POLITICS ’88 : Dukakis’ Managers Use News Time to Candidate’s Benefit

In seeking to win Ronald Reagan’s job, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts and his advisers are taking a lesson from Ronald Reagan’s career--careful management of the news to foster the desired image for the candidate.

The strategy frustrates many reporters and galls Republican opponents, who charge that Dukakis is promoting an image that belies his record. Yet for Dukakis and his aides, those complaints are a price easily worth paying.

Only a few months ago, many Republicans thought that Dukakis, a governor with no Washington experience from the state long considered the most liberal in the country, would be an easy mark. Instead, polls show that many voters regard him as moderate, even conservative, and he leads Vice President George Bush by large margins.

The Dukakis strategy was vividly on display in two incidents during his recent Southern campaign trip.

Timing in South Florida

The first came in Miami, where politics increasingly is dominated by conservative, Republican-leaning Cuban-Americans and crime and drugs are major issues.

The GOP had assigned Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to go to Miami to attack Dukakis for being soft on crime. Dukakis ignored McCain’s remarks. Instead, he scheduled a meeting with a new group of anti-crime advisers. And before that, he attended a flag-raising where, surrounded by more than 200 state police trainees, he stood at attention as a team of officers hoisted the Stars and Stripes in the early morning sunlight.

The candidate said nothing new of substance, but the image--Dukakis, police, strength, the flag--was broadcast throughout South Florida by the local Spanish-language television station.

The effect, Mississippi Gov. Ray Mabus said, was to put the Republicans in the position of “the man in the joke whose wife catches him in bed with another woman and (he) asks, ‘Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’ ”

Finessing Wallace Meeting

The next day, in Montgomery, Ala., Dukakis planned a visit with former Gov. George C. Wallace.

In Alabama, Wallace is a folk hero to white conservatives and is accepted by blacks, with whom he became reconciled at the end of his career. Elsewhere in the country, however, the sight of Dukakis shaking hands with Wallace could have upset the campaign’s attempts to begin reaching black voters.

Dukakis aides insist they made no attempt to manipulate the coverage of the trip. “We’re not really about segmenting” the campaign’s message to appeal to different voters in different ways, insisted campaign communications director Leslie Dach.

Nonetheless, when Dukakis’ motorcade pulled up at Wallace’s modest suburban home, the local media crews, alerted the day before, were ready to begin filming. The national press corps traveling with Dukakis, who had not been told about the visit ahead of time, was generally nonplussed and unprepared. In addition, the event was scheduled late in the day, after the network evening news shows and perilously close to deadline for the Eastern newspapers.

Coverage Fit Purpose

The result was exactly what the campaign would have wanted: extensive coverage in Alabama--four television news spots in Montgomery and a color photograph on the front page of the Sunday paper--but scanty coverage elsewhere.

In pursuing such strategies, Dukakis has been able to take advantage of the fact that, at least for now, the major television networks are covering the campaign only lightly. Later in the year, the image the campaign projects in local events will be largely overwhelmed by the image presented in the national media. For now, the local view predominates.

Exploiting local television further, Dukakis, who learned how to talk before a camera doing a stint on the public-affairs program “The Advocates,” regularly schedules time to appear on live interviews via satellite with local television news shows.

The interviews are usually predictable--campaign aides joke that all news anchors ask the same seven questions, beginning with “what do you think about conditions in this state?” and ending with the vice presidential selection process--so they allow Dukakis to deliver his message with little interference.

Interviews Stay Local

Campaign aides in recent weeks have not allowed non-local reporters to monitor the live interviews as Dukakis gives them, raising the possibility that he could use the forums to deliver tailored messages to certain parts of the country without the news being relayed to other regions. There is, however, no evidence that he has yet done that, and campaign Press Secretary Dayton Duncan argues that any such attempt would be “foolish.”

Neither Dukakis nor his aides are yet up to the Reagan standard. The candidate still maddens photographers and television producers by turning the back of his head to the camera. And the campaign at times still awkwardly schedules photogenic events too late to make the evening news.

But, by contrast with the star-crossed and camera-shy campaign of 1984 nominee Walter F. Mondale, Dukakis is comfortable with the world of electronic campaigning. And, by contrast with Reagan, whose aides have always had to control press access tightly for fear of a gaffe, Dukakis can and does talk to reporters nearly every day without ever dropping his guard and saying something that would differ from the campaign’s carefully worked out message.

Critics See Trouble

All of which has Dukakis’ GOP opponents fuming.

“The fact is, the picture he’s trying to create out there is very different from the reality,” said New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu, a Republican who has been one of the chief critics of Dukakis. The gap between that image and the reality will in time create a “character issue,” Sununu insisted in a recent televised news conference.

So far, however, the Republicans have drawn little blood in their effort to hurt Dukakis’ image. If all the Republican attacks are having an impact, Dach said, “I haven’t seen it in the polls.”

Times researchers Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Lorna Nones in Miami contributed to this story.