Wooing Swing Vote : Dukakis vs. Bush--Any Differences?

When all the balloons have been popped, and the little flags waved, what the Democratic and Republican conventions have left American voters to choose among are four millionaires trumpeting the cause of the common man.

Publicly, the old rhetoric of conservative versus liberal survives, supplemented by petty attacks on a candidate’s height or patriotism or manliness. But the substantive differences between Democrat Michael S. Dukakis and Republican George Bush are far less than their squabbling would suggest.

What they seem most firmly agreed upon is their desire to avoid the most challenging issues the next President is likely to confront.

Private conversation within both campaigns is increasingly about a new world order in which the Soviet-American conflict is rapidly receding and in which economic issues seem ever more intractable to either party’s traditional solutions. But voters are unlikely to hear much on either point.

‘Age of Transition’

Something is awry. The terms of the debate are the same as in years past, but the world is not.

“We really are in an age of transition,” Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s top foreign policy adviser, said last week in an interview, “from a postwar world where the Soviets were the enemy, where the United States was a superpower and trying to build up both its allies and its former enemies and help the Third World transition to independence. That whole world and all of those things are coming to an end or have ended, and we are now entering a new and different world that will be complex and much less unambiguous than the old one.”

Scowcroft cited the Third World debt, the economic challenges of Japan and a united Western Europe as examples of new international problems that are not being dealt with in the campaign. Asked why not, he replied: “It may be because the people managing the campaigns think that these are the kinds of things that make the eyes of the American people glaze over and that you have to keep it simple and direct.”

Agreement From Bush Aide

One of Bush’s senior political aides, who asked not to be identified, agreed: “I do not observe in any of my data or in any of my traveling around the country a burning desire among the voters to ponder these kinds of questions or to have them answered,” he said.

So, instead, attention has been focused on emotionally charged issues like capital punishment, abortion and prison furlough programs, all of which essentially are matters for the state legislatures.

Membership in the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Guard have replaced serious discussion about issues with which the next President will have to deal. On more basic issues the candidates have reduced their differences to paper-thin margins, as they carefully position themselves at the center of the political spectrum.

That, of course, is where those fabled swing voters, the so-called Reagan Democrats, live. And it is for their moderate, white, usually comfortable, often Southern hearts and minds that this campaign is being waged.

According to Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater: “There are two groups in the electorate that are potential ticket-splitters: One is populist voters and the other is libertarians.” Both groups, Atwater believes, are disproportionately young and Southern. “One of the reasons that the Republican Party is where it is,” he said last week, “is because the big growth group in the party has been among baby boomers. If there are two things that I would say about the Republican Party today that are vastly different than the Republican Party in 1978, they are: A) It’s much younger; B) It’s much more Southern.

“Baby boomers are not liberal on social issues. They are libertarian, meaning tolerant. That whole notion of tolerance is very, very important. We Republicans need to establish that we are a tolerant party. Ronald Reagan did a good job on that in 1984; he is a tolerant man. So is George Bush. . . . If we got to the point where the so-called far right of the party was perceived as being dominant and on social issues being intolerant, then it would cause a big problem with baby boomers. But, frankly, social issues are not top-burner issues for these voters.”

Atwater’s appraisal of the electorate is shared by the majority of Dukakis’ senior aides, which is why they prefer to call themselves progressives--which suggests good government and managerial finesse--rather than liberals--which suggests Great Society activism.

Paul P. Brountas, the aide closest to Dukakis, said a candidate who holds such progressive politics “believes that government has a role in improving the lives of people and assisting those who need help.”

Can’t Do Everything

“On the other hand,” he said, “I, like Dukakis, think there’s a balancing that takes place. You can’t do everything. There are constraints, like how much revenue do you have to do things. There’s a balancing by fiscal responsibility. You can have progressive values, but you also have to be fiscally responsible.”

The Bush and Dukakis campaigns share not only a view of the electorate, but also a conviction that the old, reliable coinage of Cold War fear has been devalued by President Reagan’s opening to Moscow.

