Goes on Attack in Texas : Quayle Criticizes Dukakis for Tie to ‘Radical Group’

Wednesday may be remembered as the day when the Democrats took the gloves off in the 1988 election campaign. But, for Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, it was just another gritty day in the trenches.

Here before an audience of GOP faithful in the conservative Texas Panhandle, Quayle branded Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis a radical left-winger running from his past.

The American Civil Liberties Union, Quayle said, is “not the only left-wing group the governor of Massachusetts is involved with. I was also disturbed to find that he is on the letterhead of a group called the Jobs With Peace Campaign.”

‘Extreme Liberal Agenda’

“Now, that has as ring to it; sounds benign,” Quayle said. “But the group masks an extreme liberal agenda, the main feature being a radical cut in the U.S. defense budget.”

(Jobs With Peace, a national campaign, was the sponsor of a 1984 Los Angeles ballot initiative, Proposition X, that was approved by 61% of city voters. The measure ordered an annual study of how much of the taxes collected from city residents winds up in the nation’s defense budget.

(Similar measures, sponsored by unions, religious leaders, nuclear freeze and civil rights groups, were approved by voters in more than 80 other jurisdictions, including the state of Massachusetts. The measures were generally seen as an attack on Reagan Administration policies that favored an increased military budget with corresponding cutbacks in domestic programs.)

Quayle’s luncheon crowd of 850 heard him deliver a withering partisan attack along with support for Beau Boulter, the GOP Senate candidate from Texas. Boulter, like Quayle, is running against Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, who is on the Texas ballot for both reelection to his Senate seat and as the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

No Mention of Bentsen

But Bentsen was not the one in Quayle’s gunsights. He was not even mentioned by the GOP nominee. Instead, it was Dukakis.

As characterized by Quayle, Dukakis was an “advocate for this radical group” (Jobs With Peace) and sat on its board of advisers. This board “reads like a roster of the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party. It includes people like Jesse Jackson and George McGovern.”

Quayle’s campaign provided reporters with copies of 1987 literature from the organization, which called for a 25% cut in defense spending “and transfer those funds into the domestic economy.”

To achieve such a cut, Quayle said, the group supported canceling all nuclear weapons production, eliminating the stealth bomber and halting research on the Strategic Defense Initiative. More, Quayle continued, it called for a 50% reduction in the M-1 tank, “the same tank the governor of Massachusetts rode around in.”

Sees Inconsistency

Quayle charged that this did not square with the moderate image Dukakis is presenting in his campaign for President.

“Now, in the midst of an election, the man from Massachusetts is riding in tanks, claiming to support weapons he’s previously opposed and generally trying to hide his past anti-defense positions.”

In Boston, Mark Gearan, a spokesman for Dukakis, said that the Massachusetts governor’s position on the Jobs With Peace advisory board was “largely honorary” and added that “being a member of a group doesn’t mean you agree with all its positions.”

‘Manufactured Issue’

Gearan called Quayle’s attack “the latest manufactured issue of the week . . . a smoke screen designed to fool the American public and get the campaign away from the real issues--jobs, education, housing, health care and Social Security.”

This was Quayle’s second day of campaigning across Texas, with other stops in El Paso and Dallas.

Not only did the senator play to the conservative politics of the region in his attacks but to local culture also. “I can understand why Michael Dukakis doesn’t fit in too well down here. He thinks a longhorn is something you play in the Boston Symphony,” Quayle said.