Election '88-competing elites:

...We've got to fight back," he went on, "and say that they're the party of privilege, the party of the rich folks...

...Dukakis, basking in the glory of a triumphant convention, coasted and Bush seized the opportunity to define the relatively unknown governor as a dangerously naive liberal ideologue...

...A confidential report prepared for Republican Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf found that Republicans were very weak or nonexistent in 2300 out of country's 3000 counties...

...He always sounds, says one critic, like "the little mechanical man...

...But the empire of science and particularly social science is no more, its prestige consumed in the flames of Vietnam and the burning ghettos...

...Legal Services attorneys and Naderites were busy suing unresponsive New Deal style bureaucracies on behalf of their poor and minority clients...

...The governor's exalted concept of law, it seemed, was little more than a cloak for his own effete prejudices...

...Does the state have a right to be in your bedroom, he asked...

...Almost all involve the media...

...there was a similar program under Reagan when he was governor of California...

...The election is perhaps best summed up in the words of a seemingly lucid caller to a radio talk show...

...No more than social science can the law provide a neutral and objective basis for decision making...

...His tack on almost any issue from foreign policy: "A matter of international law," to the environment: "I will enforce the law," is expressed in legal terms...

...In Massachusetts they were reduced to running plaintive newspaper ads in order to find candidates FRED SIEGEL of The Cooper Union is writing a book on American liberalism...

...But they are not nearly sufficient to explain how a Republican campaign which had been so justifiably despondent recovered so quickly...

...A lawyer himself, Dukakis's key staffers are almost all lawyers...

...In the words of a neighbor who was recently mugged and is now planning to vote for Bush:' 'What is Dukakis going to do, serve Noriega or Quadaffi with court papers...

...In Maryland, a state which had a thriving Republican party in the 1960s, the Democrats now control the governorship, both Senate seats, six of eight Congressional seats, and 125 out of 141 seats in the lower house of the state legislature...

...Dukakis defended himself in the Horton case by citing statistics and Massachusetts law...

...But then how did Bush rebound...

...In the manner of the libertarian who insists that opposition to laws restricting pornography doesn't imply an endorsement of pornography but rather a defense of tolerance, Dukakis was left limply explaining that his opposition to the law did not constitute an opposition to the Pledge...

...Either (a) the media's tough coverage of Dan Quayle was said to have produced a backlash...

...Bush's lead is by no means carved in stone...

...b) the focus on Jesse Jackson's media-genic maneuverings that dominated the first three days of the Democratic convention was said to have had a delayed impact...

...A Dukakis advisor, stunned by Bush's success, whined, "They're (the Bush campaign) running a class war against us, saying we're a bunch of Cambridge-Brookline eccentric literature professors...

...While out on the furlough Horton raped and sodomized a Maryland woman...

...In short, the Democrats' economic majoritarianism is at odds with their social and cultural minoritarianism...

...The Bush people understood that baggage far better than the bewildered press...

...Worse yet, savvy Republican strategists feared that a fluke Bush victory could send their representation even lower...

...But it is far more than a question of style...

...The Bush campaign, closely imitating King, has tried to exploit the so-called wedge issues to create an anti-liberal majoritarian coalition around moral/cultural issues...

...The political problem for the Democrats is that this is no longer true...

...King won by exploiting Dukakis's weaknesses on moral/cultural issues like the death penalty, abortion, and minimum jail sentences...

...Instead of new bureaucratic initiatives organized around social scientific knowledge we had the class action suit and pathbreaking Supreme Court decisions on women's rights and affirmative action...

...In 1982 when the King administration, racked by massive scandals, was up for reelection, Dukakis led the race at one point by as much as 56 percentage points...

...Does all this mean that the election is in the bag for Bush...

...They reasoned that if the 1990 midterm election took place shortly after the inevitable, and probably deep, postelection recession, the GOP would be even further diminished...

...They note quite correctly that furlough programs are widely accepted penological practices common in many states...

...Michael Dukakis has been mistakenly de-scribed as a technocrat...

...While they have made substantial gains in Texas, Florida, and the Carolinas, Republicans, as an organized party, have almost disappeared over vast swatches of New England and the party is in precipitous decline in much of the Midwest...