“Reagan’s taken away Soviet-bashing as a campaign issue,” says veteran Republican political operative Stuart Spencer, who manages the campaign of Bush’s running mate, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle.

So, moments later in an Orange County address, Spencer’s man focuses instead on the burning question of which candidate loves the Pledge of Allegiance most. “Red-meat stuff,” Spencer acknowledges, but he agrees that it’s a pale substitute as a crowd pleaser, far from the hoary days of candidate Reagan’s “Evil Empire” rhetoric.

The consequences often are surprising.

“Our main problems will be increasingly with Japan rather than the Soviets,” predicts Reagan-Bush adviser and Hoover Institution scholar Martin Anderson.

Thus, at the Republican convention a film showcased Reagan’s warm encounters with Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, while Bush extolled the new U.S.-Soviet relationship.

“I’m an old conservative who’s dazzled by it,” said Orange County congressman and Bush adviser Robert K. Dornan, standing in the aisles of New Orleans’ Superdome, and adding that peace is what he’d hoped for all these hawkish years. “I said that someday a President will come along, like Reagan, with enough imagination to try to reach around all of these archaic party structures and say: ‘Before we go bankrupt and before we could pull you down with us, let alone start a war, why don’t we try and work out something here,’ and it’s happening in my lifetime sooner than I thought. Gorbachev is a hard-nosed communist, but he’s a man of imagination.”

In this new era of national politics, hawks act like doves and doves seem lost. Is the Cold War over, a reporter asks Lyn Nofziger, a prime architect of hawkish Republican campaigns for most of the Cold War’s four decades. Nofziger conceded that the Cold War has lost its zip. But he quickly added that “we’ll find some other issues. I don’t think that you can go out year after year and attack the same thing.

“I know the Democrats attacked Herbert Hoover for 40 years, but eventually they wore that out, too. Hell, you find a new issue all the time, because you’re trying to appeal to the emotions of the American people.”

At the Democratic convention Dukakis beat back a resolution calling for no first use of nuclear weapons, urged a conventional military buildup and selected one of the Senate’s leading hawks--Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a so-called Tory Democrat from Texas--as his running mate.

‘Have to Win No Matter What’

“Hey, this Bentsen voted for Contra aid; what gives with Dukakis?” Ron Kovic, a severely wounded Vietnam veteran seated in his wheelchair in front of the California Democratic delegation, asked out loud. Kovic has written books urging no more Vietnams and is disconcerted by a militarily aggressive Democratic vice presidential candidate. “Politics” is the answer, one Dukakis delegate explained. “This year we Democrats have to win, no matter what.”

Bush also turned sharply to his right for a choice of vice president, but he was at great pains in his first press conference to minimize their differences and, indeed, to establish his moderation.

Quayle came from a family associated with the John Birch Society brand of conservatism, which held, among other things, that President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist and that the United States should quit the United Nations. But Bush, in his first press conference with Quayle standing at his side, said: “I am not a U.N. basher; I think it has a useful role to play and we’re seeing it playing such a role in the Iran-Iraq controversy.”

The moderation projected by such gestures is calculated, according to the senior Bush aide, as is the small campaign role accorded former rival Pat Robertson, a religious broadcaster, and his New Right supporters. “If Robertson had had the same size role in our convention as Jesse Jackson did in the Democratic convention,” the aide said, “then I think we would have a problem. As for the New Right, well, it’s really four or five people who are so up to their waists in mailing lists and expensive computers that they’ve got to keep waving the bloody shirt because that’s how they make their money and they’ve got families to feed and hardware to pay for.

“When the primaries began, I flat out told George Bush that if he did two things, nobody could get to the right of him. No matter how it looks, I told him, get very involved in the Central American stuff and be hard core on taxes. If you do those two things, I said, nobody can get to the right of you. Anyway, there is no question that anti-communism is no longer a motivational issue with the electorate.”

