1988 DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION : Candidate to Stick With Team That Helped Him Get This Far

For all the talk of merging Michael S. Dukakis’ campaign operation with the staffs of his rivals, particularly the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Dukakis leaves Atlanta today to start his general election campaign with essentially the same high command he has had around him since his presidential bid started almost a year and a half ago.

It is a young and tight-knit group, many of whose members have worked together for years. And while Dukakis may not have acquired his foreign policy ideas from “the boutiques of Harvard Yard,” as Vice President George Bush once charged, he certainly picked up much of his staff from Harvard. A list of his senior staff provided by the campaign reads like an alumni directory.

Having won the primaries, run a virtually glitch-free campaign and steered the candidate to an early lead in most national polls, the Dukakis staff receives high marks for its diligence, efficiency and intelligence. Its only major mistake in recent months has been the failure to inform Jackson that Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas had been selected as Dukakis’ running mate--a snafu that contributed heavily to Jackson’s ability to dominate the press coverage of the campaign through the first three days of the convention.

Some Muttering

Despite the excellent record, there has been consistent muttering, at least among Washington insiders, about the Dukakis team’s lack of experience in running a national campaign. “This is the big time,” said one such insider. “What Dukakis needs is a Jim Baker,” he said, referring to Secretary of the Treasury James A. Baker III, who is expected to take over George Bush’s campaign this fall.

Others, however, dismiss that argument as jealousy on the part of Washington politicos who have not been tapped for Dukakis assignments. “There’s no evidence that experience in prior presidential campaigns correlates with success,” said consultant Greg Schneiders, noting that the aides who steered Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to the White House were unknown outside their home states until they won. “Most of the old pros who get involved in these things lose.”

The easiest way to see who is at the center of the campaign is to look at the list of who was sitting around the table when Dukakis decided last week on his running mate. Present were his two closest advisers: his wife, Kitty, and his longtime friend and campaign chairman, Paul P. Brountas. Also present were campaign manager Susan Estrich and her deputy, Jack Corrigan, the campaign’s director of operations. Earlier in the day, a fifth aide, Kirk O’Donnell, who bears the title senior adviser, took part in meetings on the vice presidential choice.

Not present, but closely consulted in the decision, according to Dukakis campaign insiders, was Dukakis’ former campaign manager, John Sasso. A highly respected political operative with experience running a national campaign--he ran Geraldine A. Ferraro’s vice presidential effort in 1984--Sasso was fired last summer in the wake of the Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. “attack video” affair.

Dukakis Embarrassed

Sasso embarrassed Dukakis by failing to tell him that he had leaked a videotape showing that Biden, then a leading candidate for the presidential nomination, had plagiarized a speech from British political leader Neil Kinnock. Dukakis publicly denied that his campaign had been the source of the tape, then had to take back his words when Sasso revealed that he had, in fact, given it to reporters.

For months afterwards, Sasso, who was once so close to Dukakis that friends described him as the governor’s “alter ego,” was publicly shunned by the campaign. But early in July, he began to give interviews with Boston reporters, and he has started talking regularly with Dukakis once again. He has been attending the convention, telling friends that he is happy being out of the day-to-day work of the campaign but that he is available to give advice to Dukakis as needed.

When Dukakis accepted Sasso’s resignation, he turned to Brountas to find someone to fill the post. In the same way, he turned to his old friend to run the job of finding a running mate. Brountas, like Dukakis the son of Greek immigrants, was born in Maine and worked his way up through Harvard Law School to a job in Boston’s largest law firm, Hale & Dore. There he became one of the country’s premiere corporate lawyers, helping to guide the fates of dozens of the small, high-tech firms that have rejuvenated the Massachusetts economy.

Brountas tapped Estrich to replace Sasso. She had worked with Sasso before when she was a senior adviser to the Mondale/Ferraro campaign and had been working as an unpaid consultant to Dukakis’ effort.

