Politics 88 : Dukakis Lauds Student Hosts in L.A. Washington High Visit

As on nearly every campaign morning lately, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and his wife, Kitty, went to high school Friday, lauding education and denouncing drugs before a captive assembly in South-Central Los Angeles.

“I hope we can have high schools like this all over America,” Dukakis told students at Washington Preparatory High School, renowned for academic excellence under principal George McKenna. “This is what the future of America is all about.”

But there was something different for Dukakis about Friday’s school: It was almost entirely black, and the likely Democratic nominee, having virtually ceded the black vote to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, has spent very little time in the nation’s black community.

That raises for many voters the kind of question phrased succinctly Friday by the first student to step to the microphone to question him:

“Is this a token visit?” she asked. “ . . . Is this a visit to a black school to show the black community that you really care?”

“I have been visiting black schools for years . . . .” Dukakis answered. “I’m here because this is a very, very special place with a great reputation.”

The exchange was polite, and the campaign event was characterized by unusual levity, enlivened by song and dance from the musical “Grease,” performed while Dukakis, perched atop a stool at stage center, put on a letterman’s jacket and dark glasses to complete the ‘50s motif.

But the visit, while demonstrating that Dukakis has begun to reach out more purposefully to black voters, also underscored what some aides acknowledge is a vulnerability bred of neglect. One student asked him whether he would be willing to serve as Jackson’s vice president. Another asked him a tough question about South Africa, more often Jackson’s issue. And Dukakis won his most energetic applause inadvertently, when he mentioned Jackson’s name.

Dukakis’ aides explain his unusually light schedule with black voters--about a dozen events in the last year--by pointing out the governor’s busy Statehouse duties and contending that Jackson had locked up the vote in the black community.

“You pick your turf, and you do what you can,” said Fletcher Wiley, a black Boston lawyer who is a senior adviser to the campaign.

Wiley and other advisers voice confidence that Jackson ultimately will campaign unreservedly for Dukakis in the general election. But “to win black support Dukakis has to appeal to blacks at three times: in the primaries, at the convention, and in November,” Wiley said. “Without the first, the second two become much more difficult.”

Wiley and other members of an 80-member panel of influential black Dukakis backers outlined a strategy last week calling for the campaign to make a more visible appeal to black voters, and the process appears already to have begun with a stepped-up schedule that includes sites like Washington High School.

On a campaign swing in which he has sought to underscore his commitment to women’s rights and family issues, including affordable day care, Dukakis on Friday also walked a beat with San Francisco police officers and rode a Sacramento train, and delivered a highly partisan speech to an outdoor rally near the state Capitol.

Deriding the Reagan Administration for its position on drugs and its relationship with Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega, he said: “You tell me how I . . . can go to these children and their parents today and tell them to say ‘no’ to drugs when we’ve got an Administration in Washington that can’t say ‘no’ to Noriega.”