COLUMN LEFT/ ELAINE CIULLA KAMARCK : Nailing Down a Trap-Proof Platform : The Democrats go on a positive offensive, even on crime--no Willie Horton to fear this year.

For many months now, the operating assumption within the Bush campaign and White House has been that the President will win reelection because the other two candidates will be unacceptable alternatives. You could see this strategy in full swing this week as Dan Quayle was dispatched to New York to attack Bill Clinton’s integrity and to talk about family values, and Massachusetts Gov. William Weld was dispatched to Little Rock to criticize Clinton’s record on taxes and the environment. This is classic Republican presidential politics.

As Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont-McKenna College and former Republican National Committee staffer points out, much of George Bush’s problems can be traced to the Republicans’ reliance in recent presidential elections on the creation of wedge issues (which divide the electorate) at the expense of magnet issues (which attract voters). This has left us with a presidential electoral coalition not paralleled by a governing coalition.

But the wedge strategy works only when Democrats fall into the trap. The Democratic platform of 1992 proves that they will not do that again. Democrats may be mildly dyslexic but they are not blind.

Take the dominant wedge issue of 1988, crime and race, as exemplified by the infamous Willie Horton. The entire issue of furloughs for violent criminals and then-Gov. Michael Dukakis’ insensitivity to the Horton case was covered by a Massachusetts newspaper, the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. Dukakis had been insensitive to this issue well before the Republicans got hold of it; the issue worked against him because he let it.

Not Bill Clinton. He is for the death penalty; as governor he has executed people, and his operatives kept opposition to the death penalty out of the Democratic platform. More important, the platform does not indulge itself in sociological explanations of crime, which to the average American sound more like excuses. It says, very simply, that the answer to crime is more police, and then it talks about community policing and a “Police Corps.”

Dan Quayle has been trying hard to make “family values” the wedge issue of 1992. Here, too, the Democrats are not about to fall into the trap. Bill Clinton may have had a troubled family, but it is a family that stayed together--a situation that many Americans can identify with and applaud. What’s more, the platform that his people drafted steers the party away from the trap of arguing over what constitutes a family. Instead it calls for greater individual responsibility on the part of parents: “Governments don’t raise children, people do. People who bring children into this world have a responsibility to care for them and give them values, motivation and discipline.”

The platform does not, however, renege on the party’s traditional support of gays and lesbians. By combining strong equal-rights language and strong family-values language in the same document, the Democrats are not being schizophrenic; they are merely breaking out of the trap designed for them by Republicans, which holds that people’s civil rights and privacy rights are somehow anti-family. Nor will the Republicans have an easy time making the Democrats the pro-welfare party. “Welfare,” says the platform, “should be a second chance, not a way of life.”

But it is on economic policy that this platform breaks new ground and seeks to reassure the American people that Democrats really can be trusted with the economy (a job that becomes easier with each release of unemployment statistics). In the first presidential election after the collapse of communism and the failure of socialism everywhere, the Democratic Party needs to move as far from redistributionist economics as it can. The platform says, “We honor business as a noble endeavor. . . . We believe in free enterprise and the power of market forces.” It advocates investment tax credits among other strategies for private-sector growth.

Finally, Republicans will try to paint Clinton as the candidate of bureaucratic inertia, a tax-and-spend Democrat, the breed that has been in serious disfavor ever since the tax revolts of 1978. But the platform promises a “revolution” in government “to take power away from entrenched bureaucracies and narrow interests in Washington.” This is critical if the party that has become almost synonymous with government is to win this fall.

If Bill Clinton takes this platform into the campaign, the Republicans will find that their negative strategy no longer works--and that it is four years too late to build a positive one.