CAMPAIGN ’88 : GOP Handout Assailed

Barbara Bush found herself on Thursday agreeing with Dukakis that Republicans had at least in one instance unfairly depicted his positions on crime.

Barbara Bush, wife of the GOP presidential candidate, said a piece of alleged Republican Party campaign literature being distributed in Illinois about Dukakis was objectionable and that neither she nor her husband wanted to see it used.

The literature, which carried the imprint of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee, described Dukakis as weak on crime and said “all the murderers and rapists and drug pushers and child molesters in Massachusetts vote for Michael Dukakis.”

The Democratic presidential candidate held the literature up at a campaign rally on Wednesday and called it “garbage.”

Bush, interviewed on the CBS program “This Morning,” said she asked campaign chairman James A. Baker III about the pamphlet on Wednesday night. “I said: ‘Jim, I don’t like that and I know George wouldn’t.’ ”

She quoted Baker as saying “we don’t know where it came from but I’m certainly going to find out.”