Both camps seem to find the changes in the Soviet Union under Gorbachev “remarkable” and would work vigorously to expand the suddenly warm relationship between the superpowers. But both are suitably cautious about Gorbachev’s chances for survival and want further “concrete proof of Soviet cutbacks and military-force restructuring,” in the words of Bush key foreign policy adviser Dennis Ross.

‘Take It a Step at a Time’

Dukakis, too, is cautious about a new superpower relationship: “I think it’s a possibility, but you have to take it a step at a time. You test them out,” he said in an interview with The Times.

Favor Defense Issued

As to U.S. defenses, both favor modernization of conventional forces, the $50-billion stealth bomber and cruise missile program, the B-1 bomber, a new missile for submarines and continued spending at the current level, adjusting for inflation. The two apparent differences regarding a new mobile missile and the Strategic Defense Initiative tend to dissolve on closer study.

Dukakis believes in Minuteman modernization and would continue deploying the 50 MX missiles approved by Congress, half of which are already in the ground in fixed silos. Congress turned down a Reagan request for another 50 MX missiles, and Dukakis agrees. Dukakis is also opposed to building the Midgetman missile, which carries a $40-billion price tag, and says that instead he would allocate the money to the modernization of conventional forces.

Bush wants to build either the additional 50 MX missiles or the Midgetman, but, according to Scowcroft, he has “not yet decided which one to come down for.”

The Bush camp wants the new MX if it is built to be mobile, but rejects the elaborate race-track proposal of the much-maligned Jimmy Carter Administration. The Bush camp would probably favor deploying the missiles in a “garrison-track mode,” to use the words of Ross, the Bush defense staffer, referring to a short spur railroad track out of a fortified area.

Midgetmen missiles simply would be trucked about military reservations and on interstate highways.

Ross shows no more fervent enthusiasm for these weapons than does Dukakis’ top foreign policy adviser, Madeleine Albright, a protege of Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was once an enthusiast for MX and Midgetman.

The one defense issue that threatened to seriously divide the candidates, SDI, has now faded with Bush’s retreat from the program that so enthralled many Republican convention delegates, who sported SDI stickers on their lapels.

After the convention, Bush acknowledged somewhat ruefully in an interview with the New York Times: “I don’t think we yet know what the price tag will be. If you went to full deployment of a full strategic defense, it would be very expensive. What I want to do is to continue to research at the levels of funding, essentially, that we have requested.”

Both candidates are, therefore, committed to a research rather than a deployment program, with Dukakis willing to spend $2 billion a year on the effort and Bush a bit more than $4 billion, not a huge dollar difference by standards of the overall military budget.

Ross refers any further questions to Scowcroft, who he says is the individual closest to and most respected by Bush in military matters. That muddies the water even further, since it was the Scowcroft Commission convened by Reagan that concluded there is no so-called window of vulnerability, thus undermining the argument for the MX missile and SDI.

Scowcroft conceded in an interview with The Times last week: “I’ve been critical (of SDI) because it’s not been clear to me how it would fit into our strategic concepts and how it fit into our budget and, in a period of restrained budgets, what we would have to give up in order to have it.”

Prevention of Single Launch

But he said he favors “looking very hard at the program,” not as a shield to protect the population but to prevent a single launch by a third party, what he called having a “very limited purpose, really, an accidental launch or the mad-colonel syndrome.”

Bush and Dukakis aides shun any talk of cuts in the military budget to pay for social programs as advocated by the Rev. Jesse Jackson during the primaries. Jackson has suggested holding defense spending to current dollar levels without allowing for inflationary increases, but Dukakis favors growth in the budget to account for inflation. This is the same position as that taken by the Reagan Administration.

A tip-off that differences in the candidates’ thinking on domestic issues may be no more profound than in the defense area is offered by the fact that Quayle, reputed to be the most conservative member of either ticket, sports only one major legislative achievement, and it is tainted by the enthusiastic support of liberals. Quayle trumpets his job-training program in virtually every speech as his prime example of the new economic thinking of conservatives, without mention of the fact that arch-liberal Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was the bill’s co-author in the Senate.

