Strategy Weighed to Best Dukakis : Need for Agenda, Desire for Change Plague Bush

When Vice President George Bush clinched the Republican presidential nomination last month, his advisers worried that overconfidence might undermine his drive for the White House this fall.

Bush seemed to have so many things going for him. The nation was at peace, the economy thriving. Moreover, as President Reagan’s understudy, Bush had had a prominent place on the national political stage for more than seven years.

But, amid a spate of unfavorable poll results, overconfidence now seems to be the least of Bush’s problems. The surveys showed him trailing probable Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis nationally and in some key states, notably California, and made clear that his quest for the presidency faces serious obstacles.

The results, moreover, reflected political realities that had important implications for the long-range strategies of both the Bush and Dukakis campaigns, now just beginning to take shape.

Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater sought to put the best face on the bleak news. “I’m very pleased,” he told a recent gathering of political consultants here. “It’s very hard to get our people out in the field aware that this is going to be a very close election. The best thing we have going for us now is the polls.”

Other Republicans pointed out that such poll results, six months before Election Day, are suspect and subject to drastic change.

However transitory the results, political operatives in both parties saw two underlying reasons for Bush’s weak showing in the polls. One is his failure so far, despite his celebrity, to establish a clear political identity for himself. The other is a national inclination, after two consecutive Republican presidential terms, to change.

After their long years in the presidential wilderness, the Democrats naturally rejoiced in the unfavorable omens for Bush’s candidacy. “There’s a line in an old Ronald Reagan movie where he asks, ‘Where’s the rest of me?’ ” Democratic National Chairman Paul G. Kirk Jr. told a meeting of the party’s state chairmen in Atlanta this week. “In George Bush’s case, the question is: ‘Who am I and what do I stand for?’ ”

What is striking is that some of Bush’s own Republican supporters seem, at least in part, to share that view from the enemy camp.

Must Define Agenda

“The Bush campaign needs to concentrate more on establishing their own agenda,” said Bill R. Phillips, manager of the 1988 GOP National Convention, who previously served as director of Bush’s political action committee. “Bush needs to define a reason” for his candidacy.

“He has been inside for so long that he doesn’t understand a lot of things,” Edward J. Rollins, manager of President Reagan’s 1984 campaign, contends. “He has to go out and get sensitized to what’s going on around this country.”

Without his own independent story to tell, Bush is subject to severe buffeting from the storms swirling around the Reagan Administration over the Iran-Contra scandal, the allegations of misconduct against Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and the so-far-futile effort to oust Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega.

“Bush has very few of the advantages of incumbency and many of the disadvantages,” Rich Bond, his national political director, grouses. Bond contends that Bush gets little of the credit for such positive aspects of the Administration as the healthy economy, “but he gets more of the blame when things go bad.”

Negatives for Bush

As examples of negatives that have created problems for Bush, Bond cited the Iran-Contra affair and President Reagan’s threatened veto of trade legislation requiring advance notice to workers when factories close.

A more fundamental problem for Bush than the current difficulties of the Reagan Administration is the disgruntlement with the current national condition. Reagan pollster Richard B. Wirthlin finds that only 34% of those interviewed in a recent survey believed that the country was headed in the right direction, compared to 46% four years ago.

And in a Times exit poll of voters in six Southern states last March, 84% of Democrats interviewed and 65% of Republicans agreed that “we need a basic change in the way things are being run in this country.”

The electorate’s appetite for change stems in part from what most analysts diagnose as a sort of eight-year itch--a cyclical weariness with whichever party happens to be in power for two White House terms. In addition, pollster Wirthlin cites public concern about such “social issues” as drugs and crime.

Economic Anxieties Cited

Another contributing factor is what Tom Kiley, a polling analyst for the Dukakis campaign, calls “underlying anxiety” about the economic future, reflecting doubt that the current good news from the economic front will continue.

Whatever the reasons for this unease and desire for change, it is “probably the biggest single factor we have working against us” in the 1988 campaign, Bush campaign manager Atwater believes.

