The Democratic outsider- 16 September 1988

Just about two years ago when the 1988 presidential campaign was beginning to warm up, I was having dinner in Boston with a political scientist, and with a member of a Boston family that goes back far enough to have had a president, two presidents in fact, in its background.

I should pause here, to remark that Americans who have some acquaintance with a parliamentary system, have been envying for some time, any country who’s general election campaign lasts three weeks. On the contrary, two years exert an awful strain on the nervous system, and in one way may actual defeat the main purpose, by boring so many voters, so that by election day, they are too exhausted or indifferent to vote, with the result that, only just over 50% of the qualified voters go to the polls at all, far and away the lowest percentage of participation, in any democracy.

And we shouldn’t forget, whenever we talk about a landslide result that in this country, we are referring to a comfortable majority of those – 51, 52% – in other words, in 1980, Mr Reagan’s "landslide" meant that something between 26 and 27% of the qualified voters went for him. Which also means that three Americans in four either didn’t want him, or didn’t care.

So, back to that evening in Boston, in spring of 1986. By that time, several men in both parties were already well on the way to mounting their presidential campaigns. Among them, a man, undeclared but much talked of in New England, was the governor of Massachusetts.

"How about," I said to my companions, "your Michael Dukakis?" To be truthful I’d only lately learnt to pronounce the name. They looked at me, chuckling but forgiving. "Please," said the professor, "not that." The member of the first family, appreciating that I had not kept up with Massachusetts politics, but he was not wanting to sound superior, shook his head and smiled. "Not in the cards," he said, "not a prayer."

The subject was closed, and we went on to discuss more serious possibilities, Governor Cuomo of New York being then the lion of the Democratic party, who was expected soon to break out of his governor's cage in Albany and go roaring through the land.

Well that dinner reminded me of another time, another day, in New York City, it must have been January, February of 1976. Just around our corner on Madison Avenue I was off to the newsagent or the bakery and a small man with watery blue eyes and a lot of teeth, stopped me and held out his hand.

I didn’t know him, he didn’t know me, he was proffering his hand to every other passerby. "Good morning,"he said with a light southern accent, "I am Jimmy Carter. I am running for President of the United States." I resisted saying, you’re joking of course, and said something like well, fine governor, good luck.

About a month later, one of our weekly news magazines came out with a big story surveying the half-dozen or so men most likely to come down to the wire when the Democrats came that summer to choose their man. Their likenesses were on the cover, of that issue. Jimmy Carter was not among them, not even dismissed as an unserious contender.

But nobody can say that Governor Dukakis has not earned his claim. He has slogged his way through what surely be the most tedious the most interminable, the most grindingly democratic, method of choice that exists.

Remember, what we call the primaries are state primaries. Before that, every small town has had its registered members of the party vote to send delegates to a county convention or caucus. Then the counties have a run-off to pick delegates to a state convention, which picks the delegates to the national convention.

So that by the time that final convention votes, the chosen leader really is the man that a majority of the elected delegates from the states that hold primaries – and there are 38 of them – decide is the best man for the job. And whether the unknown man is Jimmy Carter or Michael Dukakis, by the time he is picked and off and running around the nation, and being now the only man in his party to receive, every evening on the news, the spotlight of television we soon get to know the unknown.

Now his job is to establish a new and attractive identity. The way Jimmy Carter did this, not himself a Clint Eastwood or a remarkable orator, was to picture himself as an ordinary decent man from the country, who was suspicious of Washington and its goings-on, and would come in like James Stewart in Mr Smith Goes To Washington, to clean out the mess created by the pros.

And he certainly could point to a mess – the historic scandal of Watergate, the first resignation of a president in history, a vice president forced to resign on charges of fraud and the successor Mr Gerald Ford, everywhere seen as a good caretaker president, but a caretaker. Only now can we realise how much Mr Carter had going for him to outweigh his own lack of dynamism, charm, the aura of leadership.

