Being Underdog Could Aid Bush at Convention : May Humanize Drab Personality, Make Voters More Receptive to Proposals He Will Advance

As George Bush comes to New Orleans this week to claim his party’s presidential nomination, he faces a Democratic opponent with a double-digit lead in some polls and political tides that apparently are running in favor of change and against the vice president’s own drive for the White House.

Ominous as these portents are for his candidacy, Bush faces an even more serious obstacle--his own troubled relationship with the American voter.

The results of voter opinion surveys, and the comments of GOP strategists in their less guarded moments, all point to the same conclusion: The vice president is a drag on his own campaign. As a political personality, the polling data and the political professionals say, George Herbert Walker Bush lacks strength, focus and conviction.

Opportunity to Project

And, unless the vice president can overcome these flaws--starting here Monday when the GOP convention gives him a special opportunity to project himself to the country--the Republican presidential hegemony that Ronald Reagan established with two landslide victories now seems likely to end.

“Voters may not really know Bush, but they think they do,” said GOP consultant David Keene, who was political director of Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign. “And they don’t think he’s up to the presidency.”

“His negatives are about the same as President Reagan’s,” reflecting varied discontents with the incumbent Administration after seven years of rule, said James Lake, a longtime Reagan aide and now a Bush adviser. “But he doesn’t get credit for Reagan’s accomplishments.”

Bush’s strategists are determined to reverse those damaging perceptions, in part by taking advantage of the opportunity for prime time public attention at the convention.

“A national convention is a transforming event in American politics, and it will be in this case, too,” Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, predicted. “And, after this convention, people will have a better sense of George Bush, of what he stands for and where he wants to lead this country.”

The remedies being proposed for the candidate cover both substance and style:

- “He has to show the electorate that he shares their concerns and is passionately committed to carrying them out,” Keene said.

- “He’s got to cut out the excess body language and the dangling participles” in his public speaking, said an aide to former Texas Sen. John Tower, “point man” for the Bush campaign on defense and foreign-policy issues.

- “He’s got to be more disciplined in the sense of having a distinctive message and sticking to it,” said one former top Bush staff member, still an informal adviser. “And he’s got to be more instinctive about seizing the issue opportunities Dukakis gives him.”

No one in the Republican high command suggests that the task ahead will be easy.

GOP Well Organized

The country is at peace, and the economy by and large is humming along in high speed, both normally potent positive factors for the party in power. The Republicans, having won four of the last five presidential elections, three by landslide margins in the electoral college, are well organized and well financed in almost all of the 50 states.

Nevertheless, polls released last week show Bush well behind Dukakis among registered voters, by 12 percentage points according to Cable News Network and by 14 points in an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey.

Even more disturbing to Bush strategists than these “horse race” ratings--which they expect the convention to improve--are the relatively high negative reactions to Bush’s own political profile recorded in the surveys. Such findings are considered especially significant by political analysts because they indicate voter responses to a candidate’s fundamental strengths and weaknesses, attitudes that are relatively hard to change.

Thus, 45% of those surveyed in the NBC poll think Bush would not be as strong as President Reagan, compared to 42% who think he would; by contrast, 52% of those surveyed think Dukakis would be as strong as Reagan.

By more than 2 to 1, the NBC respondents think Dukakis cares about people like themselves; for Bush, the ratio on this key question is barely better than 50-50. Similarly, 47% of those interviewed viewed Bush favorably, compared to 43% who regarded him unfavorably; for Dukakis, the favorable-unfavorable ratio was 55% to 26%.

These public poll results are borne out by candidate “thermometer” readings compiled by Robert Teeter, Bush’s own pollster, The Times has learned.

When asked to calibrate their feeling of “warmth” and “favorability” for the two presidential candidates on a scale of 0 to 100, voters give Bush a 50 and Dukakis a 58, according to sources familiar with the data. By comparison, President Reagan currently registers about a 55, and 1984 Democratic standard-bearer Walter F. Mondale scored in the 40s as he was losing the last presidential election to Reagan.

Viewed as ‘Second Banana’

In part, Republican professionals say, these findings are a reflection of the years Bush has spent as vice president and in other subordinate government positions; his resume has apparently created a public perception of him as a permanent second banana.

Moreover, GOP operatives say, Bush does not help his own cause with his mannerisms, which many find distracting, or with his speech patterns, which often seem disjointed and inappropriate to the occasion or his message. When Bush addressed the convention platform committee here last week, for instance, he predicted an “enthusiastic and upbeat” convention but then added a seemingly diffident ad lib: “I’m determined to go out and do my best, and I believe it will be good enough.”

Others say that the negative reaction to Bush stems mainly from the fact that he has not yet fully developed policy positions of his own. But his efforts to correct that deficiency by offering proposals to provide financial aid for day care, education and other so-called family issues have been met with skepticism even by some Republicans.

“The more he addresses those issues, the more he plays into Dukakis’ hands,” one Bush adviser said. “Whatever he suggests, he can’t promise as much as Dukakis can.”

Republican leaders who have worked with Bush closely find it hard to understand why his public performances range so far below the level that they have seen in private.

Credible in Private

“I’ve sat across the desk from him, and he’s always been very credible and very focused on the issues,” recalled Bill Phillips, who is now manager of the New Orleans convention and formerly directed the Bush political action committee, which helped set the stage for his presidential candidacy.

