Campaign across cultural divides:

...Five Rockefellers, including the clan's leader, David of Chase Manhattan Bank, are among the many figures from the New York stock and banking world contributing prominently to George Herbert Walker Bush's political action committee, the Fund for America's Future...

...Gephardt's policy switches, his enamel smooth, game-show host personality, have produced almost as much dismay as the success of Pat Robertson, he of the rictal smile...

...And in a sense Gephardt moved with them...

...Political power has followed suit dramatically...

...The once clear-cut polarities between Main Street and Wall Street, between the Sun Belt and the Frost Belt have passed through the magnetic field of Reaganism and come out jumbled...

...But there they were in New Hampshire, an electorally tottering Bush with a beaming Goldwater by his side...

...At the same time, Dole is a favorite among many on Wall Street, who have been, like him, outspoken critics of "supply-side" economics...

...Like the William Hurt character in Broadcast News, also the mi(jwestern son of a milkman, Gephardt is a shallow but immensely likable personality capable of romancing whomever he needs to win the election...

...Bob Dole, on the other hand, is the heir of the rock-ribbed Midwestern version of flinty small-town Republicanism exemplified by Robert Taft...

...Gephardt could be an enormously appealing Democratic candidate, a candidate who can reach far beyond the narrowly bicoastal appeal of a button-down, establishment technocrat like Michael Dukakis...

...Just as academics and would-be academics once rallied to Adlai Stevenson and now, perhaps only in passing, to Paul Simon, because they saw a reflection of their own personalities in those men's styles, the Republican boomers see their own problems acted out on a national stage by Bush...

...The Robertson people have issued leaflets about the Bush "liberals" and refer darkly, as do conservative activists, to Bush's pre-1980 membership in Planned Parenthood and "one worlder" foreign policy organizations...

...Bush, many reporters have noted, seems similarly preoccupied with the struggle for identity...

...Gephardt has used the trade issue to tap into the same anxieties about the nation's future that Reagan's anti-Communism drew on in the 1980 election...

...More importantly, the new populist Gephardt who emerged in the Iowa caucuses seemed to have totally reversed his economic worldview...

...Democrats to the White House...

...What united both halves, what made Harry Truman, the small businessman, also the supporter of government intervention in the economy, was a populist "the-people-versus-the-establishment" perspective that drew on both egalitarian and nationalist currents...

...Leadership, exclaimed Goldwater, isn't all that important...

...the one-time hero of Republican insurgents proclaimed Bush of Andover and Yale heir to the conservative legacy...

...They don't care if Aunt Tilly is being taken care of in the nursing home or not...

...The planner and the populist in Gephardt are a reflection of the long-standing duality on economic issues that has characterized his party throughout the twentieth century...

...This is true enough...

...If Bush had been accused of being excessively ambitious, a man who moved from job to job for the sake of his resume, so had they...

...They want it all and they want it now...

...That is, the American government imitating the Japanese should guide the process of creative destruction whereby an antiquated, rigidly organized, labor-intensive, mass manufacturing economy would be transformed into the flexible, knowledge-intensive, post-industrial economy of the future...

...he is an overgrown preppy...

...They are "very ambitious," says Holman...

...Instead, he has, FDR-like, simply layered the one on top of the other without trying to reconcile them...

...One of the high-tech companies located in the suburban section of his district, Guarantee Electric, became his model for the future of the American economy...

...Johnny Carson was the first to express publicly what many voters already knew implicitly...

...All I ask," said the president from Missouri in the midst of his uphill 1948 campaign, is that you "vote for yourself, vote for your family...

...On this down-home issue Gephardt, the Washington fixture, really is standing up to the "big mules...

...But these were warnings with little impact in a New Hampshire transformed by a new breed of young suburban conservatives, many of whom can be described as yuppies, as can their numerous Sunbelt counterparts, and who are the core constituency for a Bush campaign...

...Give a neoliberal half a chance," says one wag, and "he'll begin every other sentence with the word infrastructure...

...To be sure some things don't change: Goldwater- famous for impromptu remarks, such as telling a reporter, "You know, I really don't have a first-class brain"-lived up to his reputation when he embarrassed Bush's handlers by comparing their candidate to Calvin Coolidge...

...These young people," says Frank Holman, New Jersey State GOP chairman, speaking of young suburban Republicans, are "the hope of the Republican party...

...Political power has followed the shift of wealth and population to the suburbs...

...The Japanese went from model to villain, growth was replaced with fairness, and the bright future of the Yellow Brick Road was replaced with the nightmare of joblessness and economic displacement...

...The Bush-Dole hostilities have been characterized as a personal feud...

...Louis, for instance, lost almost a third of its population, largely to the surrounding counties, in a mere decade-and-a-half between 1970 and 1984...

...So far Gephardt's flip-flops have agitated the press and his fellow candidates, but they have had little effect on the voters...

...The vice-president concluded the New Hampshire campaign with a stumbling, sad-eyed debate performance...