And unknown suddenly rocketed into stardom always has an appeal to an American audience, whether it’s a weirdly handsome movie actress like Madonna or a charming imp of a tennis player like Andre Agassi.

In the beginning, that's to say after the Democratic convention in Atlanta, Governor Dukakis had the curiosity value of an unknown star, and in the polls taken immediately afterwards, plunged the Republicans into unaccustomed gloom by being 17 percentage points ahead of Mr Bush.

But now here is a puzzle, in the latest two national polls, a remarkable percentage, something like 24% of the electorate say they still don’t know him, don’t quite know who he is and what his party stands for. Of course, because of the aforementioned steady nightly spotlight in the TV news, we all know his face and manner as well as our next-door neighbour. It now appears that this is not necessarily a good thing, unless you have something positive to offer to your new large audience – Madonna’s slinky air of mystery, Agassi’s sporting smile and good-natured antics – you may very soon come to suffer from over-exposure.

From the beginning Mr Dukakis has not imprinted a positive image. We all know what he’s against, he’s against drug dealing with dictators, he is against knuckling under to the Ayatollah – a dead issue, if ever there was one. He is against poverty and crime and low-paying jobs and homeless people and drugs in schools.

What he is for is, alas, a mild echo of what Mr Bush is for. A strong defence, he is for people’s right to carry guns, not only to shoot rabbits but to protect their homes – that is a remarkable break with good Democratic doctrine; the Democrats had always pointed out that the Constitution allows the citizen to bear arms only to be part of a militia when called on.

To put it another way the two polls – Gallup and the New York Times-Columbia Broadcasting System – both agree that Mr Bush is setting the pace, the subject matter, what we now call the agenda, for the campaign. And on the two main issues, on the domestic economy and on foreign policy, he is comfortably leading his opponent.

Probably the most upsetting finding for Mr Dukakis’s team is that he is losing ground on the issue he picked early on as the key to his campaign. He said it at New Orleans and many times later, on the stump – this election is not about ideology, it’s about competence.

Well, the competence is not a very rousing word with which to bring 30,000 people to their feet, but for a time, people were ready to learn how Mr Dukakis’s brand of competence might show how things could be improved. Well, he has used the word, but the thing itself evidently escapes the voters. On this very question 51% think Mr Bush more competent of the two against 32% for Mr Dukakis.

Of course, we analysts and pundits are always quick to cover our tracks by saying either it’s going to be a close race – there is no more evidence to show that than to show the possibility of a landslide, either way – or we say it’s too early to be sure of anything. However the one theme that Mr Bush has hammered away at is simply the prosperity of most Americans, of the huge middle class that casts most of the votes.

Of course, it’s true, as Mr Dukakis goes on about, that there are patches, big patches, of depression here and there, in the oil states, in the steel industry, in the midwest farming stages, hurt in some places, devastated by the drought, though the federal government is about to ladle out billions for their relief. But these patches constitute a fringe of the continental prosperity.

I think the general feeling which has just shown up in the polls was best expressed in a recent cartoon, widely reprinted even abroad, by Ed Gamble in the Florida Times-Union. It showed Mr Dukakis with his umbrella up under a blazing sun, approaching a shopkeeper, who is slapping a new coat of paint on his store front. The shop's name is America and in the window is the legend "Home of peace and prosperity, low unemployment, low inflation, low interest rates, help wanted". Dukakis is saying, "I’d like to talk to you about how bad the economy is" and the shopkeeper replies, "Sure, but can you come back when I am not working?"

We have seven weeks to go. I won’t insult you by saying much may happen, it’s too early to tell, it could be close. At the moment I see no new or startling or compelling reason to change very much my guess, made at the time that Mr Dukakis was 17 points ahead, that if American history follows its unbroken course of never voting out the incumbent in a time of prosperity, the governor is likely to take say, 11 states, and Mr Bush, 39.

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