NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush’s ’88 Feat Points Way for Clinton Camp

Ask aides to Bill Clinton what they hope to achieve at the 1992 Democratic convention, and a surprising model springs immediately to their lips: the 1988 Republican convention that nominated George Bush.

If Clinton can do in New York this week what Bush did in New Orleans four years ago, then a Democratic candidate who only recently seemed headed for oblivion could retrieve his fortunes and win the presidency, his strategists believe.

In August, 1988, Clinton aides recall, then-Vice President Bush was the candidate beset by questions about character. Voters widely perceived him as weak and vacillating, devoid of ideas of his own or empathy for the common man. Democratic nominee Michael S. Dukakis held a substantial lead--17 percentage points in one often-recalled poll.

What Bush succeeded in doing in the few brief days of the 1988 GOP convention was to redefine himself in the eyes of the voters. With his “thousand points of light” and “read my lips: no new taxes” acceptance speech, Bush not only presented a new, more appealing face to the voters but set out the themes for what quickly became a triumphant fall campaign.

The convention was “the turning point of that campaign,” says Clinton campaign manager David Wilhelm. “Bush’s speech in 1988 was a masterpiece.”

Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos agrees. “He had a very tough assignment and he accomplished it.”

Four years later, Clinton is the candidate badly in need of a new introduction.

Reduced to its essence, the goal of the next several days is not necessarily to convert millions of voters to Clinton’s cause; that will take weeks if it can be done at all. Instead, aides hope simply to persuade a sizable bloc of voters to reconsider their initial assessment of Clinton.

Ideally, a senior aide says, when the convention is over, “I’d like people to say, ‘You know, I really thought that guy was full of it, but now, I kind of like him.”

As they survey the polls, the political map and the economy, Clinton strategists suddenly believe they have a fighting chance. But the presumed Democratic nominee will go nowhere unless he first succeeds in dispelling voters’ doubts about him.

“It’s the same hurdle it’s always been,” another senior Clinton aide says bluntly: “Too many people think he’s full of crap.”

Voter skepticism about Clinton’s honesty and integrity began in February with the intensive coverage of questions about past marital infidelity. Not long afterward came the controversy over his Vietnam-era draft status. Then for the next several months, Americans saw the Democratic candidate on the defensive, denying or explaining news stories that questioned his record in Arkansas or other aspects of his past conduct.

Eventually, the aide concedes, all those things blended together and combined with voters’ basic skepticism about politics to create an overall sense that Clinton is just another politician who cannot be trusted to do what he says.

To use the convention as a vehicle for beginning to change that perception, Clinton staffers know they must not only project the kinds of positive images that Bush put forth in 1988, they must avoid the negative impressions the hapless Dukakis allowed to form at the Democratic convention that year.

First, Dukakis failed to seize the moment and convey a clear message to voters about what he stood for--a failure that helped Bush and his surrogates paint their own decidedly unflattering portrait of the Democratic nominee and then persuade voters the picture was true to life.

Second, by failing to dominate the convention himself, Dukakis opened the way for a damaging distraction: public maneuvering by the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the recurring question of “what does Jesse want?”

Clinton advisers vow to avoid both errors this time around.

The Clinton camp has tried to clear away every possible issue that could draw unwanted attention during the convention and distract television coverage away from the message and images they want to convey. Most notably, Clinton announced his choice of a running mate ahead of time in hopes of having the story off center stage by the time the proceedings begin.

Moreover, by contrast with 1988, when Dukakis doled out major pieces of the convention to Jackson in an effort to placate him, Clinton aides have tightly controlled the convention process. No one is scheduled to speak from the convention platform who has not already endorsed Clinton. (However, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., who has yet to endorse Clinton, has indicated he will address the convention Wednesday night when his name is placed in nomination.)

If the Clinton campaign’s plans succeed, the focus of each of the convention nights will be on the nominee--his ideas, his values and his biography. In addition, where Dukakis kept himself out of the spotlight until almost the end of the 1988 convention, Clinton aides have scheduled at least one public event per day for their man during this convention to give television stations fresh pictures of him for their nightly news programs.

Realizing that network coverage will be far less extensive than in the past and that most voters will watch only small parts of the proceedings, if any, Clinton’s convention planners hope to assure that regardless of when viewers tune in, they will see or hear something designed to drive home Clinton’s basic message.

