Anatomy of A Disaster

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* Because the campaign had trouble developing an overall message, it failed to devise an advertising strategy. The so-called Future Group, the campaign's talented ad team, struggled through August without direction. Hundreds of scripts languished unmade, including several excoriating Bush. Meanwhile, internecine warfare broke out among the team's big egos. One adman even sought to purge Dukakis' closet of tacky ties and ill-fitting suits rather than focus on creating a national ad campaign.

When Sasso returned, he inherited this snake pit. He brought in an acquaintance, David D'Alessandro of the John Hancock insurance company, who had never run a political ad shop. In mid-September D'Alessandro arranged the Shoot-Out at the Ritz-Carlton, a demeaning screening of potential scripts. In a cavernous baroque banquet room, ad-makers flipped through their storyboards to impress the new team. It was an amateurish tryout that produced more bitterness than ads. Among those produced was a semicoherent series ridiculing Bush's handlers. Although they are certain to form the core of Kennedy School seminars for the next four years, they baffled viewers. "His people weren't ready for the big time," said former Dukakis adman Ken Swope of the operation. "They weren't ready for hardball."

The advertising fiasco fomented revolution in the colonies. Miffed state directors, dissatisfied with Boston's product, started making their own spots -- and trading them with one another. Late one night at the Hyatt Regency in Columbus, media consultant Gerald Austin, Jesse Jackson's former campaign manager, slipped into the elevator, videocassette in hand, to air his commercials for Dukakis. Even after a long day, Dukakis insisted on screening them before they could run, just as he had approved every other spot the campaign aired. An incredulous Austin shook his head at Dukakis' micromanagement. But one of the ads, a Japan-bashing spot featuring the Nipponese flag, helped close the gap in Ohio.

Even after Labor Day, when Sasso finally persuaded Dukakis to venture into the realm of neopopulism with powerful talk of the "middle-class squeeze" and "two-job prosperity," the Governor was wont to abandon the topic without warning. This message madness continued until the final weeks, when he seized on the theme "I'm on your side" and decided to ride the populist pony as far as it would go. Still, he could not master the chords of resentment that are a basic component of economic populism.