Bush and Dukakis Wrap It Up With Bicoastal Blitzes : Republican Optimistic He’ll Win

Republican George Bush, “that adrenaline” flowing in the last day of a campaign that saw him emerge from Ronald Reagan’s shadow, promised today to “keep America moving” as its 44th President.

“This is no time for the United States to turn dramatically left,” Bush told jubilant supporters in Michigan. “It is time to play on our strength.”

After more than 1 million miles in pursuit of the office that eluded him in 1980, the vice president received a hero’s welcome in Texas--where he maintains a legal voting residence in a Houston hotel room--after a Midwest swing intended to cut off possible inroads in tossup states by Democrat Michael S. Dukakis.

Winding It Up

Bush’s wind-up rally was to be held not far from the spot in Houston where he announced his candidacy on Oct. 12, 1987, beginning what he looked back on Sunday as a “long, arduous journey.”

His last pitch to the voters was to come in a 30-minute television commercial tonight, airing back-to-back against a similar production by the Dukakis camp.

At a loud rally at Ashland College in a Republican bastion, Bush went out of his way to praise Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle as his “able, young, principled running mate” and sent the crowd of several thousand into a frenzy by telling them: “You give me this state and you’re looking at the next President of the United States.”

Carter Term Recalled

Echoing Ronald Reagan’s 1984 appeal to “stay the course,” Bush invoked memories of the economic legacies of the Carter Administration and said: “Don’t go back to where we were in 1980 with the tax-and-spend policies that failed us. Keep America moving.

“Yes, we’ve traveled a lot of miles and gone the extra distance, but I never felt any better in my life,” Bush said. “That adrenaline is flowing. Our family is together, the country is coming behind our candidacy and I want to win this election.”

Campaign weariness was replaced by a surge of excitement and anticipation as Bush, comforted by knowing that only a near miracle could alter his expected victory, proclaimed his intent to “run down to the finish line not in a power walk, but in a sprint.”

Stops in the contested states of Michigan, Ohio and Missouri served as what one Bush adviser called “insurance” to blunt a desperate drive by Dukakis, whose populist message of “We’re on your side” tightened the race last week in some crucial areas by exploiting resentment among farmers, discontent among factory workers and support from organized labor.

Down to the Wire

While both candidates fought over Ohio right down to the wire, aides to Bush insisted that his lead there, although diminished over the last 10 days, was one of several developments that by Tuesday night will have denied Dukakis the presidency. The situation was similar in Michigan, where Bush made a concerted drive to deal Dukakis a knockout blow, with help from working-class Reagan Democrats supportive of his emphasis on law and order and traditional values.

All along, Bush said he would not let up until the very end, vowing to “fight for every vote out there.” But even he could not resist being caught up in the confidence that his advisers stopped trying to conceal Sunday, when polls showed his lead holding up.

Bush spokeswoman Sheila Tate said that after battling fatigue, the candidate was “in good spirits,” fortified by overnight tracking polls that continued to show no slippage in his overall lead.

Barbara Bush told reporters her husband had “slept like a baby” Sunday night. Like almost everyone else in the Bush entourage, she welcomed the onset of Election Day and cringed at the thought of how Dukakis was crisscrossing the country nonstop in the waning hours of the campaign. “That’s brutal,” she said.