...The boomers, argues political consultant Ralph Whitehead, "want to be somebody, but their culture and life experience no longer offer them the kind of off-the-rack identities that were available to their parents...

...Not leadership, but the scrambling of Republican constituencies may be the key to the 1988 Republican primaries...

...The Wall Street Journal/NBC exit poll in New Hampshire found that only one-quarter of the Republican voters believed Bush would be a strong leader...

...A Sunbelter to many New England-ers, a New Englander to many Sunbelters, he seems to resemble many professional boomers in having a stronger ego than identity...

...He became the congressman of a district that incorporated both south St...

...For the blue-collar losers in the transformation of the economy, Gephardt's populism brings the same message that Harry Truman employed so effectively...

...These divisions will not only reappear on Super Tuesday (March 8), they are sure to cast a long shadow over the future of the Republican party...

...Why, even when he wears overalls to campaign, Carson went one, "they have an alligator emblem over the pocket...

...A rich man in a party which hasn't nominated a man of privilege since Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, Bush is constantly trying to show he's one of the guys, with awkward off-color remarks about women to show how tough he is...

...Like Gephardt himself, the Democrats have never been able to decide whether they wanted to harness the power of big business for the public good or break it up out of fear of excessive power...

...Now there are 228 basically suburban seats but only seventy-nine primarily urban districts...

...That's where we can eat them [the Democrats] up...

...More important than ideology, a palpable class resentment runs through the hostility to Bush...

...For nearly twenty years the Democrats have been searching in vain to reach beyond the "cover-your-constituencies" politics of New-Deal, interest-group liberalism...

...Yet what is intriguing is that Gephardt the populist has never repudiated his earlier views...

...The new Gephardt, nicknamed the "Prince of Panderers" by Newsweek, has been every bit as solicitous of the Democratic interest groups as Mondale was...

...Will the loser in the Bush/Dole race be able to give the other his whole-hearted support in the presidential race...

...In fact, though, he had limited success on that score...

...Dole's insistence on economic "realism" has won him the plaudits of mainline Republicans convinced that the budget deficit is the nation's number-one problem...

...But if the first, if not the only, duty of a candidate running for national office is to get elected, what were his choices...

...All true, yet Bush went on to a smashing victory...

...That would hardly make him unique...

...Visitors to the governor's campaign offices find its "drill-team precision" to be of a piece with the candidate's personality...

...He was to those voters much as Dole had been to the farmers of Iowa, "one of them...

...Aunt Tilly better take care of herself...

...In terms of wealth, urban incomes actually exceeded sub...

...Gephardt's contradictions, by contrast, bring him close to the heart of his party's popular political appeal...

...want a president who has faced similar problems.'' This is the Bob Dole who has something of an implicit alliance with Pat Robertson based, in part, on the shared class resentments of their supporters...

...The hard-right Manchester Union Leader spoke for the city's working-class conservatives when it painted Bush as "a spoon-fed rich kid, wet-nursed to success...

...Louis and the sprawling, booming, and, in presidential terms, increasingly Republican southern suburbs...

...Bush is the candidate of new "me-generation" suburbs...

...While the Massachusetts governor stands clearly on one side of the Democrats' cultural divide- Dukakis the suburban reformer has made a career of running against blue-collar politicians-the congressman, whose district is both urban and suburban, straddles the differences...

...But unlike Mondale whose past consistency made him unable to tell the public when he had differed with organized labor, Gephardt, given his earlier Atari votes against minimum wage increases, comes off as a far more independent fellow...

...His greatest accomplishment in that job, he says, was to "convince people that they should stay in the city...

...But just as Gephardt has played off a milder version of the economic resentments reflected in Jesse Jackson's campaign, Dole represents, in part, a toned-down version of the cultural animosities expressed by the Robertson supporters who likewise feel left out of the Reagan celebration...

...CAMPAIGN ACROSS CULTURAL DIVIDES CONTOURS OF THE '88 ELECTION FRED SIEGEL Our mental map of Republicanism is entirely out of date...

...Dukakis, the product of what is effectively a one-party state, has played out his political career entirely within the confines of a managerial and highly legalistic liberalism with scant appeal beyond the boundaries of the white-collar upper-middle class...

...In Iowa, Bush ran the best campaign of his life and lost...

...If, as campaign aide John Buckley has put it, Dole's painful "root-canal" style of budget-balancing economics reminds the upwardly mobile of a nay-saying bank loan officer, Bush's ruddy optimism is both a model and an emblem of their own future possibilities...

...Today, while suburban...

...The support of Rockefellers, Cabots, and Winthrops-not to mention many members of the conspiracy theorists' favorite bogeyman, the Trilateral Commission-has led to muttering from "movement conservatives" about Bush and "re-establishment,'' a return to the bad old pre-Reagan days...

...The Congressman started out in politics as a St...

...But it misses the more enduring basis for a Bush-like candidacy rooted in the restructuring of American life...

...Bush, says Atwater, is plugged into youth values...

