Lessons of Campaign '88
Barnes, Fred
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 22, NO. 1 / JANUARY 1989 Fred Barnes LESSONS OF CAMPAIGN '88 He who was predicting a Democratic victory now explains his error, and it had much to do with weird...
...There's a lesson for 1992 in this...
...In 1988, Democratic incumbents got $44.9 million from PACs, Republican challengers only $1.4 million...
...Many of the same voters who rejected Dukakis re-elected liberal isolationists like Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio and Representative Peter Kostmayer of Pennsylvania...
...Anyway, Democrats have electable liberals on tap for 1992, though none will be able -to oust Bush if he has a successful first term...
...What the PACs do is help keep in office folks who are anti-business...
...Voters know that...
...It worked for them, and it would work again...
...They know Jackson will never be the Democratic nominee for President...
...0 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989...
...Jackson piped down...
...Voters knew they weren't putting the nation's security in Metzenbaum's or Kostmayer's hands...
...Democrats figured out in the early1980s that business PACs are stupid...
...Of the four people on the two national tickets in 1988, he was by far the most popular...
...In truth, Dukakis did one thing brilliantly...
...The Senate, now 55-45 Democratic, is reasonably up for grabs, though Republicans are obviously worse off than at the outset of the Reagan era when the Senate was 53-47 Republican...
...For all Reagan's success, the GOP lost seventeen House seats during his two terms...
...If those weren't enough, Dukakis came across as the least likable political figure since Thomas Dewey...
...The safety of the country is in the President's hands...
...By the fall, he'd have seemed far less a risk to voters and been less vulnerable to Bush attacks...
...He was barely friendly...
...Besides, Bush couldn't have made the argument that Gephardt had opposed "virtually every new weapon since the slingshot...
...He's the commander in chief, the person in charge of foreign policy...
...He stood up to Jackson...
...They can be weaned from Jackson.crats can gloat about their hold on the House of Representatives...
...Look at the three most likely candidates in 1992, aside from Jesse Jackson...
...What House Republicans need is another failed Democratic President, another Carter...
...Coelho .guessed that the PACs might just be dumb enough to keep handing over money...
...I disagree with William Safire that Jackson's high visibility at the Democratic convention poisoned the party in voters' minds...
...Michael Dukakis ran the worst national campaign of modern times and George Bush ran one of the best...
...Led by one of the shrewdest House Democrats, Tony Coelho of California, they realized they could take money from business PACs and still vote however they wished...
...For Republicans, worse times are more likely...
...Democratic presidential contenders are not only free to get tough with Jackson, they'll gain from it...
...Gephardt (or any other Democrat) could have defeated Bush merely by beFred Barnes is a senior editor of the New Republic...
...Gephardt had a gripping issue, "economic nationalism...
...In 1988, only nine of 435 House seats changed parties, an incredibly low W hile Republicans have no lock on the White House, Demo-THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 15 number...
...Those three guys were liberal on everything but defense and national security...
...Gephardt and Paul Simon, who came in first and second in Iowa, showed the futility of gearing a campaign around the caucuses...
...He could have criticized Reagan for being too soft on Mikhail Gorbachev, which he is...
...Dukakis made no significant concessions to Jackson that I know of...
...Don't gloat...
...The GOP is a victim of its own success in holding the White House...
...Bush's opposition to a bill requiring 60-day notice of a plant closing was damaging to him in the summer...
...Their dream was to have conservative money financing liberal votes...
...In other words, the peace and prosperity produced by Reagan benefited House Speaker Jim Wright and his brood, who opposed Reagan's policies...
...But my point is how little he would have had to do, and with so much to be gained...
...This race was winnable by a Democrat, even Dukakis...
...The PACs think they are buying access to incumbents, but they're wasting their money...
...In fact, he was pilloried in the Democratic primaries for having backed too many weapons programs...
...Turnout was down in some black areas, but Dukakis more than made up for it by luring back Reagan Democrats...
...As early as June, Bushies were talking openly about these issues...
...He ran out after the New Hampshire primary, and Dukakis still had plenty...
...Another development also works against them...
...Gore demonstrated in 1988 that you could do that with impunity...
...Dukakis did nothing...
...He won them 51-48 in the CBS News/New York Times exit poll...
...He was correct...
...Chances are, that won't happen again soon...
...Hating done it once, Democrats can do it again...
...Okay, I'm sensitive on this point, having argued until early September that it was going to be a Democratic year...
...1 / JANUARY 1989 Fred Barnes LESSONS OF CAMPAIGN '88 He who was predicting a Democratic victory now explains his error, and it had much to do with weird Mike...
...Dukakis was soft on crime, weak on defense, and suspect on taxes...
...By the way, there's a reason why House and Senate candidates can be as egregiously anti-defense as Dukakis, yet win...
...The only recent period of real Republican rule in...
...This wouldn't have happened if Dukakis had appeased Jackson...
...Even then, the chances of a Republican takeover are remote...
...Well, it could have been...
...Voters have short memories...
...I know this is hard to believe, but I'm talking about the fall campaign...
...T n Dukakis's case, a little inoculation would have gone a long way on national security issues and on patriotism...
...Then Reagan signed the bill into law and it died as an issue...
...He could have gotten away with being liberal on most economic, domestic, and social issues...
