KIDS AND THE CAMPAIGN : Schools Give Students a Hands-On Feel for Politics, Letting Them Run for Office, Study the Parties and Vote

“Don’t play with your tie, Mr. Dukakis. You want to look cool.”

Frank Ha, an eighth-grader at MacArthur Fundamental Intermediate School in Santa Ana, quickly puts his hands at his sides, even though his shirttail still is hanging out in a decidedly unpresidential manner.

Dan Bertsch, a U.S. history teacher who is guiding his students through a debate, tries to fire up the Republican candidates: “We have enough bombs to kill ourselves 11 times over. You guys want more. Go, Bush!”

Frank starts to respond, realizes his mistake and quickly retreats.

Fortunately, it is just a rehearsal observed by about 30 classmates. The real debate will take place Monday before the entire student body in preparation for Tuesday’s mock election--one of many to be held at schools around the county on Election Day.

But now the students, who have not yet mastered their party platforms, are asked to put down their notes and improvise.

Marc Larrea, representing Vice President George Bush, takes up the weapons issue: “If Gov. Michael Dukakis is elected President, I’ll hear nuclear weapons approaching America. I support ‘Star Wars’ to defend the country.”

Frank (Dukakis) answers: “We already have enough nuclear weapons. We don’t need any more.”

Then, moderator Jason Welty, impersonating ABC news anchorman Peter Jennings, draws Republican Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana and Democratic Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas into the debate with a question about their qualifications to serve as vice president.

“I believe I am the best,” answers Paula Worland, Bentsen’s stand-in. “Dan Quayle will sit behind a desk and file his fingernails.”

Chad Johnson, a small but feisty young man with Quayle-blue eyes and blond hair, counters with an attack on the $10,000-a-head breakfast club Bentsen once started but quickly dissolved under criticism.

“It was perfectly legal,” Paula insists. “I stopped it. It wasn’t a big deal.”

Well, snaps Quayle’s 13-year-old look-alike, “it’s also perfectly legal to charge $50 for a Big Mac.”

Why didn’t the real Dan Quayle think of that?

What Quayle and Bush, Dukakis and Bentsen do under the tutelage of teams of political campaign experts comes naturally to some of the Orange County students vying for votes in campaigns patterned after the Bush-Dukakis race for President.

Civics teachers throughout the county are using election-year politics to overcome textbook tedium and spark student interest in the election process. On elementary, junior high and high school campuses, students are registering to vote in mock elections, giving speeches at conventions and fielding questions in debates, making video commercials, and creating posters and literature based on what the real-life candidates are saying on the campaign trail.

Even the political fringes are represented in these mock campaigns. For example, a Mission Viejo High School senior who chose to represent extremist, four-time presidential contender Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., told classmates in an impassioned speech that under President Reagan, our society has “plummeted into a brothel of AIDS-infested streets. . . . Every single American must be tested for the AIDS virus. . . . Those who test positive must be quarantined because they are not suited to live in American society.”

Asked afterward if he believed any of that, Matt Girardin smiled and said: “I think LaRouche is insane. I just thought it would be interesting to learn something new.”

In mock campus elections, grades are based not on charisma, but on the candidates’--and voters’--grasp of the issues. And these students do know the issues--well enough to shame many adults who will vote on Tuesday.

They are also highly opinionated: They know who they want. And in a county that favored Republican presidential candidate Bush over Democrat Dukakis 67% to 24% in The Times Orange County Poll taken Oct. 20-22, it is not surprising that teachers--many of whom are Democrats--are facing classrooms full of Bush-Quayle supporters.

Bertsch of MacArthur Intermediate School is a Democrat, but 30 of the 33 students in his U.S. history class said in an informal survey that they prefer Bush to Dukakis. “I don’t want to influence the students,” Bertsch says. “But I’m reinforcing the idea that Americans can agree to disagree. I just want them to be able to support their views.”

Wendell Bainter, a U.S. government teacher at Valencia High School in Placentia who says he is “very liberal” but tries to stay neutral in the classroom, believes that most of his students reflect their parents’ views. His goal is to help them keep an open mind.

