GOP Designing Platform as Club to Bash Dukakis : Democrat’s Positions Called Threat to Peace

Republican Party leaders Tuesday unveiled the draft version of their 1988 party platform, the key component in George Bush’s twofold strategy to catch up with front-running Democratic standard bearer Michael S. Dukakis.

The Republican document, expected to be about six times as long and far more detailed than the skimpy 5,000-word manifesto produced by the Democrats, is intended to be used first as a lever to boost Bush in voter esteem. Secondly, Republicans hope to wield it as a club to bash Dukakis and tarnish the electorate’s perception of the still relatively little known Democratic nominee.

Even as platform drafters put the finishing touches on the document prior to next week’s Republican National Convention here, the bashing began at a briefing on the platform’s foreign policy and defense sections.

“We hold that the positions taken by Michael Dukakis threaten peace, world security and American interests everywhere,” declared former U.S. Sen. John Tower, the Bush campaign’s platform “point man” on national security issues. As evidence for this charge, Tower cited what he called Dukakis’ unilateral approach to reduction of nuclear arms and his adherence to “multilateralism” instead of “American leadership” in diplomacy.

Boasts of Achievements

By contrast with Dukakis’ views, the foreign policy section of the bulky GOP platform draft boasts of Reagan Administration achievements in arms reduction and also of the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan and of Vietnam’s pullout from Cambodia. It attributes those events to the Administration’s reliance on the doctrine of “peace through strength.”

“We know something that the national Democrats seem to have forgotten,” the platform draft pointedly declares. “If a foreign policy is based upon weakness or unrealistic assumptions about the world, it is doomed to failure.”

Party leaders contend that the platform will help shift the electorate’s focus to the Republican accomplishments of peace and prosperity, depicting Dukakis as a threat to both, and away from what has so far for the Republicans been a losing competition between personalities.

Views Called Out of Step

Of all the issues, Republicans have concluded that Dukakis is most vulnerable on foreign policy and defense. They contend that, as governor of Massachusetts, he has had limited direct experience in those areas and they argue that he holds views, such as his apparent reliance on the United Nations and other international organizations, which are out of step with those of most mainstream voters.

Along with promoting the notion of Dukakis as naive and inexperienced in foreign affairs, the Republicans hope to use their platform to exploit the Democratic avoidance of specifics in foreign affairs, particularly with regard to the Middle East. Thus, Republicans are hoping to make points with the traditionally Democratic American-Jewish community, concerned about the influence of the Democratic runner-up, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, on the Middle East policies of a future Democratic Administration .

The Middle East plank, covering four triple-spaced pages, rejects outright the idea of a Palestinian state and it explicitly opposes a role for the Palestinian Liberation Organization in peace negotiations unless it recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

Neither point is mentioned in the Democratic platform, which covers the Middle East in a single sentence that refers to a peace plan for Nicaragua also.

Pledge of No Tax Hikes

Similarly, in its economic section, the GOP draft restates its “unequivocal” 1984 promise: “We oppose any attempts to increase taxes.” And it pledges to restore lower tax rates for capital gains “to promote investment in jobs.”

The platform calls for dealing with the deficit by giving the President line-item veto power and increased authority to withhold spending, along with a “flexible freeze” on current government spending and a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget.

Some economists contend that a flexible freeze, as proposed by Bush, would fall far short of the savings claimed for it and would require drastic cutbacks in existing programs to get the government back in the black. Nevertheless, Republicans contend that their platform at least makes a stab at the deficit problem. By comparison, the Democratic platform deals with the deficit only in the course of a sentence in which it pledges commitment to “fiscal responsibility.”

When asked during the Democratic drafting process why the party platform offered no answer to the deficit, Michael Barnes, chief Dukakis liaison to the platform committee, said, “I don’t think we need it. What we have is adequate.”

Family Issues Stressed

Apart from pointing to alleged omissions and gaps in the Democratic platform, the GOP platform is intended to show that Bush and his party are ready to break new ground in dealing with such emerging family concerns as education and child care.

In a 28-page section, nearly as long as the entire Democratic platform, the GOP draft pledges, among other things, to push for the Bush plan for tax credits for day care, to work to improve quality and financing of long-term health care and to keep AIDS testing records “appropriately confidential.”

If this seems like a heavy political weight to put on a party platform, which in most campaigns is paid scant attention after it is approved, Republican leaders say that the Democrats gave them an opening to emphasize the GOP platform by their decision to de-emphasize the Democratic platform.

In drafting their own platform before their convention, the Democrats made no secret of their determination to avoid making the sort of specific commitments and taking the sort of controversial positions that they believe have cost them votes in the past.

‘Doesn’t Say Anything’

“I think the Democrats overreacted,” Republican National Chairman Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr. said in an interview. “They thought that their platform in San Francisco (where the 1984 Democratic convention was held) was so specific it got them in trouble. So they went the other way and came up with a document that doesn’t say anything and that makes it a lot easier for us to frame the issues.”

Fahrenkopf said that the Republicans will keep driving that point home through the convention and the fall campaign. “We’re going to tell people that the Democrats don’t have the courage to tell the American people what they really believe and what they really want to do.”

As evidence of true Democratic intentions, Republicans cite polls of Democratic convention delegates taken by The Times and other publications which showed that most of the delegates wanted to raise taxes. At the insistence of the Dukakis campaign, though, the delegates voted down an amendment to the platform proposed by the Jackson campaign calling for a tax hike to support domestic programs that are backed by both Jackson and Dukakis.