‘We Need You,’ Dukakis Tells Jackson Supporters : ‘Everyone a Shareholder in Dream’

Michael S. Dukakis today told the loyal supporters of Jesse Jackson, “We need you . . . we can’t win without you” in the campaign against Republican George Bush.

Dukakis, Jackson and vice presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen appeared early today at a unity breakfast of about 2,000 Jackson supporters only hours after the Democratic presidential candidate accepted the party’s nomination.

Jackson, who has been promised a “major role” in the fall campaign, called Dukakis “the man I have grown to love” and added, “the man I intend to watch close-up . . . when he becomes the next President of the United States.”

Jackson told the group that Dukakis “deserves to become the next President of the United States.”

“We’re on the same boat together,” Dukakis told the group, including many Jackson delegates disappointed that he is not on the Democratic ticket for the election.

“We’re going to open the White House to the people. . . . We’re going to make everyone a shareholder in the dream. . . . We’re going to need you. We want you. We can’t win without you.”

Tells of Seeing Segregation

The presidential nominee recalled the civil rights struggle and spoke of his own experience traveling to Washington in 1953 and seeing “Jim Crow” segregation.

He pointed to his running mate and said that as a Texas congressman Bentsen had voted in 1948 to kill the poll tax that was used to deny voting rights to blacks.

Dukakis, who headed to Texas and California later in the day with Bentsen to begin the fall campaign, told the Jackson supporters, “We have 110 days, and I hope we can enlist every single one of you in this cause.”

The three-term Massachusetts governor was setting out on his first campaign trip as the nominee after claiming the prize in a forceful, 50-minute speech Thursday night at the Democratic National Convention.

The trip was both a symbolic homecoming for Bentsen and a strong reminder that the Democratic ticket intends to battle for Texas, the third-largest state with 29 electoral votes and the adopted home of Republican opponent George Bush.

Getting a fast start on the general election campaign, Dukakis and his running mate then were flying to Stockton and planned later appearances in Minot, N.D., St. Louis and Erie, Pa., before Dukakis returns home Sunday night to Boston.

Previous GOP Strongholds

The three-day cross-country swing is both a campaign kickoff and a sign that the Democrats believe they can compete in regions such as the West, Southwest and Midwest--in farm areas and in industrial regions--that have gone Republican in recent elections.

“We’re making a nationwide swing,” said Dukakis spokesman Dayton Duncan. “He intends to run an aggressive national campaign that concedes no state, no region, to George Bush and the Republicans.”

They were visiting three of the four largest states, each of which looms as a potential showdown state: California, the largest with 41 electoral votes; Pennsylvania, the fourth-largest with 25 states, and Texas.

“They’re all important states that we intend to contend for,” Duncan said.

The four-day convention had a heavy focus on the South and Texas, with Texans wielding the gavel and delivering the keynote speech--and with Bentsen joining the ticket for a “Boston-Austin” axis that had Democrats reminiscing about John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1960.

“This is a truly national ticket, with a national message that can win in November and will not allow the Republicans, as they have in the past, to take any state for granted,” Duncan said.