If this mood should prevail through November, the results could be disastrous for Bush. But Republicans have no intention of allowing that to happen. Their objective is to reshape the political debate so that it is not about the desirability of change but rather about the costly consequences of it.

“Nobody wants change if that means higher taxes, higher unemployment, higher interest rates or war,” said Eddie Mahe Jr., former executive director of the Republican National Committee and now a political consultant.

“The argument has to be that Dukakis is clearly a threat to everything that you like out there right now,” Mahe added.

But there is one big danger to this strategy, Rollins, the former Reagan campaign chief, warned. Before Bush can recreate Dukakis in the image of Walter F. Mondale and Jimmy Carter, he must first establish a positive image for himself. “If you go out on the attack today, all you’re going to do is reinforce your own negatives,” Rollins said. “What (Bush) really has to do first is to define himself and what a Bush presidency is all about and what his agenda is.”

Blazing Own Trail

This is no easy task, however, as was evidenced this week when Bush set about trying to blaze his own trail in the political thicket. When campaigning in Los Angeles, he declared that, if he were President, he would not “bargain with drug dealers” at home or abroad.

The allusion to the Noriega case was unmistakable but so oblique--Bush did not mention Noriega by name--that some thought he blunted his point. Finally, on Friday, Bush’s chief of staff, Craig Fuller, issued a statement explicitly confirming that Bush advocated an end to negotiations offering concessions to Noriega if he gives up power.

Back home in Washington, Bush met with a group of black leaders hoping, he said, to “reach out” to the civil rights movement. But, afterward, Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP--like others at the meeting, embittered by Reagan Administration policies--said Bush has “a long way to go if he actually expects to get a substantial black vote.”

It may be of some solace to Bush and his advisers that Dukakis faces a similar challenge. If voters know little about Bush’s beliefs and goals, they may know even less about Dukakis. This reality somewhat tempered the optimism of Democratic state party leaders at their Atlanta meeting this week.

Although the party leaders found the reports of Dukakis’ considerable lead in national polls encouraging, the results, said Al LaPierre, executive director of the Alabama Democratic Party, “tell us more about Bush than they do about Dukakis.”

Dukakis Must Look to Future

For Dukakis to triumph, the focus of the campaign must be on the future and on the need to change. “The country is poised to make a change,” Dukakis polling analyst Kiley said. “The key for Dukakis is to represent the kind of new direction that voters are looking for.”

But, to do this, even Dukakis’ own advisers acknowledge, their man must be more forthcoming about what his presidential agenda would be--and how he would pay for it--than he has been in his drive for the nomination.

“A general election campaign is different from a primary,” Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich said. “In a general election campaign, people will be interested in what your plans are and what your priorities are.”

Just as Bush must find a way to move out of the shadow of the White House to establish his own identity, Dukakis must try to put some distance between himself and the Democratic Party, with its traditional liberal doctrines, to win back the voters who deserted the party’s candidates in four out of the last five elections.

That problem is compounded for Dukakis by the success of the candidacy of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has come to be a spokesman not only for blacks but also for the party’s liberal-activist wing.

Walking a Tightrope

The Jackson issue is considered so sensitive within the Dukakis camp that his advisers will not even discuss his handling of it with reporters. But, as other Democrats see it, Dukakis must walk a tightrope to avoid alienating blacks and liberals and yet preserve his electability.

“He needs to be respectful to Jesse,” said Chris Scott, president of the North Carolina AFL-CIO. “But he can’t be seen as fawning.”

As each candidate seeks to define himself in the consciousness of the electorate, Dukakis and Bush both must make decisions about what issues they will emphasize, in what states they will concentrate their resources and whom they will select for vice president.

Here is a look at the factors governing these three strategic choices:

ISSUES--A sudden dip in the economy this summer or early fall could just about doom Bush’s candidacy. Similarly, a full-blown international crisis could seriously hurt Dukakis by highlighting what many believe to be the chief weakness of his candidacy: his inexperience--and, critics say, naivete--in foreign affairs.

But, barring such unforeseeable developments, issues are likely to take a back seat in this campaign to character, which Bush pollster Robert Teeter calls “the first and most important substantive question” of the campaign.

