Surviving Candidates Try to Show Manners in Illinois Ads

In Illinois, where politics is not a polite occupation, the surviving candidates for President are finally trying to show some manners.

Or at least they are slapping each other like gentlemen, with white gloves. No more kicking and biting.

In his commercials, for instance, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis never mentions Illinois Sen. Paul Simon or Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., although his message criticizing them as unable to win the Democratic nomination is clear enough.

Vice President George Bush, meanwhile, is running the video version of the Rose Garden campaign, regal and inoffensive. Kansas Sen. Bob Dole, Bush’s principal rival for the GOP nomination, twice considered attacking him in commercials, but changed his mind.

It all contrasts with the campaign a week ago, which was marked by some of the most aggressively negative television commercials in presidential history.

Not Gladiators’ Struggle

It suggests, for one, that Tuesday’s contest is not the gladiators’ struggle that earlier primaries were, in which candidates had to take risks to survive. It also suggests that last week’s 20-state Super Tuesday balloting has shortened the primary process somewhat. Now, with so many delegates already chosen, decisions to run divisive negative advertising have to contend with growing concerns for party unity.

Still, it might seem odd that this new-found decorum would come in Illinois, a state where politicians are known for saying and doing in public what politicians elsewhere might say and do only in back rooms. In the 1984 Democratic presidential primary, for example, Gary Hart tried to link Walter F. Mondale to controversial Alderman Edward R. Vrdolyak, while Mondale’s ad questioned whether people wanted Hart with his hands on the red phone to Moscow. Mondale won the primary.

Perhaps the most subtle attack is a new Dukakis ad that appeals for votes by arguing simply that Dukakis has the best chance to win enough delegates to clinch the nomination before the Democratic convention.

Clear Response to Simon

The ad is a clear response to Simon, who, with little chance of winning the nomination through the primary process, now plans full-page newspaper ads here urging a vote for him because the party is certain to have a brokered convention, at which Simon could get the nomination.

Over slow-motion black-and-white footage of a past presidential convention a narrator intones: “Some people would like . . . to go back to the days when the voters didn’t really pick their presidential nominee. They say you must turn over that power to them, to use at a brokered convention. But you don’t have to do that. On Tuesday, you can pick the next President.”

At this point, the visuals switch to (who else?) Dukakis.

The ad also notes that Dukakis “is running for President in every state in America.”

That is a thinly veiled dig at both Simon and Gore. Simon skipped the Super Tuesday primaries because he was unlikely to do well, and Gore skipped the Iowa caucuses and campaigned only moderately in New Hampshire.

Dukakis Outspends Rivals

Dukakis apparently will outspend all Democrats in television advertising here, even though initial polls suggested he would finish third behind Simon and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.

On Friday, the campaign more than doubled its advertising buy. Some aides told reporters on Friday that the campaign had spent $250,000, less than expected, because internal polls were discouraging. But rival campaigns tracking Dukakis’ media purchases say aides are low-balling their media buy by half--that he has spent $500,000.

And some Dukakis campaign sources said his internal polls show Dukakis rising and Simon dropping. If so, the size of the Dukakis media buy and the secrecy surrounding it might imply that the campaign is trying to minimize expectations here while privately thinking it can beat Simon.

Gore, meanwhile, is trying to echo the same populist themes in his advertising here that he used for Super Tuesday.

Similar to Gephardt’s

They are themes that strike many as strangely similar to those first used by Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, but they apparently play well against Harvard-educated, Boston-bred Dukakis.

“They said it couldn’t be done, but Al Gore did it,” a narrator begins. “He beat them, and he won by taking his campaign right to the people.”

The ad then cuts to a Gore speech made Thursday night in Chicago: “I want to bring the Democratic Party back to the grass roots, back to the people, and I want the White House back on the side of working men and women for a change.”

Gore’s other two ads are those his polling showed to be his most effective spots in his Super Tuesday victories. One criticizes American corporations for exporting jobs to cheap foreign labor markets. The other argues that “big chemical polluters, price fixers, corporate law breakers and greedy drug manufacturers” oppose Gore’s campaign because he fought their interests in the Senate.

Needs Strong Showing

According to sources in the Gore camp, Gore is spending second only to Dukakis here for ads because the campaign needs a strong showing to sustain any momentum after Super Tuesday.

Earlier last week, an ABC News-Washington Post poll showed Gore at just 2%.

“I don’t think we can afford 2%,” one aide said. “We’d take a lot of heat for that in the press.”

Simon, short of cash, is running no TV ads in his home state. Jackson’s campaign says it is spending $25,000 to $30,000 “in small downstate markets.”

Yet the biggest media buy of all, as it has been in other states, might well belong to Bush, whose campaign is being described on local TV news here as a “juggernaut.”

Bush principally is using the spot first used in New Hampshire, which shows the vice president meeting with various world figures, from Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to Polish dissident Lech Walesa, and ends with a freeze frame of President Reagan putting his arm around the vice president in a corridor outside the Oval Office.

Dole, meanwhile, tried to pull all of his roughly $450,000 worth of advertising off the air Thursday. According to some sources, Dole was planning to run an attack ad Thursday night, stating that polls showed Dole was the only Republican who could beat the Democrats in November. But Thursday’s USA Today poll contradicted the ad. At the same time, some of Dole’s aides were urging him to consider folding his campaign altogether.