Focus on Doubts : Bush Strategy: Chip at Rival Day After Day

He is not even the official nominee of his party but already those close to his unfolding presidential campaign hear an echo from George Bush. Most every day is the same: Try to stir up second thoughts, doubts, about opponent Michael S. Dukakis.

At midsummer--with most rank-and-file voters unexcited about the presidential race--the vice president’s campaign strategy is simple: bear down each day in hopes someone will listen.

So Sunday morning, surrounded by family outside the door of the chapel where both his mother and daughter were married, Bush interrupted his weekend here to assail Dukakis as determinedly as a cloud of North woods mosquitoes.

“We cannot risk the peace and national security of this country on someone as inexperienced as the governor of Massachusetts,” Bush said.

‘Polluted Water’

As he has before, the vice president described Dukakis as a “liberal,” who is against the death penalty for drug lords and is a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.” Bush also alleged that Boston Harbor is “one of the most seriously polluted bodies of water in the country.”

This followed a similar attack Thursday, when Bush told an audience that Dukakis would weaken U.S. defenses, turn his back on 40 years of bipartisan American foreign policy and make the world “more dangerous.”

At his brief Sunday picture-taking session and press conference, Bush said he was unrattled by the bad news that followed him here--a New York Times/CBS poll showing him 17 points behind Dukakis. And worse, the survey reported that the vice president’s performance ratings are at an all-time low with 33% of those surveyed saying they have an unfavorable impression of him compared to 27% favorable.

Dukakis, by contrast, scored 2-to-1 higher in the favor column than the disfavor.

With the Republican convention just a week away, is Bush worried?

“No, I’m not. I think we’ll get this into focus,” Bush said. “They’ve had their day in the sun (with the Democratic convention) . . . now we have a day. So it doesn’t concern me one single bit.”

At that, the massed congregation of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church burst into applause.

Returns Each Summer

Every summer of his life except 1944, when he was serving with the Navy, Bush has come here to the family compound with its weathered mansion jutting into the Atlantic on Walker’s Point.

This year, all five of his children and 10 grandchildren are here, along with wife, Barbara, and his mother, Dorothy. But so are the tourists who park along the road outside the 11-acre seashore compound and peer in with binoculars and video cameras.

There also was the Coast Guard cutter patrolling off the point and in the compound, and the camera crew of Roger Ailes, the vice president’s media adviser and advertising consultant. Ailes was compiling footage of Bush along this wild coast that he loves so dearly.

“Kind of the roots thing,” as Bush explained it.