It’s The Year Of the Handlers

In six weeks, the American people will entrust either George Bush or Michael Dukakis with the keys to the nuclear kingdom. The presidency carries with it a moral responsibility that ought to humble even the most self-confident leader. Yet how do the candidates spend these final weeks, as they seek to shoulder this awesome responsibility? By reverting to a childlike state of dependency, with their every movement, gesture, word and response dictated by political handlers and chaperones. At the very moment the voters are asked to place their future in the hands of one of these men, the campaign staffs of Bush and Dukakis are trying to prevent their candidates from uttering a spontaneous thought in public.

Something has truly gone awry in 1988, as the election becomes transformed into a handlers’ handicap. More than any other race in history, this has become a narrow-gauge contest between two disciplined teams of political professionals. The problem is not the caliber of the candidates, since both Bush and Dukakis have stronger claims to competence than many who have sought the office. Rather it is their passive and uncritical acceptance of the premises of modern political manipulation. Bush flogs patriotism at a flag factory, the far more restrained Dukakis joyrides in a tank, and neither seems embarrassed by the prearranged artifice. There is a cynical edge to it all, as the backstage puppeteers pull the strings, and Bush and Dukakis dangle before the TV cameras obediently reciting their memorized themes for the day.

If the choice in November comes down simply to a referendum on gamesmanship, not leadership, then Bush should win. Since James Baker took charge of the ill-focused campaign in August, the Bush forces have consistently outflanked, outthought and outfoxed their Democratic rivals. “The Republicans punch a button every four years, and all the old pros show up,” says longtime Democratic wheelhorse Robert Strauss, chafing on the sidelines. “The Democrats bring out a bunch of bright, gracious people, who reinvent the wheel.” Until the exiled John Sasso was summoned back on Labor Day weekend to become the de facto head of a triumvirate that includes campaign manager Susan Estrich and chairman Paul Brountas, the Dukakis camp was hobbled by lack of bold strategic planning. Even now, as Sasso belatedly tries to assemble a Democratic all-star squad, he is hard pressed to match the fast-break pace of Baker’s disciplined band of G.O.P. playmakers.

Still, Sasso has his moments in this dizzying game of parry-and-thrust politics. Last Thursday, for example, the Bush campaign plotted a lightning raid on Boston, where the Vice President would dramatize his law-and-order thematics by accepting the endorsement of a Republican-leaning police union. This was a classic maneuver of Baker’s and his operations officer, campaign manager Lee Atwater, a tactical gambit to keep his opponent off balance on the eve of the presidential debate. Earlier this month, the Bush armada had sailed unmolested into Boston harbor and excoriated Dukakis over its polluted waters. This time the Vice President stood in a garish Italian restaurant in East Boston, looked at the sea of blue uniforms and joked, “Who was it that said the police aren’t there when you need them?”

That moment photographed well on the evening news, but so did Sasso’s same- day response. With less than 24 hours’ warning, Sasso assembled a phalanx of about 250 sympathetic uniformed policemen, from elsewhere in Massachusetts and from Texas, Ohio and Florida. They were displayed, badges gleaming, guns at their side, as the centerpiece of the scenic backdrop for a lunchtime rally on the west lawn of the State House. Accompanied by New York Governor Mario Cuomo, Dukakis got off one of the snappiest lines of his campaign. “We’re here today,” he told the crowd, “to investigate a felony: assault and battery against the truth. Because what George Bush is doing to the truth in this campaign is a crime.”

Where, one might wonder, is the beef? There is the inconvenient notion that the President is not the Commander in Chief of the nation’s more than 300,000 cops on the beat. Add to that the bewildering effect of two candidates embracing the same law-and-order themes on the same day: some police support Bush, others back Dukakis, and the result is symbolism stalemate. Bush strategist Charles Black is correct when he says, “The velocity of events in this election is such that a campaign needs to make important decisions on an hourly basis.” But such MTV-style campaign imagery reduces political messages to a blur of sight and sound, signifying almost nothing. The press, of course, accentuates the process in its fixation with the story of the day, and thereby encourages bite-size campaign fragments. The result is teeter-totter polls in which many voters express dismay at the choice handed them.

