5 NOVEMBER 1988, Page 9

PRESIDENT BUSH, SCAPEGOAT DUKAKIS

With the presidential race all but won,

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard explains why the

Democrats are so out of touch with America

Macomb County, Michigan COMPLETE chaos. People pushed to get in. People pushed to get out. Beefy Polish- Americans wearing the black jackets of the United Auto Workers tried to control the crowd. 'You need tickets.' explained one, no tickets — you don't get in.' The message rippled back into the crush of loyal but exasperated Democrats who had come from all over southern Michigan to see Michael Dukakis, not realising that they needed tickets. 'What is this crap? Who's running this thing?' bellowed an angry man as he turned to leave.

The hall was a third empty. The UAW boun- cers could have let ev- erybody in, but that was not the point. Tickets are used to ensure that anti-abortion activists cannot spoil the careful choreography of the event and steal the nightly news. Dukakis has come a long way since 1975 when he ing- enuously invited the media to attend his first cabinet meeting as Gov- ernor of Massachusetts, and told his astonished advisers that 'this and all the cabinet meetings of this administration will be open to the public'. Now he has surrendered to the image-handlers. Behind the podium was a huge American flag made of red, white and blue balloons. More flags were draped on all sides. Supporters carried star-spangled placards for DUKAKIS-BENTSEN. 'It looks more and more like Bush every day,' muttered a reporter on the press stand. It even had the 14-white colour of the Republican rally. Jesse Jackson swept this state in the Democratic caucus — with the help of the Levantines and Iraqi Chaldeans in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, the biggest enclave of Arabs west of Marrakesh. The blacks, it seems, will stay at home on election day and the Arabs will vote' against Kitty Dukakis, who went beyond the call of duty in denouncing the PLO.

Dukakis was an hour late. `He's in the building somewhere,' the major-domo kept repeating. Finally the doors opened and Sam Donaldson, the ubiquitous repor- ter from ABC News, charged through the crowd, stopping for a moment to shake the outstretched hand of an ecstatic teenage girl. Then came the caravan of officials, clustered around a diminutive man in a dark suit. 'The next President of the United States, Michael Dukakis,' announced the major-domo to wild ap- plause. But no, it was only the Governor of Michigan. Finally, Dukakis appeared, waving his hand shyly, tilting his head to one side. A quiet, affectionate man rather likeable, in a way. He gave a gritty speech, blasting the Republican proposal to cut, capital gains tax as a $40 billion tax break for the rich— and a $22,000 annual bonus for George Bush. `He said it's a jobs programme . . . What are they going to do — hire a second butler? A new lifeguard at the pool?' For two months Bush ha-s- been winning the class war, tapping resentment' against the an Irish-American named Dan Powers, be- gan a revolt against tax increases in 1983, can- vassing from door to door across the country until he had enough signatures to force a recall election. A Democratic state senator was thrown out and replaced by a Republi- can. `We're a community of hard-working people here, and we resent paying for people who won't work,' says Powers. Would he vote for Dukakis? 'You've got to be kidding.'

Dukakis cannot put together an electoral college victory that does not include Michi- gan, as well as Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylva- nia, and New York. Given the Republican lock on the South and the Rocky Moun- tains he will lose the election if he loses any one of these five industrial states, yet the fastest growing economies in America are the Metropolitan areas of the rustbowl: Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Pitts- burgh. These supposedly depressed cities have unemployment rates around six per cent. The race will probably tighten in the industrial north, in spite of the prosperity, because the Democrats still have a big advantage there in party registration. If Dukakis builds momentum he may win two or three of these states, the ones in closest range, but he would have to be Harry Truman to win all five and Truman he is not, although he invokes the patron saint of underdogs at every stop, reminding voters of the Chicago Daily Tribune's banner headline on election morning in 1948: 'DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN'. But the closer you study that election the clearer it becomes that the roles are reversed, that it is George Bush, emerging from the shadow of a dominant president, overcoming his image as a sap, surging from 17 points behind in the polls, who has pulled off a Truman stunt. It is Dukakis who has coasted, just like Dewey. Dukak- is's death-bed confession of liberalism may give hin political absolution of a sort, letting him lose on a dignified philosophic- al stand, but it cannot save him. It may even drag him in lower in the polls if Bush exploits the muddle, calling for a televised debate 'between Dukakis and Dukakis'.

The Dukakis boomlet has been fuelled

more by a media that needs suspense than by the force of his candidacy. His blitz of television appearances over the last week has ranged from unimpressive to dismal. In a 90-minute exchange on ABC's Nightline with Ted Koppel, he look exhausted. Here was his chance to engage educated Amer- icans in an armchair-and-cognac conversa- tion, to show his intellectual depth and agility of mind, yet he performed like a drugged parrot. Repeating unedited pas- sages of his stump speech, he denounced Bush, as if it was self-evident that the Reagan administration had failed, without selling himself. His answers were painfully thin. When Koppel asked how he would maintain deliveries of strategic minerals from South Africa while at the same time destabilising the Botha government, Duka- kis said he would look for supplies else- where, seemingly unaware that South Afri- ca and the Soviet Union have a duopoly.

