A Millstone That Only Gets Heavier

October 28, 1988|By Jeff Smith.

The Democratic candidate is surprised by the size of his loss. By nature calm and moderate, he wonders how voters came to view him as a radical. He points to the negative ad campaign waged by a Republican who, unlike his primary opponents, hammered him hard on issues of patriotism and crime.

A failure with conservative Democrats, the candidate wishes he had better conveyed his concern for working people`s problems. He scoffs at the Republicans` deficit-driven prosperity. Finally, he notes the effect of the incumbent president`s belated conversion to peacemaking, and expresses surprise that the administration`s biggest scandal didn`t hurt it more at the polls.

An early postmortem for Mike Dukakis? No, these feelings were all expressed by George McGovern shortly after his landslide defeat in 1972. The patriotism issue then was antiwar dissent, not the Pledge of Allegiance; the swing voters were Humphrey or Wallace (rather than Reagan) Democrats; and the scandal was Watergate, not Iran-contra. But the similarities-and also differences-between then and now say a great deal about the Democratic Party`s continuing problems in national campaigns.

The McGovern comments I have cited were recorded by Hunter S. Thompson in a remarkably forthright interview published in Thompson`s book, ``Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail `72.`` Thompson, the notorious ``gonzo``

journalist then of Rolling Stone magazine, is the Sydney Applebaum of American politics. That is, he reminds one of the crazed character in Woody Allen`s movie ``Love and Death`` who, after outlining some absurd conspiratorial plot, solemnly says, ``They call me mad-but someday, history will mark my name:

Sidney Applebaum!``

The main question Thompson brought to his interview with McGovern was:

Could the 1972 Democratic campaign conceivably have won? Was it lost merely on tactics, or was McGovern`s ``New Politics`` just basically out of synch with the times?

McGovern told Thompson: ``I think there was just a chance, coming out of Miami (site of that year`s Democratic convention), that we could have ignited the public. There was a period there right after I got the nomination when I`m sure that the majority of the American people really weren`t sure what they were going to do about me. But the impressions they had were rather favorable.`` Change ``Miami`` to ``Atlanta`` and that whole paragraph could almost be a statement by Dukakis or one of his advisers.

Thompson reserved judgment, but a few years later, still in search of the New Politics-of an ``anti-politician`` whose presidential campaign would break the mold-he happened upon obscure Jimmy Carter, whose brief but brilliant Law Day speech was picked up by Thompson and eventually published around the country. It`s impossible to say how crucial this early publicity was. But I know of Democratic primary voters for whom it provided a first, favorable impression of Carter.

And Carter did go on to run, and win, as an anti-politician-a simple, pious soul who would never sell out to the tawdry ethos of official Washington.

The national Democratic Party has never quite recovered from that. McGovern in 1972 had problems that Dukakis this year didn`t have: a contentious nominating convention and a running-mate fiasco that ensured that those crucial few weeks after Miami wouldn`t go his way. At least some of his top operatives, including Gary Hart, later blamed his loss on large but essentially limited tactical failures like the Thomas Eagleton affair.

Dukakis ran his convention like a Swiss railroad, and if there was a running-mate problem it wasn`t his but the other guy`s. Yet Dukakis has fallen victim to a problem McGovern didn`t have. That problem is McGovern himself-or the electorate`s memory of him-as well as similar memories of Carter and of Carter`s successor, Walter Mondale.

George Bush and Dan Quayle have both linked Dukakis to these names from the Democrats` past. As Mondale was vulnerable to being cast as a McGovern/

Carter, so Dukakis has been vulnerable as a McGovern/Carter/Mondale. And it`s better than even money that if Dukakis loses, Republicans in 1992 will attempt to tar their next opponent as a McGovern/Carter/Mondale/Dukakis.

The fact that losses are cumulative gives the party a longer row to hoe each time out. On the other hand, the Democrats retain a large and reliable base. Despite what the press continues to call Reagan`s ``immense

popularity,`` opposition to Reagan has consistently stayed at around 40 percent, both in popularity polls and at the ballot box. At times it has been even higher. Politics must be the only field in which 60 percent approval is considered overwhelming.

Given this base, it is possible that Dukakis simply made a tactical error-for instance, by not better exploiting his ``outsider`` status. In an age cynical toward politics, outsiders will tend to win.

But Dukakis chose a course more like Gov. Thomas Dewey`s or Gov. Adlai Stevenson`s. For too long he spoke of ``process`` values like competence, rather than of substantive values like freedom, equality and compassion.

Process talk smacks of insiderism. Dukakis might have succeeded, or at least taken the offensive, with a campaign more like the campaigns of Carter or Reagan, which were built on a promise to ``throw the bums out.``

Thus, the question remains: Are the Democrats` losses fundamental and historic, or simply tactical? Does it just so happen that they`re falling a few points short, or are those few points symbolic of a basic shift in political dynamics? The longer that question goes unanswered, the more likely it becomes that the more ominous answer is correct. For as each loss helps beget another, what began as perhaps just tactical failure is becoming the grand historical burden of the Democratic Party.