At age 35, she is a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School, a former Supreme Court law clerk and the first woman to run a major-party presidential campaign.

In fact, Dukakis has more women in senior staff positions than any previous presidential campaign in either party. Included among the women are the campaign’s scheduling director, Mindy Lubber, who formerly headed the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group, a Ralph Nader-affiliated organization, and Dukakis’ convention manager, Marcia Hale, who is expected soon to take over a new office that will be set up in Washington to begin laying plans for the transition should Dukakis win the election.

Estrich broke into national politics in Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s 1980 challenge to then-President Jimmy Carter. After doing field work for the campaign in several states, she represented Kennedy in negotiations over the party platform, where she quickly proved a tough and resilient political negotiator.

Restored Equilibrium

In the current effort, she is widely credited with restoring equilibrium after the Sasso crisis and guiding the campaign through its one other major low point, the back-to-back primary-season losses in Illinois and Michigan.

Facing an absolute need to win the next contest, in Wisconsin, the campaign briefly considered pulling field operatives out of later states, such as Pennsylvania and Ohio, where campaign workers already were organizing efforts to try to secure big victories that would allow Dukakis to lock up the nomination early.

Despite the pressure to throw more resources into Wisconsin, Estrich decided to stick to the plan, and her decision proved correct. Dukakis won Wisconsin, and his huge victories in the later primaries provided him a quick majority of the delegates, something that most Washington insiders thought would be impossible.

“There’s always a tendency to panic” in a political campaign, noted campaign field director Charles Baker. Estrich, he said, has been secure enough to resist that urge.

O’Donnell, a former aide to House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. who now heads a Democratic think-tank in Washington, was brought into the campaign last month to beef up its connections with Democratic politicians outside Massachusetts and to coordinate “the image.”

He works with communications director Leslie Dach--one of the few Yale graduates in the heavily Harvard Dukakis crowd--and the campaign’s issues and speech writing staffs. O’Donnell’s job is to ensure that “day-to-day” the candidate’s statements, the events he appears at and the “surrogates” who are campaigning for him around the country all project the same message. During the last week, he was in charge of the effort to coordinate the convention speeches, ensuring that virtually every speaker--particularly those who appeared on prime-time television--stressed the proper themes.

Corrigan, another alumnus of the Edward M. Kennedy campaign, the Ferraro campaign (deputy campaign manager) and Harvard (Class of ‘78), is Estrich’s chief deputy on the political and operational sides of the campaign.

Notoriously tight-lipped, he was recently described by a Boston columnist as the sort of guy who would not tell you if your coat was on fire. The next day, Corrigan assured a reporter who asked that he would indeed tell him if his coat was on fire, but only because the reporter had been covering the campaign for more than a year and had gotten to know him.

Strong Field Staffs

Unlike such rivals as Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who built a strong organization for the Iowa caucuses but whose campaign’s most prominent feature was its advertising, Dukakis won many of his major victories on the basis of strong field staffs.

His hope is to win the presidency the same way, using the huge amount of money--$50 million--that his treasurer, Robert Farmer, plans to raise for the Democratic Party to finance grass roots organizations, voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote campaigns in key states like Texas, California and New York.

To coordinate those efforts, the campaign has divided the nation into nine regions, each of which will have a desk officer in the Boston headquarters and a regional political coordinator as well as directors in each state. Because of its size and importance to the campaign, California is being treated as a separate region in that scheme.

Each evening at 5:30, Corrigan hosts a meeting of the campaign’s senior political operatives in his office to review the day’s events and plot strategy. In addition to Corrigan and Estrich, the regular cast at the meetings includes field director Baker, campaign political coordinator Charles Campion and principal deputies. Among that group are Donna Brazile, a former aide to Jackson and Gephardt, who joined the campaign last month to strengthen its ties to blacks and its political connections in the South, and Richard Ybarra, who as the campaign’s western political coordinator handled much of its work with Latino politicians during the primary campaign.