...Whatever liberalism's defeats on other fronts during the Reagan years, legalitarian liberalism was able to rise up and hand Reagan his biggest political defeat by blocking the appointment of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court...

...Dukakis achieved some marginal success on this score during the first debate...

...They enjoyed strong organizations in only one hundred, largely suburban counties...

...There is a bit of truth in all of these explanations...

...Well before George Bush went out of his way to make civil liberties un-American, Dukakis was describing himself as a "card-carrying member of the ACLU...

...But they also have a sense of the unruliness of the world, an awareness of the law's limits both at home and abroad, something Dukakis with his tidy formulas seems unaware of...

...his style will always speak against the substance of them...

...Since I opened the party's leadership," he said, ' 'most of the country club people no longer participate in party activities.'' George Bush appeared to be caught in the worst of both worlds...

...Conservatives began to discuss seriously the virtues of a Bush loss as a means of reviving their flagging movement...

...The effect was to take the gloss off Dukakis's high-mindedness...

...Dukakis can win because the broad indifference of the voters toward either man has created a volatile electorate...

...Had the Democrats chosen Gephardt or Gore or even Simon they would have had a candidate both far better able to play on populist economic themes...

...or finally (e) Bush had, appearances aside, suddenly become an effective demagogue...

...The caller explained that she had begun as a supporter of Bush, shifted to Dukakis, moved back to Bush, and was now uncertain-as is our fate...

...It's no wonder then that reporters are repeatedly struck by the similarity between the style of the Dukakis campaign operation and that of a well-run law firm...

...Is he going to threaten the underclass with legal proceedings...

...Dukakis, the Harvard free trader, though he must strike populist themes, will never be able to do so...

...In the 1970s the legal crusader filled the vacuum created by the collapse of social science...

...Despite the Democrats' recent attempt to rediscover economic populism, the civil libertarian tradition Dukakis represents has, often with good reason, moved to expand the power of a small minority of "wisemen," the judiciary...

...Dukakis can win then, not by making himself more attractive, but by driving up George Bush's negatives, by reminding people why they disliked Bush to begin with...

...Bork tried to respond in narrowly jurisprudential terms...

...What the Horton case dramatized, as the facts of the case were widely broadcast, was that perpetrators of heinous crimes in Massachusetts are not only given furloughs but are eventually paroled...

...Take the matter of Dukakis's now widely publicized furlough of convicted killer Willie Horton, who was serving a life sentence for a vicious murder...

...Dukakis's repeated resort to high-minded slogans about the rule of law, his attempt to practice law on the stump, marks his weakness as a politician...

...Instead of responding to Bush like a politician, instead of snapping back and pointing out the Pledge was never part of Bush's private school education, Dukakis responded like a civil liberties lawyer...

...It does only if the Dukakis people are unable to surmount their provinciality...

...If he learns to press his advantages more vigorously in the second, he may be able to paint Bush back into the corner from which the Republicans escaped in August...

...ELECTION '88 COMPETING ELITES THE DUKE & THE DAUPHIN FRED SIEGEL The great turnaround of 1988, George Bush's twenty-six point swing in the polls between late July and late August, has puzzled pundits and pollsters...

...He is something related but different...

...In late July, TV commentators were musing not about whether Michael Dukakis would win, but by how much...

...For all of the talk over the past eight years of a Reagan-era realignment, Republican strength in Congress has actually declined from 193 congressmen in 1981 to 179 today...

...Numerous explanations of varying merit have been offered for the great turnaround...

...they would also have had a candidate without Dukakis's minoritarian baggage...

...One needn't be particularly hardened to recognize that the law has often been unable to deal with thugs at home or abroad...

...The presidency excepted, Bush's turnaround came despite the sad state of Republican party fortunes...

...The answer is that he exploited the weakness of an opposing party whose primary elections produced one of the weakest possible candidates for the general election...

...Theproblem," says Republican campaigner Tom Thoren, "is that the party doesn't exist on the ground...

...What the Bush people then delighted in pointing out was that under Dukakis's conception of the law it was legal to free a Willie Horton but illegal to require teachers to lead their classes in the Pledge of Allegiance...

...A month later the Duke's campaign was in such disarray as to invite advice columns from virtually every political journalist in the country...