Ever since California in the 1930s bequeathed to the world the profession of campaign consultant, created out of necessity to compensate for the state’s lack of party structure, purists have been decrying the takeover of politics by technocrats. As early as Tom Dewey in 1948, Republican presidential candidates enlisted the services of Madison Avenue, and in 1952 Adlai Stevenson, that egghead favorite, decried the selling of candidates like soap. This prissiness, of course, did not prevent Stevenson from using an ad agency in 1956, and soon all other inhibitions against selling candidates as packaged goods eroded. Thus came the marketing wizards, the pollsters, the television consultants and assorted other image makers. Every four years brings the modern campaign closer to mechanical perfection as techniques like focus groups and overnight tracking polls wring the last gasp of spontaneity out of the process.

The 1988 campaign represents the apotheosis of what might be called the California style of campaigning, which has been influenced by Hollywood and adopted with relish by Republicans like Richard Nixon. It relies on a skillful use of television to project a narrow and often negative message, rigid control over every other aspect of each day’s communications, avoidance of the press and off-the-cuff remarks, an emphasis on resentment as a subtext, along with optimism and patriotism as the visual overlay. This despoiled and pockmarked political landscape is the inheritance of the candidates and their handlers, and how much can they be blamed for doing whatever strip mining is necessary to win the White House?

Moreover, 1988 has become the Year of the Handler partly because of the great voids this time. Among them: the lack of visceral issues to shape the campaign, the absence of a commanding personality on either ticket, and the fuzziness of the national mood on both economic and foreign policy issues. In this environment, small tactics and forced errors can have a large impact. Experts in offensive gambits and defensive damage control are indispensable. With no margin for error, the danger of a gaffe, a mistake that will reveal too much, induces a crippling level of scripted caution. After the feel-good placebo of the Reagan years, neither Bush nor Dukakis dares to realistically ; address such pressing questions as the $2.8 trillion national debt. Devoid of content, the campaign almost inevitably becomes a technical exercise, akin to an overcoached Super Bowl with all plays taking place within the 40-yd. lines.

To be sure, there are major differences between Bush and Dukakis in the ease with which they have adapted to the discipline of send-them-a-simple-message politics. It was the Vice President who dominated the airwaves and lowered the level of the debate with a series of irrelevant and inflammatory issues, ranging from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Massachusetts prison-furlough program. Few, however, would describe Dukakis as waging a campaign of ideas, despite a recent laudable flurry of substantive speeches on defense policy and health issues. Within a week, the Massachusetts Governor both posed in an M-1 tank and flew halfway across the country for a photo opportunity at Yellowstone Park.

Dukakis and his staff nonetheless tend to see themselves in overly high- minded terms, as the innocent victims of sound-bite sabotage. Campaign chairman Brountas pointedly walked to the back of the Dukakis plane last week to give ABC newsman Sam Donaldson a copy of a Doonesbury cartoon that lampooned Bush aide Atwater as dictating the message of the day to a network news director. Similarly, Estrich, who kept her title in the Dukakis campaign while yielding to Sasso responsibility for shaping the campaign’s message, claims, “The campaign staff is far more important on the Republican side, where the pollsters and the media advisers are running things and where the Vice President seems willing to do anything they say.”

In truth, the two campaign staffs, like rival armies, increasingly tend to resemble each other. Every weekday morning, Sasso in Boston and Baker in Washington preside over strategy meetings designed to fine-tune that day’s thematics. The longer-range questions at both meetings are similar: Where will the candidate go next? What will he say? What is the target group of voters? What do the polls say? Which states warrant a heavier advertising budget?

At Dukakis headquarters the major political decisions used to be made at the 9 a.m. departmental meeting that Estrich still chairs. Sasso has pre-empted some of the decision making by creating a loose, informal 8 o’clock gathering with a few key advisers, such as Kirk O’Donnell, Jack Corrigan and Peter Jacobs.