...They are Bentsen, Bradley, and Albert Gore, all three pro-defense liberals (or at least not anti-defense...
...Democrats found this out the hard way on another issue...
...They'll get some...
...When that happens, incumbents get reelected, most of whom are Democrats...
...the liberal position on these issues is often the popular one: mandatory health insurance, long-term medical care financed by the taxpayers, more spending on education, stringent enforcement of environmental laws, and so on...
...If it takes a scandal to beat an incumbent Democrat, Republicans are understandably discouraged...
...Bentsen may not be nominatable—he'd be 71—but the other two certainly are...
...But in the House, Democrats had a solid majority when Reagan took office and now have a bigger one...
...As luck would have it, the Democratic ticket had someone on it who wasn't anti-defense, a liberal along FDR-HST-JFK lines—Bentsen...
...ing nationalistic on economics and slightly pro-defense...
...Worse, -Republican prospects of taking control are slim to none...
...Yet Dukakis got 46 percent of the vote in an era of Republican peace and prosperity...
...True, he voiced irritation in September, but John Sasso, Dukakis's campaign chief, quickly smoothed things over...
...But he could have decided in June to support the same weapons he backed in September—the Stealth bomber, the D-5 missile, maybe a new land-based missile...
...Dukakis managed to have Jackson become invisible, in the national media sense, for entire weeks of the campaign...
...Democrats did two other things well in 1988...
...If Richard Gephardt had gotten the nomination, he'd have given George Bush a lot of trouble and maybe won...
...They dropped out a few weeks after Iowa...
...So was Hubert Humphrey's in 1968...
...Yes, life is unfair...
...Amazing...
...This is a wholly new phenomenon, and much of the credit goes to Robert Farmer, Dukakis's fundraiser...
...Three were open seats, those vacated by Republicans Hal Daub in Nebraska and Beau Boulter in Texas and by Democrat Buddy McKay in Florida...
...And PACs also stopped giving to Republican challengers...
...Perhaps Dukakis was culturally and politically unable to make early adjustments on defense and nationalism...
...And we will have elections that ratify it...
...Can the Republicans count on that weirdness to save them next time...
...Bush's opposition was ancient history in the fall campaign...
...He could have taken his name off the letterhead of the peacenik organization Jobs for Peace...
...Bradley's votes for the contras would be a handicap in the Iowa caucuses, but 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1989 he could skip Iowa...
...So long as Republican Presidents are reasonably successful in office, voters will be happy with the status quo...
...He failed to shift soon enough from a primary to a general election posture...
...They can get access for free...
...One was raising as much money as Republicans in the presidential race, some $50 million in "soft money" directed to state Democratic parties...
...It was no secret that the Bush campaign was going to use Dukakis's opposition to new weapons and his Pledge of Allegiance veto against him...
...In comparison with Dukakis, Jimmy Carter was a bundle of laughs...
...Republicans assume that the liberal activists who dominate the Democratic presidential primaries will continue to nominate inflexible, anti-defense, elitist Democrats like Dukakis...
...But voting for President is different...
...There's not much risk to the nation in voting for a single senator or representative or governor...
...The only thing that kept Gephardt from the nomination was money...
...And he made it clear that Jackson would be blamed if he caused problems in the campaign...
...George McGovern's was better than the Duke's...
...After all...
...They'll have a good list to work from in 1992...
...That should tell Democrats something about what they need in 1992 or 1996...
...The lesson of the 1988 election isn't that Republicans now have an electoral lock on the presidency...
...On the contrary, the lesson is how easy it would be for the right Democratic presidential nominee to win the White House...
...This is the growing tendency of corporate political action committees to funnel money to incumbents, mostly Democrats...
...The other success was in handling Jackson...
...Island and Bill Chappell of Florida...
...He could have begun reciting the Pledge at the beginning of each rally...
...I've assumed the same thing from time to time, but now I'm not so certain...
...What won't work is for the Democratic nominee to be, as former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger characterized Dukakis, "viscerally anti-defense...
...Washington was 1981 to, 1983, when Republicans held the White House and the Senate, and Republicans and conservative Democrats were a majority in the House...
...Imagine if Democrats had nominated someone else—Bill Bradley, say, or Lloyd Bentsen...
...All Democrats have to do is act sensibly, and only a little sensibly, in 1992 or 1996...
...Blacks are as pragmatic as anyone...
...All six incumbents who lost were tarred by scandals or mini-scandals: Republicans Pat Swindall of Georgia, Mac Sweeney of Texas, Jack Davis of Illinois, and Joseph DioGuardi of New York, and Democrats Ferdinand St Germain of Rhode...
...What I'm saying is, if a Democrat is truly in the tradition of Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, he can win, at least against a non-incumbent...
...I call that a brilliant stroke...
...It's a demagogic mixture of protectionism and the Yellow Peril, but it does have appeal, more than I had suspected...
...It worked, as standing up to bullies and blowhards always does...
...They can rely on their high rollers from Wall Street and Hollywood...
...Many would like to go with a winner...
...He didn't pander...
...They ought to challenge him for support in the black community...
...There are no limits on soft money donations, so Democrats are not penalized for lacking a mass base of contributors...
...He hadn't...
Vol. 22 • January 1989 • No. 1
