Anatomy of A Disaster

Monday, Nov. 21, 1988 By MICHAEL RILEY
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Throughout the primaries, Dukakis talked incessantly of the marathon, a race that goes to the steady, not the swift. He knew that an even gait and a great fund raiser would allow him to outlast the six other dwarfs and survive the Democratic wars of attrition. But the general election was a war of collision, not attrition. Toward the end, a disoriented Dukakis admitted that he failed to realize that the primaries are nothing like the frenzied finale. The vaunted marathoner proved to be a man too late with his sprint.

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In June, while the Bush forces were fine-tuning their fall strategy and testing attack lines, the Dukakis camp, nomination assured, worried about Jesse Jackson's reaction and the Veep selection. Distracted by these pressing events, campaign manager Susan Estrich, an intense Harvard law professor, failed to concoct a coordinated offensive and defensive plan for the fall. "Everybody knew what was coming on Willie Horton and the Pledge," said a consultant who provided advice at the time. But Dukakis and Estrich insisted on ignoring the mounting attacks. Instead of taking the fight to Bush, Dukakis spent precious days in distant corners of Massachusetts playing Governor. He announced a $200,000 local grant, visited an apple orchard, swore in a probate-court judge. He seemed strangely detached, almost fearful of taking the plunge. His staff was worried.

When Bush finally started firing away on Horton and on Dukakis' veto of a 1977 bill requiring teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance each day, Dukakis' "strategy of shrugging off attacks suddenly stopped looking presidential and started looking weak," says a top aide. Estrich dismissed the potency of patriotism as an issue. "If Bush thinks he's going to get anywhere with this Pledge stuff, he's crazy," she told an adviser. "We've got this Supreme Court decision." That was the problem. Months after Bush first raised the issue, Dukakis finally responded: "If the Vice President is saying he'd sign an unconstitutional bill, then in my judgment he's not fit to hold the office." This pained legalism betrayed the limits of his campaign. So many top staffers, as well as Dukakis, had suffered through Harvard Law School that an insider dubbed them "ineffectual intellectuals." The Charles River elitism underscored an insularity and parochialism that led to intense bellyaching about "Boston," the derisive epithet for headquarters voiced out in the states -- or colonies, as some called them.

Dukakis spent the fall on the defensive rather than taking charge of the agenda. He entered the campaign a blank slate, and Bush scrawled all over him. Bush made liberal a dirty word, while Dukakis stupidly insisted that such a label was "meaningless." For John Sasso, the street-savvy alter ego of Dukakis who was rehabilitated on Labor Day weekend to take over the campaign, this single mistake spelled the end. "One of the rules of the business is somebody gets to fill up the cup," he explained. "If you want to be successful, you have to fill it up first."