...d) Bush was given credit for running a brilliant Reagan-like media campaign...

...Legal liberalism has, in the form of the great public interest law firms and the ACLU, not only survived, but even thrived under Reaganism...

...There are, notes analyst Kevin Phillips, actually fewer Republican governors, congressmen, and state legislators today than in 1969 when Nixon took office...

...willing to run for the legislature...

...The near total collapse of the Republican party over vast stretches of the country was one of the best kept secrets of the Reagan years...

...Dukakis went into a political free-fall and won by only 8 points...

...Americans have, as the Iran-contra affair made clear, a great and justified respect for law...

...But this only compounded the problem since, as a number of conservative legal experts have only been too happy to point out, the Constitutional issues were far murkier than Dukakis had suggested...

...Postwar technocracy rested in large measure on the newly acquired prestige of the social sciences, particularly economics and sociology...

...Its heroes are Constitution-quoting Senators like Sam Ervin, jurists like William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, crusading lawyers like Ralph Nader, and a host of ACLU and Legal Services attorneys...

...The claims of scientific neutrality and objective knowledge were undermined by the moralists of both the left and right and by the intellectual revolt of the neoconservatives who turned social science against their own Great Society creations...

...Dukakis's legalitar-ianism, to coin a neologism, is the evolved expression of post-Great Society liberalism, a liberalism honorably centered on the courts as the vehicle for the protection of minority rights...

...Kennedy and, in his early years, Johnson could always buttress their policy initiatives by appealing to the magisterial findings of social scientific research...

...He was thrashed, just as smug Dukakis would be when he explained that it should have been obvious to even a first-year law student that the Constitution required him to veto the Pledge law...

...The new liberal legalitarianism was as fierce as the sixties' counterculture in its defense of lifestyle and minority rights, and it was far more effective...

...The mood among conservatives in particular and Republicans in general was, in the words of a GOP operative, "morose...

...This is true enough and to the extent that his style reminds ordinary voters of their generally unpleasant dealings with the Bar, the Democrats are hurt...

...During the Bork hearings, Senator Biden, acting as an effective politician, placed the nominee on the defensive by posing the legal issues of privacy in starkly emotional terms...

...He is not...

...Liberals have long argued against the death penalty by arguing that life imprisonment was a genuine alternative...

...They studied something which has been largely ignored, the reasons for Ed King's victory over Governor Dukakis in 1978...

...In Oklahoma, for instance, the Republicans were unable even to put up candidates for the state senate in 40 percent of the races...

...On all but the presidential level the Republicans have never fully recovered from the drubbing they took in the Watergate election of 1974...

...The problem he fails to grasp, but most of the country intuitively understands, is that Bush and Dukakis represent competing elites, neither of which is much loved...

...Dukakis's principled bloodlessness, as political analyst Jim Chapin notes, has made even George Bush seem tough and bold by comparison...

...Conservative activists, never happy with the selection of George Bush, had other reasons to be gloomy this past summer as furious debate broke out over the lost opportunities of the Reagan years...

...But Dukakis, in a foreshadowing of the great turnaround of August '88, was unable to hold on to the loyalty of culturally conservative blue-collar voters...

...c) the media was said to have finally turned its attention to examining the truth behind the hype of the Massachusetts miracle...

...But this is politically beside the point...

...The prestige of social science rested in turn on the uncritical, almost religious adulation Americans reserved for the neutral knowledge of scientific expertise...

...He is a man of the Bar through and through...

...A Michigan Republican county chairman has part of the answer...

...Not only had conservative activists alienated much of the party's up-scale, moderate base-the base on which George Bush himself had once depended-those same activists were openly hostile to Bush's "preppie pragmatism...

...Literally dozens of Dukakis defenders and editorial writers around the country have jumped to the Massachusetts Governor's defense...

...FDR could proudly proclaim that the "One great difference that has characterized the division (between liberals and conservatives) has been that the liberal party-no matter what its particular name was at the time-believes in the efficacy of the will of the great majority of the people as distinguished from the judgment of a small minority...

...There are, despite a shared button-down style, important differences between the technocratic liberalism of a John Kennedy and the legalitarian liberalism of Michael Dukakis...