Notes on the 1988 Presidential Campaign

Abstract

Let us at the outset review a few facts about Dukakis's performance: he ran a lousy campaign and he was a lousy candidate. Perhaps his most glaring error was to try to present himself as a technocrat, with all of the connotations that the term carries: the end of ideology, watering down the old new deal, social liberal agenda, moderation of the healthy post-Vietnam anti-interventionist drift of the congressional Democratic party, and last, but not least, an attempt to moderate his own relatively progressive position on two critical social issues, particularly abortion rights and the death penalty. Moreover, Dukakis simply refused to hammer away at corruption in the Reagan administration, its penchant for secret government exemplified in Contragate, and failed, by design I believe, to paint Bush as the candidate of the loony tunes wing of the Republican party, to portray him as in the thrall of dangerous elements of the right wing, to accuse him of running a mean spirited, anti-popular campaign. When his camp finally got some of these messages it was too late for, by Labor Day, Bush had succeeded in pulling off an odd feat for a sitting vice president: Dukakis was identified as the candidate of the liberal establishment than ran practically all social policy, despite the Right's 20 year effort to hurtle back into the future. Bush, buoyed by the hot economy (which, in turn was fueled by hot checks) stood pat on economic issues but, more importantly, ran as a social insurgent, combining a right wing populist appeal to patriotism and the free market (he promised no tax increases in face of the budget deficit, which worked because for most Americans, issues of finance are an impossible abstraction). Dukakis was forced to abandon his strategy of appealing to the desire for order against the presumed chaos of the Reagan years and, belatedly, to identify himself with the historic Democratic program when it became clear, by mid-October that the traditional bases of the party were ready to desert the ticket. In an era when media images count for a whole lot in deciding election outcomes, Dukakis appeared to be afflicted with a psychological block: he failed to look anyone in the eye and, observed Ellen Willis, his cheeks did not move. And, grasping for defeat from the jaws of possible victory, having accepted three important television interviews, he was patently unable to reach out to the millions watching him but