...On the morning of the New Hampshire primary (Tuesday, February 16) the newspapers and magazines were filled with premature and almost gleeful accounts of Bush's demise...

...Th'e immediate explanation for the Bush triumph is that whereas Iowa is a strongly anti-Reagan state, New Hampshire is a strongly pro-Reagan state...

...The New Deal itself shifted between an emphasis on planning designed to incorporate the "big boys" into a mildly social democratic national economic policy, and a populist assault on big business monopolies...

...Truth to tell, Goldwater may be right...

...per capita income outstrips the cities' by one-third, the average suburbanite pays about 25 percent less in taxes...

...A great many of his south St...

...Bush probably has the best of this new pattern of cross-alliances...

...Both men were untouched by the passions of Vietnam and Black Power...

...In this, his Atari Democrat phase, Gephardt's favorite slogan was "managing the transition...

...urban ones at the end of World War II...

...Lee Atwater, the vice-president's campaign manager and baby-boom booster, would agree...

...George Bush," said the talk show host, "is a yuppy...

...While the Dole base in the Midwest is in long-term economic decline, Bush support is concentrated in the new suburbs of both North and South that have grown the most rapidly over the last twenty-five years...

...Dole insists that he'll win because voters who "work for a living...

...He is, in short, the kind of politician who, if he survives the Super-Tuesday hurdle, can restore the Democrats to the White House...

...Only a decade-and-a-halfago, the cities held a 4-seat edge (148 to 144) in Congress...

...The deepest resonances between Bush and young suburban Republicans center on their parallel identity problems...

...He lost despite a superb organization and the best debate performances of his political career...

...That's true to a point...

...Guided by a group of entrepreneurial engineers, Guarantee Electric, a small company, grew rapidly by moving into the expanding field of computer-aided manufacturing, a process which reduced the need for skilled union labor...

...There is a populist streak to Dole, who mocks Bush's privileged life, and who speaks of how, as a young attorney in depression-era Kansas, he had to approve welfare payments for his grandparents...

...He left the audience with these halting words: ". . .I don't always articulate well, but I always feel and I care too much to leave now...

...Gephardt has experienced this transformation directly...

...Louis alderman...

...What Gephardt has done through his assault on Japanese and Korean protectionism is to find a solution to the John Glenn problem...

...The two men have been at odds since Richard Nixon, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, chose to replace Dole with Bush as Chairman of the Republican National Committee...

...The somewhat culturally conservative, disaffected blue-collar Democrats who had deserted the party for Reagan's nationalist appeal never saw Glenn's studied moderation as a reason to come home...

...They are dismayed to find that it is an almost apolitical operation with the atmosphere of a middle-sized law firm...

...Dick Gephardt's hometown of St...

...Bush, said R. W. Apple of the New York Times,' 'lacks a common touch, lack[s] a clear program'' and has "difficulty in conveying a sense of himself...

...The growth of suburban political power is represented clearly in the rise of Michael Dukakis and somewhat more ambiguously in the case of Richard Gephardt...

...Twenty years ago, the idea that Barry Goldwater, the scourge of the Republican establishment, could endorse George Bush, a scion of Wall Street Republicanism, would have been unthinkable...

...Neoliberalism is a smash among the press corps, but the "we-must-make-tough-choices" neoliberals like Bruce Babbitt have been conspicuous political failures, their press notices notwithstanding...

...What's striking then is not that Gephardt has, as the press has noted in trivializing the issue, flip-flopped on a variety of specific congressional votes...

...For Gephardt, and other Atari Democrats like Colorado congressman Timothy Wirth, the Democrats need to cease stressing "fairness" and become the party of growth, the party of entrepreneurial innovation doing battle with the party of eco.-nomic stagnation and big business, the GOP...

...And, if Bush should win the presidency would he, having alienated his party's Senate leader, be able to govern...

...Bush's angst-fiee enjoyment of his own wealth arid privilege, his easy acceptance of a terraced society, is something "me-generation" conservatives, entranced by the Upstairs, Downstairs world of Public Television's Masterpiece Theatre, aspire to...

...Louis constituents moved into adjacent and largely rural Jefferson County...

...There is even a hidden benefit to his switches: it solves what might be described as the Mondale problem...

...Similarly, his protectionism, which has agitated the editorial writers of every major newspaper, has given his campaign an air of independent honesty...

...In the week between Iowa and New Hampshire, Bush was subjected to a relentless and almost entirely negative media blitz that fastened on his selfconscious and largely unsuccessful effort to make himself "just folks...

...The upwardly mobile strivers of the high-tech Nouvelle Hampshire found the vice-president to be an enormously appealing figure...

...Well, Bush isn't exactly a yuppy, but he is a forebear...

...They first made their mark in the wake of Watergate as procedural reformers pushing issues of concern to up-scale suburbanites, issues like insurance rate determination and health care cost containment...

...Glenn, the Ohio senator touted as the great moderate Democratic hope in the 1984 primaries, never got off the ground...