Dukakis Loan Program Effort to Seize Offensive : Democrat Seeks to Wrest Control of Campaign Agenda From Bush After Polls Indicate Decline

The sweeping education proposal released Wednesday by Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis is a major step toward regaining the campaign offensive that he has lost over the past month to Vice President George Bush.

And the move, if successful, may have come not a moment too soon. Although most polls now indicate a virtual dead heat or a moderate Bush lead in the presidential campaign, Republican and Democratic strategists agree that the Dukakis campaign is in trouble and that to remain in serious contention the Democratic nominee must seize the offensive.

Dismisses Polls

Dukakis publicly has dismissed the significance of the latest polls showing that he lost ground to Bush steadily throughout August. Privately, however, he and his top strategists are known to be worried that the polls could portend permanent trouble for his campaign. One prominent Democratic strategist said that when he suggested to Dukakis that he has about two weeks to refocus the campaign on his own issues and turn the tide away from Bush, the governor promptly replied, “About 10 days.”

Bush has “owned the dialogue” of the campaign since the GOP convention and polls show him surging in all areas of the country, especially the South, said Richard B. Wirthlin, a Republican pollster. Most polls showed Bush going into the convention trailing Dukakis by at least 10 points or more and Wirthlin said his own polls showed Bush behind by 20 points on July 30--two weeks before the convention began.

His latest national poll, however, completed a week ago, shows that among all voters the campaign is a dead heat but that among those most likely to vote, Bush holds a 5-point lead, Wirthlin said at a breakfast meeting with reporters. An ABC News-Washington Post poll released Wednesday gave Bush a 51% to 42% lead over Dukakis with a 3.5% margin of error.

The education proposal is an attempt to turn that tide and seize the campaign agenda. So far, Dukakis has been following a plan that calls for constant repetition of a single theme: “bringing prosperity home” to working families and a middle class that, Dukakis says, has been “squeezed” during eight years of Republican rule.

Reinforces Feeling

It is a “middle-class agenda,” campaign manager Susan Estrich told reporters last week, designed to reinforce the feeling many voters already have that while much of the nation may be prosperous now, there is danger around the next bend.

Democratic strategists hope the theme will convince traditional Democratic voters and independents who supported Reagan to “come home” to the Democrats. But as political messages go, this one is relatively complex. It requires voters to accept two arguments--first, that GOP boasts of prosperity only mask troubles ahead, and second, that Dukakis is the person to put the country on the right track.

To pull off that trick, Wirthlin and Democratic pollster Peter Hart both suggested, Dukakis needs to discuss substantive issues and flesh out his arguments, exactly what the new education plan is designed to do.

Although campaign officials had been talking about education financing proposals for several months, they only began seriously talking about putting forward a specific proposal “very recently,” according to one Dukakis aide who has been closely involved in the process.

Proves Sasso Influence

The decision to move ahead quickly with the proposal appears to reflect both the campaign’s realization that it has slipped behind Bush and the influence of Dukakis’ aide John Sasso who, since his return to the campaign last week as vice chairman, has been pushing Dukakis to be more active and aggressive on the campaign trail.

The education plan allows Dukakis to be specific on an issue that appears to be of major concern to baby boom voters while remaining consistent with the general thrust of his campaign plan.

That plan has remained unchanged despite the campaign’s recent problems, ranging from a horrendous slump during late August to more recent heckling by anti-abortion protesters and even to confusion over details of the new education loan proposal. Basically, Dukakis aides have made clear that they intend to do it their way. And monos mou , by myself--Michael S. Dukakis’ first words as a baby--remain the last word in discussions of his presidential campaign.

The phrase encapsulates three basic elements of Dukakis’ effort: his stubborn insistence on sticking to the plan that, despite recent troubles, has brought him this far, the campaign’s seeming resistance to bringing in help from outside its own ranks and the extraordinary focus that plan puts on the personal qualities of the candidate, himself.

Democratic critics repeatedly have complained that Dukakis has moved too slowly to reach out to other parts of the party. At the state and local level, the campaign is hiring numerous field organizers, political professionals and press aides who once worked for other candidates. Partly as a result, the field organization in key states is larger than that of any Democratic effort in decades. By election time, for example, the campaign plans to have 500 paid staff members in the field in California, an effort of unprecedented size.

But the campaign’s national core remains a small, tightly knit group of Boston-based aides who have known Dukakis for years, and Democratic strategists, including some of Dukakis’ own advisers, remain concerned that while the Bush campaign is being propelled by a unified Republican Party, the Dukakis campaign has failed to enlist the help of many leading Democrats. Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, for example, recently complained that the governor’s campaign had failed to reach out for the support of leading Democrats in his state, like Sens. Sam Nunn and Wyche Fowler Jr.

“Everybody who was a player in the Republican presidential race--all the candidates for the nomination--is in the Bush campaign, but Democrats just seem to have an aversion to planning and this kind of cohesion,” said a Dukakis adviser who asked not to be identified. “Bush is using all kinds of surrogates on the campaign, but Dukakis just isn’t doing it.”

In a move to redress that problem, Dukakis plans soon to announce the appointment of a dozen campaign co-chairmen, prominent Democratic elected officials who will “fan out across the country,” he recently told reporters, to act as surrogates.

Jackson Role Unknown

One particular problem the campaign still has not come to grips with is one that has plagued Dukakis since the Democratic primaries: What role the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the controversial civil rights leader and former presidential candidate, should be given in the campaign.

In a brief telephone interview from Chicago on Wednesday, Jackson said he is eager to hit the campaign trail, but that so far he has been given no part to play. However, he indicated he believes his role will be worked out and said he has some plans for helping the Dukakis campaign regain its momentum.

Sasso scheduled a meeting with Jackson in New York on Wednesday night and the governor arranged a meeting with Jackson for later today in New York to discuss the civil rights leader’s role in the campaign.

But while Jackson may help Dukakis in some areas and hurt him in others, a presidential election must be won by the candidate, himself. That is particularly true of the Dukakis campaign, which has, since the beginning, concentrated to an unusual degree on selling the nature of the man at the top of the ticket.

The emphasis was clear from the first advertisement of the primary season--a biographical sketch which concentrated on Dukakis’ record as governor--to the first page of his acceptance speech in Atlanta, where he declared that the election was “not about ideology,” but about “competence.”

Alters Declaration

For the final stretch of the campaign, Dukakis has altered that declaration slightly, moving from “competence,” with its unwanted overtones of technocratic coldness, to “leadership.”

“We look forward to the fall campaign as an opportunity to contrast the record of accomplishment of our ticket of Mike Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen with the record of accomplishment or lack thereof--the record of lack of leadership--from the Republican side,” Estrich said.

Leadership will be a major theme of the Democratic media effort--advertisements designed to sell the message that Dukakis offers the leadership needed for America to confront the challenges of the last decade of the 20th Century.

“It’s our sense right now that voters have only scanty information of what Dukakis has accomplished and what his record is, what his real record is,” Estrich said. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and we’re going to correct it.”

The obvious pitfall in a strategy that relies so heavily on selling the candidate personally is that it provides no room for a fallback position should voters decide that they simply do not like Dukakis much.

Painted as Liberal

Republicans are pinning much of their hopes on--and aiming a major portion of their resources at--having that happen, counting on painting Dukakis as a liberal and hoping that voters would find his personality, which appears forceful and directed at first meeting, to be arrogant after repeated exposure.