While the ever-fractious nature of the Democratic Party complicates any such effort at thematic unity, Clinton’s operatives have achieved some major successes.

The party platform, for example, has been carefully tailored to conform with Clinton’s views. Gone are the divisive issues that dominated Democratic platform debates in the past.

And Tuesday night, when the platform is presented to the delegates for approval, the occasion will be used to extol issues Clinton wishes to put front-and-center, such as jobs, education and health care.

Similarly, major debates over the party’s rules--a recurrent feature of Democratic conventions going back as far as 1968--will not occur this year.

But the most important part of the convention, in the eyes of Clinton strategists, will deal not with issues, but with biography.

For months, Clinton and his aides have complained that the image most voters hold of him deeply distorts the reality of who he is.

During the Pennsylvania primary in April, for example, Clinton pollsters say they discovered to their dismay that a large number of voters assumed he had been born rich and privileged--while in reality Clinton was born poor and worked to help put himself through college.

“No one knew where he came from,” recalls Clinton media adviser Frank Greer. And because they did not know his background, Greer argues, voters have seen little reason to believe Clinton will do any of the things he says he will do.

For the last several weeks, Clinton’s campaign has focused, with some success, on an effort to give voters a more rounded picture of him.

“We were in their face, on every possible direct form of communication” from “Today Show” call-in programs to saxophone playing on “Arsenio Hall,” says pollster Stanley Greenberg. And that effort appears to account for most of the improvement in Clinton’s poll ratings.

“We still have a lot of reintroducing to do,” Greenberg acknowledges, and much of the convention will be aimed at doing it.

In a convention-eve foreshadowing of what they hope to accomplish, when Clinton and his choice for running mate, Sen. Albert Gore Jr., visited Gore’s hometown of Carthage, Tenn., on Saturday, Gore devoted most of his speech to Clinton’s life story and accomplishments.

“He was born to a widow in a family that was dirt poor,” Gore said, lauding Clinton for “working his way through college . . . earning a Rhodes Scholarship” and then, turning around and going “back to Arkansas, to the people who raised him . . . because he saw what needed to be done, and he rolled up his sleeves and went to work.”

Those basic themes--humble origins, hard work and what Clinton likes to call his “lifelong commitment” to helping others--will be cited repeatedly in the next several days. Some of the biographical efforts will be direct. Over the last several weeks, for example, Clinton aides, led by Greer and Clinton’s longtime friends, the television producers Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth Thomason, have put together a video biography to air Thursday night.

Other aspects of the effort will be more subtle. Speakers at the convention will stress values that campaign strategists want voters to associate with Clinton. Those watching the convention likely will hear repeated references to “putting people first,” to “making government work for average Americans” and to “opportunity” and “responsibility”--all favorite Clinton buzzwords.

Finally, there will be Clinton’s speech--his attempt to do for himself what Bush managed to achieve in 1988.

“The speech is the candidate’s opportunity to have a conversation with the American people,” says Stephanopoulos. “It’s his first real chance to establish a personal bond.”

So conscious is Clinton of the parallels between his situation and Bush’s plight four years ago that the Democratic candidate has been toting a videotape of Bush’s acceptance speech around with him.

That speech was good “as a personal exposition,” Clinton said Saturday, acknowledging that he has to do some of same thing.

Whether he can rise to the challenge is an open question.

His last try at a convention address, his nominating speech for Dukakis in 1988, was a flop of memorable proportions--in part, he said later, because Dukakis aides gave him extensive remarks he wasn’t fully comfortable with. At times during the present campaign, particularly when he has discussed specifics of policy matters, Clinton has been almost as bad, endlessly orating in mind-deadening detail.

At other times, particularly at key moments, Clinton has borne out the assessment of friends who call him one of the best political speakers in the country.

For this occasion, Clinton’s convention speech writing team--consultant Paul Begala, recently hired speech writer David Kusnet and campaign aide Bob Boorstin--have been working for weeks, reading past convention acceptance speeches, talking with Clinton about what he would like to say and poring over dozens of drafts submitted by Clinton friends, consultants and would-be friends and consultants.

Now, aides have blocked off Clinton’s schedule to allow the candidate to concentrate on the speech and they insist they have left him sufficient time to prepare.

“He’ll walk into it as well prepared as any Democrat ever has been,” Stephanopoulos predicted.