The structure is more formal at Bush headquarters, where Baker’s authority $ is explicit as well as implicit. At 7:30 each morning, seated around the conference table in Baker’s office are roughly the same seven or eight key people, including Atwater, TV guru Roger Ailes, pollster Robert Teeter and chief of staff Craig Fuller. “What’s the line of the day?” is Baker’s invariable call to order — and that question perfectly encapsulates the bumper-sticker mind-set that dominates both campaigns. Teeter provides the initial answer, usually based on his latest polling. The mood is virtually always low key. “We’ve all worked together for years in various jobs,” explains Margaret Tutwiler, Baker’s longtime top aide. “There’s no real excitement to it. It’s almost boring.”

When Baker arrived as planned at Bush headquarters after the G.O.P. convention, he confronted problems far less dire than those that would later bedevil Sasso. One reason: as Tutwiler points out, the top Bush handlers have all fought side by side before. Until Baker took over, this teamwork was undermined by the lack of anyone in firm control of the campaign. Atwater had nominal top authority as campaign manager, but Bush insisted that all decisions be made by consensus. The result was the kind of paralyzing chaos that allowed the Dan Quayle nomination to bring the campaign to the brink of disaster. Almost no decisions were firm, since each of the top advisers reserved the right to mount a back-channel appeal to the Vice President.

As soon as Baker arrived, there was no question who was the final authority. The former Treasury Secretary, who has played a major role in every G.O.P. presidential campaign since 1976, has become a figure of such stature that there is no counterpart to him in the Democratic Party. Sasso owes his authority to his personal bonds with Dukakis; Baker has managed the political fortunes of two Republican Presidents, and directed Bush’s 1980 primary campaign. Baker, in fact, represents the rare towering figure who is an exception to the political truism that power depends on physical access to the candidate. Even more than Sasso, Baker has laid down the dictum that almost all decisions are made at headquarters, not in the fuselage of Air Force Two at 35,000 ft.

There is a curmudgeonly line of argument that contends that campaign strategy, like most mystic arts, consists mainly of common sense buttressed by uncommon decisiveness. It is probably also true that Dukakis’ July lead in the polls was destined to fade like a hothouse flower. The Massachusetts Governor, after all, is running against the heir to a popular President who is campaigning on peace and prosperity. But even so, it is hard to exaggerate the problems that Sasso inherited when for the second time he took the tiller of the foundering campaign.

The Dukakis camp was simultaneously overconfident and overly defensive. There was the blustery insistence that the threadbare good-jobs-at-good-wages themes of the primaries would work against Bush, combined with the insecure reluctance to reach out to battle-tested Democrats who had worked for other candidates. There was virtually no planning, no ability to respond to Bush’s attacks, and logistics out of the whistle-stop era. Dukakis would have to work until after midnight revising a speech he had just received for the next morning’s breakfast event. All too often the candidate would take wooden prose and tired arguments and, miraculously, make them even blander. Small wonder that the campaign message was upstaged by everything from hecklers to a defensive Dukakis response to Bush’s latest charges.

Estrich was, and is, an incisive thinker and an intense manager with a keen grasp of policy issues. But she and her lieutenants were simply not adroit in matching the strategic maneuvering through which the Bush campaign dominated the sound-bite agenda. In politics, as in war, whichever side chooses the battlefield is likely to win. Baker and his cadre were designating the battlefield every day. In addition, none of the top Dukakis command, with the occasional exception of Brountas, could tell the candidate things he did not want to hear or make him do what he did not want to do. By early September, even Dukakis realized this was a liability.

But in bringing back Sasso, Dukakis was careful to spare Estrich’s feelings at the cost of the bureaucratic coherence of the campaign. Instead of reassigning some of the top staff as the effort expanded, Sasso just worked around them, relying on new, more seasoned hands that he recruited. As a result, there are in effect two campaign hierarchies: the paper structure and the de facto one reporting to Sasso. Even though Baker might blanch at such chain-of-command chaos, a tendency to paper over personnel problems is typical of presidential campaigns but can be near fatal in a President.