Phillips attributes Bush’s perceived weakness as a public figure to Bush’s feeling that as vice president he is expected to be subservient. “You’re going to see him be very different when he is ‘candidate Bush’ at the convention,” Phillips said. “I’m sure George Bush sees the importance of his Thursday night acceptance speech. That is going to be the best speech he’s ever given.”

But some GOP strategists doubt that a persona shaped by more than 20 years in politics can be greatly changed in the few days the convention will last, or even in the few weeks before Election Day. And they argue that not much change is necessary given the GOP’s other assets in the campaign.

“If he just doesn’t make any mistakes, we can win it without him,” said one of the Bush campaign’s top lieutenants, who broke into presidential politics with Richard M. Nixon in 1972. “We’ve still got a big advantage in the electoral college and we’ve got the better organization.”

But, for all of the numerous factors that shape the outcome of a presidential election, most politicians believe this campaign, like nearly every other, will be decided by voter attitudes toward the two candidates.

“This election, when it comes down to it, is going to be between George Bush and Michael Dukakis,” said pollster Teeter, who is also a senior Bush strategist. “And all of these things that are interesting and even significant now, most of them will tend to fade, and it will end up as a generalized decision between George Bush and Michael Dukakis--which one of those two do voters trust to sit in the Oval Office and make decisions for them for the next four years?”

With all of these difficulties, history suggests that the convention offers Bush an important opportunity to make headway. Indeed, entering the convention as an underdog could help humanize Bush’s relatively drab personality and might gain him a responsive audience for the positive proposals he needs to make.

Has ‘Leeway to Attack’ Just as important, the need to come from behind gives Bush “more leeway to attack” Democratic standard-bearer Dukakis, said Peter B. Teeley, former Bush spokesman and press secretary, who coined the phrase “voodoo economics” that Bush used to describe Reagan’s tax-cut proposals in the 1980 campaign.

As Teeley and others see it, as an underdog Bush will be able to depict Dukakis as a threat to the Reagan era’s peace and prosperity without Bush himself suffering a serious backlash.

Moreover, Bush seems to operate better when he is behind--as his success in the campaign for the 1988 Republican nomination seems to demonstrate. “The best performance Bush gave was between Iowa (where he was defeated by Kansas Sen. Bob Dole) and New Hampshire (where he won a decisive victory),” recalled Charles Black, a Bush adviser who was campaign manager for erstwhile Bush rival New York Rep. Jack Kemp.

If Bush needs examples to inspire himself and his supporters, he can look back to Democrat Harry S. Truman. In 1948, Truman scored the greatest upset in modern political history when he overtook Republican Thomas E. Dewey, whose lead was so big that some pollsters stopped taking surveys in September.

Ford Comeback Drive

For a more recent model in his own party, Bush need only look back to Republican Gerald R. Ford, whose feisty 1976 convention performance sparked a comeback drive that almost eclipsed a 30-point disadvantage in the polls. And Ford, like Bush, was running against a relatively little-known Democratic standard-bearer--in Ford’s case, Jimmy Carter, whose main political experience had been as a governor, and whom Ford nearly defeated by using his record in state government against him.

These are points well remembered in the Bush campaign because two of its top operators, former Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III, who is now campaign chairman, and pollster Teeter had similar roles in the Ford campaign.

Indeed, the attack on Dukakis is scheduled to begin right here in New Orleans.

“Look for Tuesday night to be bash-Dukakis night,” said Paul Manaforte, deputy convention director for the Bush campaign. He said the speakers on that night are prepped to sharply contrast Dukakis’ record with Bush’s performance and with Dukakis’ own presidential campaign rhetoric.

Republicans say they will not be as personal in going after Dukakis as the Democrats were in maligning Bush. But the GOP speakers will certainly pull no punches in an effort to build Bush up by knocking Dukakis down, and particularly to buttress their contention that the Democratic nominee has sought to distract public attention from the economic and foreign-policy issues that the Republicans say should be the centerpiece of the campaign.

“The main thrust of our effort at the convention is going to be to contrast the issues that differentiate George Bush and Michael Dukakis,” Bush adviser Lake said. “The speakers will be highlighting issues that people care about and (will) point up the fact that (the Democrats’) convention was devoid of any content with regard to issues.

Convention to Stress Issues

“We are going to make ours a convention of the issues. We’re going to discuss the issues aggressively. And we expect the American people to be able to differentiate between the two candidates after the convention runs its course,” he said.

Looking back on the 1976 campaign, the last presidential election that the Republicans lost, Bush strategists point out that their candidate is not nearly as far behind as Ford was. Moreover, they argue that Bush has an extra weapon Ford did not have: Ronald Reagan, one Republican the Democrats have never been able to beat.

Reagan is certain to wring every ounce of political melodrama out of his own convention address, scheduled for Monday night. Indeed, some analysts have wondered whether the expected boffo performance by Reagan might not make Bush’s speech three nights later seem lackluster by comparison.

But Atwater professes to be unworried about any unfavorable comparisons with Reagan.

“I’m just very pleased that Ronald Reagan is speaking the first night and not Jimmy Carter,” Atwater said, referring to the last Democratic President’s appearance at his party’s convention in Atlanta last month. “Ronald Reagan is one of the most popular political figures in the country. So he’s going to be a plus, not a minus.”