Group Assails ‘Comic Book’ Attack on Dukakis

A “comic book” picture pamphlet purporting to lay out in stinging cartoons Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis’ political stands has been criticized as intolerant and “brass knuckles tactics” by a group urging Republicans to repudiate it.

But a Bush campaign spokesman who said he had not read it thoroughly found the “Magical Mike” broadsheet to be “a clever and somewhat ingenious approach.”

The 32-page booklet with its caricatured drawings was endorsed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell when he distributed it at last week’s “Family Forum” religious convention here.

Distribution Urged

Falwell urged his followers to distribute 10 million copies of the pamphlet, subtitled “The REAL story of Mike Dukakis,” before the November election.

Written in the style of a fictitious dialogue between Dukakis and an angry voter, it portrays the Massachusetts governor as soft-on-crime “Sheriff Pansy,” shows him wearing a dress and pearls as a supporter of the equal rights amendment and comparable worth, and excoriates him as a backsliding member of the Greek Orthodox Church who married outside his faith and did not baptize his children. (Allegations that Dukakis’ status within his church is irregular have been rejected and denounced by Archbishop Iakovos, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Americas.)

Claims He Backs Blasphemy

The booklet--published by AKA Inc. of Garrisonville, Va., at three for $5, 35 cents each for 1,000 copies or more--makes Dukakis out as having endorsed blasphemy, bestiality and witchcraft during his Massachusetts legislative career.

It also draws Dukakis as an issue flip-flopper, a “taxaholic,” married to a cartooned bossy, glassy-eyed, “take-charge” woman, and--with a graphic drawing of Dukakis in a doctor’s coat with a vacuum cleaner--as a pro-abortion zealot.

The cartoons intersperse a text--extrapolated from news articles, editorials and commentary--that questions Dukakis’ prison furlough program and fiscal policies, limning him as a phony “Supermanager” who is bested by “the one thing that can hurt supermike--FACT-onite.”

The People for the American Way, the liberal organization set up as a countervailing voice to the religious right, called on the Bush campaign to repudiate the broadsheet “full of enough intolerance to offend just about everyone except Jerry Falwell,” said its chairman, John Buchanan.

People for the American Way spokeswoman Tina Hester said the GOP’s and Bush campaign’s refusal to renounce the effort indicates that “either they’re not taking it seriously or they don’t want to upset Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly and crew.”

Bush spokesman Mark Goodin said Sunday he had not read the booklet thoroughly but said: “I would certainly think the People for the American Way have a lot more to worry about than comic books.” He shrugged off the pamphlet, noting that “it’s a free country; the last time I looked the First Amendment was still in force.”