More than anything, Sasso has brought an end to turn-the-other-cheek piety in the face of the Vice President’s attacks. Flying from Houston to Kentucky last Tuesday morning, the Dukakis staff mulled over how to respond to Bush’s substantive event for the day: a visit to a New Jersey flag factory. At Sasso’s direction, a group of aides gathered at the front of the plane to concoct a sound bite that would contrast Bush’s flag-draped photo opportunity with Dukakis’ upcoming speech on universal health insurance. The winning jab: “I have a question for Mr. Bush: Don’t you think it’s about time you came out from behind the flag and told us what you intend to do to provide basic health care for 37 million of our fellow citizens?”

The line drew large cheers. Sam Donaldson, poking back for the Doonesbury cartoon, told Brountas, “We can’t use that.” But, of course, he did. On the flight back to Boston, press secretary Dayton Duncan celebrated with a slug of bourbon: “We made the evening news.” This, admittedly, was a paltry triumph for the nominee of a major party in September, but it conveys the dire mood that had prevailed in the Dukakis camp and the elation over the shifts that were under way. “This is not brain surgery,” said Francis O’Brien, a Sasso recruit to the campaign. “Republicans have done it well for years.”

There is, however, something in the Democratic soul that resists running the kind of disciplined — and, yes, cynical — campaign that the Republicans have been perfecting since 1968. Part of the explanation may be cultural: most of the current generation of Democratic handlers were originally attracted to politics by ideological causes like Viet Nam and civil rights. Their Republican counterparts, nurtured by a well-funded party and now used to White House power, seem to place a higher emotional premium on the sheer act of winning. Republicans have certainly mastered the art of postconvention unity, while most Democrats who backed a losing contender in the primaries routinely go into a sidelines sulk.

Given the history of Democratic feuds, Sasso has been determined to run a campaign of inclusion. Jesse Jackson has at last been accorded the respect he craves, and Dukakis has reached out to party leaders ranging from Cuomo to Georgia Senator Sam Nunn. But Sasso has also recast the upper levels of the campaign staff to make room for Democratic strategists who have weathered the cold winds of prior fall campaigns. Their track records are not nearly so glittering as those of Baker’s lieutenants, but then the Democrats have lost four of the past five presidential elections.

Among the veterans Sasso has brought in is Ted Sorensen, who wrote some of John Kennedy’s most famous lines. Two weeks ago, Sasso arranged a meeting with Sorensen to discuss an important speech. They wandered over to Fenway Park in the middle of a crucial series with the Yankees. Over hot dogs and beer, the two men reviewed the text of a neopopulist economic address — delivered complete with some Dukakis stylistic improvements in the Camelot Hotel in Little Rock last Monday.

Despite Dukakis’ tinkering, the Sorensen draft retained much of its energy, including a class-conscious denunciation of “those who were born to great wealth.” The candidate even got off one of his new breed of one-liners: “The next President will inherit a sea of Republican red ink that not even Moses could part.” But the inherent tension between Sorensen’s soaring prose and the candidate’s down-to-earth style captures an enduring dilemma of modern democracy: Does the political process unduly reward artifice and spurn the genuine article?

There is something admirable about Dukakis’ stiff-necked resistance this summer to the demands of political packaging. Yet his implicit I-am-what-I-am declaration of principle would have been more appealing had he used this period to better express the beliefs and dreams that spark his ambition. Instead, he sought political safety in repeating the cautious catchphrases that carried him through the primaries. Still, there is something unsettling about the ease with which Bush seems to accommodate the demands of his handlers. Even in the 1980 primaries, when Bush was free from the encumbrance of all ties to Ronald Reagan, he ran a scripted campaign full of burbling boasts that he was “up for the ’80s.”

Sadly enough, probably neither Dukakis nor Bush is equipped with the moxie and the imagination to run the kind of campaign that would be a tonic for the nation’s flagging political spirits –a campaign in which the candidate says what he thinks, takes questions from all comers, and dares to let the networks create their own sound bites. Such a mythical candidate might be destined to lose as badly as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. Or maybe, just maybe, the handlers — and their candidates — have underestimated the good sense of the American people.