POLITICS ’88 : Yalie Bush Again Jabs at Harvard Man Dukakis

The Battle of the Ivy League--or, as it is more commonly known, America’s presidential race--heated up anew Friday when the Yalie tossed a few more barbs at the Harvard man.

On Thursday, Vice President George Bush declared that Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis got all his foreign policy views from “Harvard Yard’s boutique.”

That, coming from the country’s top-ranking Yale Bulldog, was an insult.

On Friday, Bush--who has consistently bridled when Democrats accuse him of being too privileged to be President--dumped again on his alma mater’s fierce rival.

Harvard, he said, is “kind of a philosophical enclave . . . a philosophical cult.” And, for good measure, he repeated the criticisms first leveled Thursday in Houston to a new audience of Republicans gathered here for a unity dinner Friday night.

Dukakis Unperturbed

But, if those were fighting words, Bush found himself with an opponent who refused to counterjab.

“I’m going to campaign on the issues,” said Dukakis, who taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1978 and also has a Harvard law degree. “I’m going to talk about the future.

“I really am not interested. I don’t think the American people are interested.”

The Harvard vs. Yale contentiousness is the first blush of a new strategy on Bush’s part to come out swinging at Dukakis--and keep on swinging until November.

Not that he has much choice but to be aggressive--he is well behind in national polls--but Bush appears to be delighting at the attack.

On Friday, he seemed downright loose, even in the aftermath of a lackluster performance Thursday night on ABC’s “Nightline” program. The appearance there was marked by Bush’s calling moderator Ted Koppel “Dan” three times during the hourlong show, a reference to CBS news anchorman Dan Rather, with whom Bush exchanged shouts in January on national television.

Reference to Anchor

“Try calling me Peter,” Koppel implored at one point in the interview, an apparent reference to Peter Jennings, the anchorman on Koppel’s own network. At the show’s conclusion, Koppel said that, during his next appearance, the vice president could call him “Barbara”--Bush’s wife’s name.

Bush strode Friday to the rear of Air Force II, his traveling plane, and jokingly greeted a pool of reporters--with wrong names.

And when he stepped out onto the Tarmac at Denver’s Stapleton Airport, he was greeted by a sea of reporters, all wearing name tags bearing the name “Dan.”

On the more serious note of his battle with Dukakis, Bush defended his sniping about Harvard on the grounds that it was not class-oriented, as attacks on him have been. Rather, he said, it was politically oriented.

“Harvard boutique to me at least has the connotation of liberalism and elitism,” Bush said. “I see this as a philosophical cult normally identified with extremely liberal causes.”

Defining Dukakis as an extreme liberal is of importance to the Bush campaign, which is concerned that many Americans appear to consider Dukakis conservative, and thus less vulnerable to Republican criticism.

Bush said the jabs at Dukakis will continue until “it’s in focus.”