“The more exposure they can get to the issues and what’s going on in the real world, the quicker they’ll see there are many more positions than they’ve been exposed to,” he said.

Teachers also hope to encourage their students to become informed voters who exercise that right at every opportunity. The voting record of young adults, ages 18 to 24, is so poor that many candidates exclude them from campaign mailings because they don’t want to waste resources on non-voters, according to Greg Haskin, executive director of the Orange County Republican Party.

In the last presidential election, 36.7% of adults ages 18 to 20 voted--a lower level of participation than in any other age group, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The figure was 54.4% for voters ages 25 to 34 and 67.7% for voters age 65 and older.

Apathy may be rampant in the young voting-age population, but there are many “points of light” among Orange County’s future voters.

Representatives of the Republican and Democratic parties in Orange County said they have put a number of high school students to work in campaigns for Tuesday’s election--registering voters, stuffing envelopes, distributing campaign literature door-to-door, putting up signs. And on Tuesday, many will be working phone banks and walking precincts in get-out-the-vote efforts for which some students will get academic credit.

Mike Tu, a senior at Los Alamitos High School, felt his school wasn’t doing enough to involve students in the election, so he organized a Young Republican Club that attracted about 50 students to its first meeting. Tu, who does volunteer work at Republican Party headquarters in Huntington Beach after school every day, said he has enlisted about half of the club’s members to work on Election Day.

While some students get a glimpse of what a real campaign is like, teachers are trying to make classroom campaign exercises as realistic as possible.

Terri Munroe, a fifth-grade teacher at Mariners Elementary School in Newport Beach, divided each of her three social studies classes into four groups that selected candidates for class president and vice president, campaign managers, speech writers and workers who have been making posters, creating campaign slogans and jingles, and presenting campaign commercials to the class in the form of skits.

Today, in a “primary” vote following a week of campaigning, each class will choose one of its four pairs of candidates to make speeches to all three classes Monday. And on Tuesday, students will cast their votes for fifth-grade president and vice president.

The candidates are not representing Bush and Dukakis but are campaigning under their own names because Munroe wants to emphasize process over politics. However, for the past few weeks, there has been a “Today in Politics” note on the blackboard telling students where Bush and Dukakis are campaigning. And one student who had been following the campaign on TV asked Munroe: “Can we get as dirty as Bush and Dukakis have in their commercials?”

“No,” the teacher answered. “Let’s try to rise above that.”

Betsy Miale’s sixth-grade students at Fletcher Elementary School in Orange also have shown interest in the personal attacks that have characterized the Bush-Dukakis race. The students, who have “registered” to vote and will hold elections for classroom officers Tuesday while following the outcome of electoral votes in the national election, understand that “many times it’s not a lie, but it’s also not the truth because the information isn’t complete,” Miale said. “They feel it’s very unfair that this type of information is given to the public.”

Eighth-graders at Sierra Vista Middle School in Irvine were not shy about taking jabs at the candidates in their campaign posters. For example, one poster read: “Vote for Bush. Bush helps keep the criminals where they belong--in jail.”

The Bush posters far outnumbered those for Dukakis, said social studies teacher Bob Clark, a Republican. His four classes have been keeping a daily log of the presidential candidates’ campaign stops and comments to the press. The students also held a mock debate and will cast their votes for President in class on Tuesday.

The mock election Tuesday at MacArthur Intermediate will involve the entire student body--that is, everyone who has registered to vote. While the candidates have been learning their party platforms and working on their speeches, other students in Bertsch’s eighth-grade history class have been producing campaign literature and video campaign commercials--and the whole process has been covered by the school’s video Mac News team.

Not all the candidates are comfortable in the shoes they are wearing for the campaign. Chad Johnson, for example, says he likes Bush but “hates” Quayle, the candidate he is impersonating. “Quayle’s not experienced,” Chad said. “He’s basically a rich brat.”

Paula Worland, who is representing Bentsen, said: “All I’ve been brought up with is the Republican point of view. I didn’t know much about Democrats, but now I know more about Bentsen than Quayle or Bush.”

Bertsch let his students choose their candidates without regard for their political views.