With the country at peace and the economy thriving, John DeVillars, Dukakis’ chief of operations in the Massachusetts Statehouse, says: “The election will not be on the issues but on which candidate will be able to demonstrate that he has the character and capacity to lead the country.”

But, because both Bush and Dukakis lack color and definition as personalities, they will rely on issues to help establish the broad themes of their campaigns and to delineate their character traits. “The good news is that people are worried about issues like law and order and drugs, which are issues the Republicans come out better on,” Bush campaign manager Atwater contends.

It is also true, though, that voters are concerned about education, an area where most analysts believe Bush has yet to prove his bona fides.

Meanwhile, these are the sort of issues that lend themselves to exploitation by Dukakis also, because they are relevant to his experience as governor and are suited to the pragmatic, problem-solving approach he stressed in his campaign for the nomination.

Republicans would much prefer to depict Dukakis as a liberal ideologue. Says GOP consultant David Keene: “The liberal as city manager is a lot more dangerous to Republicans politically than the liberal as preacher.”

STATES--History suggests that Bush starts out with an enormous advantage in the electoral college. No fewer than 23 states with 202 electoral votes have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1968. Only the District of Columbia has been that consistently Democratic during this period.

Republicans have been particularly dominant in the South and Rocky Mountain West, leading some analysts to conclude that the Democrats would be wise to abandon those regions and try to collect the 270 electoral votes needed for a majority by putting together a group of states in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, especially including California with its 47 electoral votes.

“I can see zero ways the Democrats can win without California,” Bush aide Atwater said.

But UCLA political scientist John Petrocik scoffs at the notion of devising regional strategies based on past results, which he says have little meaning for 1988. With the exception of the South, where conservatism appears to reign supreme, Petrocik argues that voters around the country “respond in a pretty homogeneous way.”

At any rate, Dukakis can hardly afford to concede any section of the country, at least until much later in the campaign, because doing so would aid Bush. “He has to run a forceful campaign down here,” North Carolina union leader Scott said, “or the Republicans will take all their money and dump it into California.”

Even Republicans concede that Bush is weak in the Midwest Farm Belt, as his losses in GOP primaries in Iowa and South Dakota demonstrated. And some Democrats believe that, if Dukakis can get just 40% of the white vote in the South--about 7 points more than Mondale did in 1984--a solid Democratic black vote would make it possible for him to carry states such as Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina and possibly Georgia.

VICE PRESIDENCY--In both parties, there is talk of using the vice presidency as a strategic pawn in the electoral college chess game. Among Democrats, most attention focuses on the notion of picking a Southerner--Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn is the name heard most often--to allow Dukakis to crack the strongly conservative redoubt in Dixie.

But Dukakis pollster Irwin Harrison, among others, questions how much difference a vice president can make. “The wrong choice can hurt you,” Harrison said, “but I don’t think the right man can help that much outside his own state.”

Others argue that Nunn could at best help carry his own state of Georgia, with 12 electoral votes, and say the Democrats would be better off picking Sen. John Glenn of Ohio, whose state has 23 electoral votes and is conservative enough to suit Southern tastes. Glenn, 67, seems interested. If he received an offer from Dukakis, “I’d have to think about it,” he said.

Some Democrats talk of New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, with whom Dukakis is said to get along well. But Bradley, like Dukakis, comes from the same Northeast Corridor--out of which the Democrats must expand or lose.

On the Republican side, some analysts urge Bush to consider California Gov. George Deukmejian, following what UCLA’s Petrocik calls a “blocking strategy” to prevent the Democrats from carrying the Golden State. But GOP consultant Rollins thinks that, by picking Deukmejian, which would give the Democrats control of state government, Bush might create so much turmoil in the state Republican Party that the Democrats would win.

And others point out that the last time the Republicans ran a California governor for vice president, Earl Warren in 1948, Democrat Harry S. Truman carried the state.

Two former Bush rivals for the nomination, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and New York Rep. Jack Kemp, are other names put forward for the vice presidency. But even Dole’s partisans concede that his temperament would be a problem, and some Kemp associates say Bush does not care for their man.

Staff writer Bob Drogin contributed to this story.