefers to “liberal.” But he adds: “He’s very conservative fiscally. And he’s run the state in a tight-fisted way.”

In the end, many believe the outcome of the Gephardt-Dukakis battle in Dixie may depend on whether Gephardt can reach the voters whose anger is fueling his candidacy.

Chris Scott, president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO, contends that Gephardt’s argument for retaliation against unfair trade practices has great appeal in his state, where the textile industry has been hard hit by foreign imports.

“Gephardt’s trade message can romp and stomp in this state,” Scott says. “But I don’t know if Gephardt can get the message out.”