Valencia High School government teacher Wendell Bainter took a different approach, dividing his five senior classes into parties based on their scores on a political spectrum survey. The Democratic, Republican, American Independent, and Peace and Freedom parties are represented by candidates who campaign under fictitious names, giving speeches based on actual party platforms on such issues as defense spending, capital punishment, abortion and welfare reform. A third of the students in each class are cast as voters in this role-playing exercise and are seated from left to right in the classroom, according to their political leanings.

“Some students say, ‘I just can’t do this,’ and I tell them, ‘Try your best. If you’re not comfortable where I put you, it’s because you’re philosophically opposed. You can better argue against your opponent if you’ve worn his shoes,’ ” Bainter said.

Bainter, who is campaign manager for one of the local school board candidates, also gives extra credit for those who work 5 to 10 hours on a real political campaign. He said about 25 students have become involved in various school board campaigns.

The 90 senior honors students at Mission Viejo High School also are required to do some kind of field project for their civics class--attend speeches by real-life candidates, help register voters, work on a team campaigning for or against a ballot initiative.

But it is the mock-election process the students clearly enjoy the most. They threw themselves into their recent Democratic and Republican conventions with the enthusiasm of cheerleaders at a pep rally, wearing hats, waving signs, singing the national anthem and saying the Pledge of Allegiance in full voice, cheering wildly as their favorite candidates were introduced to make speeches. Some of the candidates even wore suits and ties for the occasion.

The role-playing at this school includes Libertarians as well as Republicans and Democrats. There are even apathetic citizens--”It’s up to the candidates to get them registered and to get them to vote,” explained civics teacher Bob Minier.

In the campaign that ends Tuesday with a mock election, “we even allow a certain amount of dirty tricks,” said Minier, a Democrat whose objective is to “open minds but not make converts.” If anyone were to get caught defacing a poster or distributing damaging campaign propaganda, for example, the Humanities Bureau of Investigation would stage a trial that would show how real campaign ethics or laws were violated.

But the atmosphere at the recent conventions--attended by 40 Democrats and 38 Republicans--seemed to indicate that the students were intent on playing by the rules. The event proceeded smoothly from one speech to another without any involvement by the teacher, and by the time it was over, candidates representing real-life counterparts in both parties had been selected not only for U.S. President but also for the U.S. Senate and Congress and the state Senate and Assembly.

Brendan Light, 17, won the Republican nomination for President after a rousing speech covering Bush’s positions on the budget deficit, crime and national security, among other issues. “The deficit caused by the Democratic Congress has set this nation in a whirlwind. It’s not the old folks who are going to pay. It’s us,” he said.

In an interview after his speech, he said he believes in the candidate his classmates elected him to represent. Brendan, who said his parents are both Republicans, has been active as a volunteer in Republican political campaigns for the past 4 years. “The Democratic Party isn’t bad in itself. The Republican Party is the party of realism, and the Democratic Party is the party of idealism,” he said.

He would like to see a “restructuring” of social programs under a Republican Administration. “People should have to work to get welfare. Too many people are loafing. It’s too much of a Robin Hood system, taking from the rich for no reason and giving to the poor for no reason.”

Jonathan Chihorek, who was chosen to represent Dukakis by his Mission Viejo classmates, managed a convincing imitation of Dukakis’ voice and mannerisms, saying: “My friends, the Democratic Party has never stood for weakness. . . . The Democratic Party stands for strength and it stands for peace.”

Like Brendan, Jonathan comes from a Republican family and is not yet eligible to vote.

But his role in the mock election campaign has prompted him to shift his support from Bush to Dukakis, he said.

“Before this all began, I had a lot of questions about the political process. Now that I’ve been studying the issues, separating myself from the influence of this highly Republican area, I think Democrats do have stronger arguments.”

Jonathan said his parents support his right to his own opinion but still try to persuade him to register Republican when they talk politics at the dinner table.

But he said the principles of the Democrats have “given me the strength to move away from the masses.” More specifically, he likes the idea of national health insurance. And, he said, he likes the Democrats’ stand on other social issues--”the belief that just because one person has more money doesn’t mean he has more rights.”