Ninety Long Minutes in Omaha

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The importance of a debate depends not so much on what happened as on how people remember what happened. The first polls showed that by a 2-to-1 ratio the public felt Bentsen had won. Soon, print pundits were pummeling Quayle from both left and right. At first the Bush campaign expressed guarded satisfaction. Quayle was bloodied but unbeaten. Bush's reaction was predictably hyperbolic: Quayle "knocked it right out of the park." But campaign chief Jim Baker, never a Quayle fan, seemed to be damning Dan with faint praise: "When you think about what might have happened, we have to be pretty happy."

At an 8 o'clock staff meeting the morning after the debate, Quayle sat in his hotel suite as his advisers gently informed him that the public thought he had lost. He played it cool: "So, what else is going on?" he replied. They then sent him out on the stump to provide the answer he should have given in the first place. "There is no question," he said in Joplin, Mo., "that I would maintain and build on the excellent policies of George Bush." On the plane he told reporters, "I hadn't had that question before. Obviously you think of it in sort of a macrosense to be able to get that question right there."

For the next two days, like people after a storm, Republicans waited anxiously to see if the roof would cave in. The Bush campaign started to edge away from Quayle. During his first speech after the debate, Bush failed even to mention his running mate. But Ronald Reagan proclaimed during a White House photo opportunity that Bentsen's J.F.K. line was a "cheap shot." Responded Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich: "When the Republicans call something a cheap shot, you know you've scored a direct hit." Republicans tried to make a virtue out of necessity by having Quayle dub himself a "lightning rod" for Democratic attacks.

Word went out to Democratic surrogates all over the country to portray what was a solid Bentsen win into a Waterloo for the Republicans. Within 24 hours the Democrats were airing a commercial they had started preparing two weeks ago precisely for this turn of events. Part of Dukakis' "packagers" series in which five crafty imagemakers plot how best to deceive the American public about Bush, the commercial depicts the cynical image-manipulators in a smoke- filled room. Packager No. 1: "We've got a disaster on our hands." No. 2: "After all that rehearsal, I thought we had Quayle totally programmed." No. 3: "Not totally." No. 4: "Suddenly the words President Quayle even make me nervous."

The Democratic strategy now is to link Bush and Quayle inextricably. In the final presidential debate, Dukakis will surely do his best to remind voters that a vote for Bush is a vote for Quayle. They may not turn the polls around, but after last week's showdown in Omaha, it is intended to give voters pause before they commit themselves.