Democrats’ Views on Ideological Goals at Odds : Veneer of Harmony Hides Differences

In years gone by, Democrats came to their national conventions burning to fight for the soul of their party. But after enduring eight years of Republican rule, most members of the 1988 breed of Democrats are ready to trade their political souls for a better chance at the White House.

Witness the Dukakis-Jackson accord concluded Monday, hours before the convention’s opening session; last week’s choice by Michael S. Dukakis of conservative Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, and this year’s skimpy party platform, painstakingly drafted to avoid both specifics and controversy, which the delegates will consider tonight.

Under this veneer of pragmatism and harmony, however, strongly held and significant differences between the ideological goals of the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s black adherents and liberal supporters and the strategic aims of the Dukakis campaign can still be discerned. These are disagreements that cannot be reconciled by the boost Dukakis gave Jackson’s ego and prestige on Monday or offset by the electoral strength that Bentsen’s partisans claim he brings in Texas and the South, or cloaked by the calculated imprecision of the platform.

“Dukakis is trying to define the party by saying what we are not,” said Ed Reilly, who polled for Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt’s presidential campaign. “We need to say what we are.”

Otherwise, some Democrats worry, the Dukakis-Bentsen ticket could have a hard time defeating Republican George Bush in the fall, not to mention remaining unified enough to govern the country should weariness with the GOP give them the White House.

Critical Democrats and independent analysts complain that party leaders are still in flight from the outdated New Deal-linked dogma they blame for their overwhelming defeats in 1980 and 1984 and have not yet begun to formulate a new credo that will replace traditional federal government activism as the ideological engine that drives the Democratic bandwagon.

“We’ve scratched the graffiti off the wall,” says Al From, executive director of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate to conservative elected officials who have been trying to move the party toward the center. “But we have still got to draw a mural.”

From and others of his centrist ilk blame what they call “interest-group liberalism” for the Democratic decline. This ideological approach grew from the Depression-born commitment of the New Deal to use federal power to meet the needs of Americans suffering from economic and social disadvantages.

But over the decades, critics complain, this outlook came to stand for nothing more than the collective appetites of the interest groups who supported it. Feeling neglected by this now-dominant Democratic ethos, urban ethnic voters in the North and middle-class whites in the South who had been the backbone of the party deserted in droves to support Republican Ronald Reagan.

These are the swing voters Dukakis and the Democrats must win back to recapture the White House. To accomplish this, strategists concerned with long-term party building think Dukakis must offer a replacement for the interest group-oriented credo--what From calls “a larger vision” that would both stir the consciences of middle-class Americans and satisfy their economic concerns.

No one expects Dukakis to formulate such a concept overnight. But the Dukakis campaign’s insistence on avoiding specifics during the platform debate has raised questions over whether the candidate will attempt in the fall to spell out more explicitly than he has so far what a Dukakis presidency would mean to the lives of Americans.

Disagree on Deficit

The chief domestic policy disagreement between the Dukakis and Jackson forces over the platform draft--a 3,800-word document only about one-tenth the size of the 1984 platform--is over economic policy, specifically reducing the federal deficit.

The Jackson people want to raise taxes on a small percentage of wealthy Americans and freeze the defense budget in order to help pay for an expanded federal role in meeting social needs, particularly for education, where they want to double federal spending and child care.

Throughout the platform drafting debate, the Dukakis forces made plain that they would not accept any proposal for a tax hike, or any specific commitment to increase federal spending.

Jackson supporters from the party’s liberal wing see this disagreement as critical to the chances of reaching the education and other social goals that Dukakis purportedly shares with Jackson, at least in general terms.

Seek Commitment

“What we’re talking about is fundamental to political and governing strategy,” Robert Borosage, a Jackson issues adviser, said during the drafting committee meetings. “The only way we’re going to be able to fund the programs both sides (the Dukakis and Jackson campaigns) are talking about,” he explained, “is if we make a commitment now to set the money aside, by raising taxes and freezing defense spending.”

“One way or another, we have to pay for our dreams,” Leslie McLemore, a Jackson delegate from Mississippi, argued to his fellow drafting committee members. “It seems to me that if we are going to have this vision, we are going to have to pay for it, and it seems to me that the American people deserve to know how Democrats are going to do this.”

As for the Dukakis proposal to curb the deficit by tapping into tens of millions of dollars of uncollected taxes, McLemore argued that he did not think the Democrats “can hide behind” what he described as “clearly a stop-gap measure. We need something that is institutionalized.”

Politically Harmful

But Dukakis strategists think it would be politically harmful for the prospective nominee to offer more details about his fiscal policy, particularly an explanation of how he could cut the deficit without raising taxes.

“Voters aren’t stupid,” said former Maryland Rep. Michael Barnes, Dukakis’ point man on the platform drafting committee. “They know that the things candidates say about what they are going to do, if they get too specific, they often are not able to implement.”

“I would like to see him (Dukakis) win this election,” Barnes said. “I think we can help him do that with a platform that retains the flexibility we have in this draft.”

After Dukakis wins the election, Barnes said, “he’ll sit down with the congressional leadership and work out a strategy for the kind of specificity that they’ll have to have for this first budget.”

Willing to Go Along

Even though a Times poll of convention delegates showed considerable support for Jackson’s positions on economic policy, many of them seem willing to go along with the Dukakis position in the interest of unity and victory.

“I know what it’ll take to get the party elected,” said Missouri delegate Deleta Williams, originally a Gephardt supporter, now backing Dukakis. “I’m willing to do it that way--that’s the party goal, and what I feel personally I’ll just set aside. I think most Democrats are willing to. We haven’t in the past, but we’re willing to now.”

In some cases that attitude has been hardened by bitter past experience. Neva Maddox, another Missourian who switched from Gephardt to Dukakis, still remembers the strife-torn 1972 convention, which nominated George S. McGovern and sent him to a landslide defeat, as a low-water mark. “We can’t fight each other any more,” Maddox said. “We’ve got to get together and embrace and not get split over one specific person or one specific issue.”

Given his current lead in the polls over Bush, few expect Dukakis to be more explicit in the near future. But some analysts think this is a strategic mistake.

Counting on Negatives

“They (the Dukakis campaign) are counting on Bush’s negatives to hold him down,” and allow Dukakis to avoid specifics, said Prof. Kathleen Jamieson, a political communications specialist at the University of Texas. But Jamieson cautioned: “The negative feelings about Bush aren’t that deeply held.”

Moreover, she added, the same polls that give confidence to the Dukakis campaign offer Bush a potential benefit. “The polls make Bush an underdog,” she said, which means that he would be more free to campaign negatively against Dukakis without being damaged by a voter backlash. “As an underdog Bush can attack Dukakis and attack him successfully,” she said.

One of the reasons Dukakis resists specifics is that this approach carried him to success in the long battle for the nomination. But pollster Reilly contends that if Dukakis is to forge a new and victorious Democratic coalition to replace the battered New Deal alliance, the tactics that worked in the nominating contest need to be adjusted for the battle against the Republicans.

“As the campaign moves into a different phase, it’s important that Dukakis develop a different approach and spell out what the differences are between him and Bush and what are the stakes in this election,” Reilly argued. “If those swing voters are going to come back to the Democrats, they have to feel here is a guy who believes in something he is willing to fight for.”

Staff writer Patt Morrison contributed to this story.