The economic world has also changed dramatically in the last few years. Reaganomics has both succeeded and failed. But it has done so dramatically, and its mark is there emblazoned on every tree in the political forest.

Seventeen million new jobs and low inflation are balanced against $1.4 trillion of foreign debt and a budget deficit that exceeds the sum of all that came before.

The Dukakis people claim to be tightfisted about government operations but also to favor vigorous government initiatives. This is the essence of the progressive politics Brountas says he and the Massachusetts governor share. The unanswered question, however, is whether they have abandoned not only the liberal label, but also the liberal critique of American society.

At the heart of that critique was the notion that America was in the grips of a racial crisis that had to be solved if the country was to survive and prosper. This was the conclusion of the Kerner Commission and of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. The assumption was that a long history of slavery and segregation had left black America in an institutionally deprived position and with a very large number of blacks locked in an underclass that was threatening to become permanent.

The tendency now is to forget all of that and assume the pre-civil rights, pre-urban riots language of President John F. Kennedy that a rising economic tide lifts all boats and not, as Jackson insists, that it lifts only yachts.

Boston, Massachusetts’ leading city, has a relatively small percentage of blacks, but a well-publicized history of white flight and racial tension. But for Dukakis this does not add up to a structural problem requiring fundamental change as much as a marginal problem requiring social tinkering.

As his friend Brountas put it: “Dukakis does not believe that there is a permanent underclass in America. What he has developed in Massachusetts he hopes to develop nationally, which is to take those people up from the levels they are now and provide them with good jobs at decent wages.”

This is, of course, also Bush’s position, only he claims to have done it on the national level as part of the Reagan Administration.

There is simply no sense of desperation or, indeed, urgency in either camp for coming to grips with the issues Jackson raised, other than by hoping that the overall economy will get better. The language of the key issues among advisers to both candidates is similarly marked by a sense of clinical detachment toward those left behind.

“I’m not saying there aren’t pockets of poverty in this city (Boston) or in other cities around the country, but these are the areas you have to work on and be sure they don’t get left out,” Dukakis senior domestic policy adviser Tom Herman said, “like the areas targeted in Dukakis’ Fund to Rebuild America.” This last refers to a seed-money program of $500 million to inspire local projects, which Jackson charged could be spent entirely on two or three bridges that need rebuilding.

Bush has a similar program for targeting funds from existing programs on the most needy areas. Bush top domestic issues adviser Debra Steelman views the question of the underclass in tones similar to those of the Dukakis advisers: “I just don’t follow the notion that there’s something different about these people, that they just can’t get out of the cycle.”

Crisis in Education Seen

Both candidates agree that the country’s educational system is in crisis, but again their approach to solving it is apparently quite limited. Dukakis has called for $250 million to be spent on a national teaching excellence fund to attract young people into the profession. But mainly, the Dukakis people say that education is a state issue and that they will lead by example.

Bush’s advisers speak the same language of meager funding and much inspiration for educational programs. Asked what Bush means when he says he would be an education President, Steelman replies: “One of the things Bush would do is convene a conference of governors immediately to talk about curriculum, to talk about standards, to talk about results.” She said a Bush Administration would push for an additional $500 million to beef up magnet schools and target disadvantaged students, “40% of whom are receiving no assistance right now.”

Bold New Programs Unlikely

None of this amounts to much in the way of bold new programs. There will not be a massive new commitment to educate American youngsters to be competitive with the Japanese; no substantial money will be found to solve the drug problem, to provide urban housing or save the family farm or fulfill the many other promises made in all those primary kaffeeklatsches and debates.

There will be no bold efforts to redistribute income from the haves to the have-nots or from the military to social programs. Neither party’s candidate has the stomach for any of this, and in private their aides nod silently in agreement when that conclusion is put to them. So what we are left with is a hope by both sides that things will somehow get better by more effective tinkering with the status quo.

To suggest anything else would risk committing the fatal political gaffe.

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.