Such foolishness has little effect on the election, however, and the Dukakis cam- paign has been able to throw Bush off balance by accusing the Republicans of character assassination and smear tactics. It is diversionary chaff. This is not an especially negative campaign. Nineteenth- century elections were often nastier. Mar- tin van Buren was called a transvestite. James Polk was accused of branding slaves

with his initials. This century the slurs have been less personal, more political, and there has probably never been a more brutal television advertisement at the pres- idential level than the little girl pulling petals in 1964, warning that Barry Goldwa- ter would blow up the world. Even so, the cries that Bush has been mean-spirited are taking their toll and it seems that Dukakis, using surrogates to do the dirty work, has for once outwitted the Bush campaign. The liberal commentating classes, sure at heart that it is the Republicans who are wicked, have taken the side of Dukakis. They have forgotten the Democratic Convention in Atlanta, those four days of insults and derision that created so much sympathy for Bush among the fair-minded. 'Poor George, he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth,' sneered the keynote speaker, Anne Richards. Since then we have seen Democratic television ads with pictures of the Japanese flag, inciting xenophobia. We have heard Duka- kis compare Reagan to a rotting fish. Andrew Young, the Mayor of Atlanta, said that the Bush campaign was reminis- cent of Hitler and Goebbels. Donna Bra- zile, a senior Dukakis campaigner, deman- ded that George Bush 'fess up' to rumours of adultrery. And there have been constant posters, leaflets, and television ads linking

Bush to Noriega and insinuating that he is an accomplice to the drug trade.

The Bush campaign has been no more outrageous, just more effective. It has better field intelligence and chooses themes that people care about: neighbour- hood crime, not Noriega. The richest harvest has come from television ads on Willie Horton, a black murderer who went on a rampage and raped a white woman while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Bush allies aired an unauthorised version, showing Horton's menacing face, which led to uproar about the use of subliminal racism and 'psychosexual fanta- sies'. It probably was designed with malice, but the official campaign version, seen by most of the country, does not mention Horton or suggest his colour. The Amer- ican liberal mind has been at its most impenetrably dense on the Horton affair, unable to see the difference between the furlough programme that Reagan had as Governor of California, which released prisoners for family visits to help rehabi- litation as they came up for parole, and the Massachusetts scheme which gave holidays to prisoners sentenced to life without parole, who would be fools not to abscond while on furlough since they face perpetual incarceration otherwise.

Equally telling is the disgust of the cognoscenti with ordinary Americans who do not seem concerned about the 'real' issues, like the 'need' to raise taxes, and are instead being swayed by 'symbolic' and 'local' issues like crime. The election, however, has a great deal to do with crime. There is a reason the Boston police force endorsed Bush. The President appoints Justices to the Supreme Court. Reagan's conservative Court is already shifting the focus of American criminal law from the rights of the accused to the rights of the abused. The Miranda and Exclusionary rulings, which restricts evidence admiss- able in court, are likely to be modified. The Supreme Court is the issue of the election. Bush would not appoirit reaction- ary judges but he would increase the conservative majority from 5:4 to 8:1, guaranteeing an anti-liberal court well into the next century and altering the social mind of America. Nothing else is so decisive.

Bush's campaign gives him a mandate to consolidate, but has not followed Margaret Thatcher's example and fought to extend the revolution with a theme of economic empowerment. Instead, he has tended to accept the premise of liberal challenges, Proudly listing the entitlements he has supported instead of asking whether the government has any business bribing the middle class with its own money. We already know what his administration will look like. He has been calling the shots for several months, softening the hard edge of Reaganism, and appointing his sound friends to the cabinet. Conservatives are watching with apprehension as the team

takes shape, as the noblesse obliges, wondering whether the door is closing.

The liberals are crying foul, clinging to the notion that they have been done dirty by Bush propaganda because they cannot face the truth: that their candidate is losing because of what he stands for, that the people have repudiated his ideas. At some point in the late Sixties liberalism fell to an illiberal putsch and become the movement of social engineers. The Democratic Party has only regained the White House once since then: with a Southern evangelical in the aftermath of Watergate. There are always excuses. In 1972 George McGovern had to drop a running mate who had had electric shock treatment for depression. In 1980 there were the hostages in Iran, in 1984 the financial problems of Garaldine Ferraro — and an 'infelicitous promise to raise taxes. Twice there was Ronald Reagan, • the 'great communicator, who supposedly tricked America with charm. But to be beaten by George Bush and Dan Quayle, the weakest ticket imaginable in presidential politics, is shattering. It is not as if Dukakis has made any bad mistakes. He handled Jesse Jackson deftly at the

convention, chose a Tory running-mate to help win the South, unified the party, and eschewed taxes. He failed to define a message but that failure was rooted in the schizophrenia of his candidacy. He had two incompatible constitutencies: the old- fashioned car workers here in Michigan, and the pacifist Left (with which he has always been identified) that forces candi- dates to jump through hoops in the primar- ies.

Poor Dukakis, the 'terrible candidate', the 'cold fish'. who 'blew a winnable elec- tion': the knives are out already. He is the scapegoat of a party that has an unwork- able selection process, that nominates candidates precisely like him, with a left- liberal past that invariably comes back to haunt. It may get worse for the Democrats before it, gets better. Jesse Jackson has charged a price for his acquiescence, secur- ing changes in the allocation of delegates in 1984 and more seat for his supporters on the Democratic National Cimmittee in 1988. He is poised for an assault on the party. While moderate Democrats, prepar- ing for a battle royal, are whispering of Labour and oblivion.