The Dwarfs in Disarray

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

"Can't anybody play this here game?"

-- Casey Stengel to the New York Mets, 1962

The same anguished question might be asked by today's voters of the Democrats who propose to capture the White House next year. Unlike the ballplayers on that woeful expansion team of a quarter-century ago, the Democratic candidates were supposed to be slick, blooded pros who could project an attractive image of cool competence. Instead, they have been putting on a tangle-footed show reminiscent of the blunders that made the original Mets a synonym for ineptitude.

First Gary Hart and then Joseph Biden played themselves out of the presidential lineup because of foolish errors. Last week it was Michael Dukakis who stumbled badly. The Massachusetts Governor, whose image of rock- solid integrity has been a major selling point, had to accept the resignations of his two top aides for their part in bushwhacking the Biden candidacy. Worse, Dukakis first denied his campaign's part in undermining Biden, then revealed his aides' role, then hesitated before letting them go. His handling of the crisis made him look ill-informed and indecisive.

Unlike Hart and Biden, Dukakis will stay in the race. But his five remaining Democratic presidential rivals can take little comfort from the Governor's woes. The sight of yet another candidate under fire at a press conference adds to an impression, harmful to all Democrats, that the party's race is becoming a demolition derby that will be won by the last battered survivor. Says Robert Beckel, a senior aide to Walter Mondale in 1984: "This is one hell of a way to start. We've got a stature problem: some of our best candidates have refused to enter the race, and now two others have got out and Dukakis is in serious trouble -- all in five months." Andrew Kohut, head of the Gallup polling organization, puts it more bluntly. Says he: "The Dukakis-Biden incident will reinforce the perception that Democrats are screw-ups."

Quite needlessly too. The source of Dukakis' trouble was in itself nothing so terrible: it was a videotape, covertly circulated in early September to three major news organizations, splicing together speeches by British Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock and Senator Biden in a way that demonstrated how Biden had been plagiarizing Kinnock's words. Distribution of the tape could have been defended as a proper revelation that raised legitimate questions about Biden's ability to be President. True, it would have been severely embarrassing for any campaign to admit taking shots at Biden on the eve of the hearings he conducted on Robert Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court. , Furious Democrats regarded the video as undermining the effort to defeat Bork, an important party cause. Even so, the embarrassment would have been minor compared with what actually occurred.

What happened was that Campaign Manager John Sasso phoned Dukakis in Iowa Sept. 27 to warn him that a story in the forthcoming edition of TIME identified the Dukakis campaign as the source of the video. Dukakis somewhat cryptically told Sasso to "check out" the story. But the Governor, who likes to portray himself as a hands-on manager who pays close attention to detail, overlooked one rather salient question. By his own account, he never asked Sasso if the story was true.

Instead, Dukakis called a press conference Monday morning in Boston to deny that his campaign had had anything to do with the video. He went further to proclaim his abhorrence of attacks on rivals. Said the Governor: "Anybody who knows me, and knows the kind of campaigns I run, knows how strongly I feel about negative campaigning." Apparently, that message had failed to get through to Sasso, who knows Dukakis so well that he is sometimes called the Governor's alter ego. Besieged by reporters' inquiries, Sasso on Tuesday afternoon confessed to Dukakis what he should have made clear earlier: it was Sasso himself who had ordered the Biden-Kinnock video and sent it to the New York Times. He had then directed aides to dispatch identical videos to the Des Moines Register and NBC News.

"I can't live with something like this," Dukakis declared. But the Governor initially kept the news to himself, so as not to spoil the mood of a party called Tuesday night to celebrate the fact that his campaign had raised $8 million, more than twice as much as any other Democrat's. Dukakis, an amateur trumpet player, tooted -- of all things -- Happy Days Are Here Again. But by Wednesday morning he had to face a different kind of music. First he phoned Biden to say he "felt badly" about what had happened; according to Biden, the Governor tactlessly added that "he knows what it's like to lose." Then Dukakis called another press conference to report Sasso's confession.

Two days earlier Dukakis had said he would be inclined to fire any aide caught engaging in negative campaigning. But on Wednesday morning he declined to accept the resignation Sasso had offered the day before; he said he would merely send Sasso away on a two-week leave. That resolve lasted all of four hours. Statehouse advisers and campaign aides came to Sasso and Dukakis with demands that the campaign manager get out for good. On Wednesday afternoon Sasso called his own press conference to announce that Dukakis, at Sasso's insistence, had accepted his resignation. Dukakis promptly confirmed that, scoring his second reversal of the day. A second top campaign aide, Political Director Paul Tully, also quit; his position had become untenable because he had falsely denied to TIME that the Dukakis campaign had circulated the Biden- Kinnock video.

The departures left the campaign bereft of its most experienced drivers. Sasso had engineered Dukakis' comeback from a galling gubernatorial defeat in 1978, and was responsible for his emergence as a politician of national stature. Dukakis had frequently introduced Sasso by saying, "I wouldn't be here without him."

The organizational damage is minor compared to the way Dukakis' carefully polished image has been tarnished. Reserved to the point of aloofness, the Governor is no charisma candidate. His principal appeal is his reputation as an efficient manager, and he has been pushing that appeal for all it is worth. For example, Dukakis has derided Ronald Reagan for being dangerously unaware of what the White House staff was doing during the Iran-contra affair, yet in the first crisis of his campaign, the Governor appeared ignorant of what his own campaign staff had been up to. If Dukakis had fired Sasso immediately, he might have looked decisive; if he had kept Sasso on, he might have got credit for gritty determination. Instead, he merely looked like a waverer who in the end bowed to pressure from political supporters and campaign contributors.

Summing up the damage, Robert Farmer, Dukakis' campaign treasurer, asserts, "We've taken a body blow, but we're going to make sure the campaign is a success." Perhaps. Campaigning across Iowa Friday, Dukakis brought up the subject voluntarily at almost every stop, portraying himself as a man who had taken painful but decisive action to maintain his integrity. Many voters seemed forgiving. But in New Hampshire, where he has been leading, a quick poll showed a 10% drop in the number of voters who view him favorably.

This latest controversy can only reinforce the impression that Will Rogers articulated decades ago when he announced that he didn't belong to an organized political party: he was a Democrat. A good bit of the population has something like that impression as well, to judge from an exceptionally broad and detailed poll conducted by Gallup for the Los Angeles Times Mirror Co. and published last week. On the whole, the 4,200 people polled were markedly favorable toward the party; 54% identified themselves as Democrats or leaning that way, vs. 46% Republicans or G.O.P. leaners.

But when the voters were asked questions relating to organization and competence, the Democratic advantage disappeared. The respondents divided about equally as to which party selects good candidates and is able to manage the Federal Government well; moreover, 34% thought the Republican Party "is well organized," but only 19% would say that about the Democrats.

Since then things have obviously got no better for the Democrats. One of the party's greatest problems has been the absence from the race of some of the best potential vote getters: Bill Bradley, Mario Cuomo and Sam Nunn. Last week these noncandidates were joined by another refusenik: Colorado Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder, who had been vigorously testing the waters since June, announced in Denver that she would not plunge in officially. To the embarrassment of her supporters, Schroeder burst into tears and had to be comforted by her husband James for a full minute before she could continue with her announcement. Schroeder gave a number of reasons for staying out, among them that she could not maintain personal contact with voters. Said she: "I could not bear to turn every human contact into a photo opportunity." Schroeder would have been a long shot, but she could have added color and flair to a bland field.

The six remaining candidates suffer from a common problem: with the exception of Jesse Jackson, they are still not well known nationally. Only Jackson has developed a large body of committed supporters willing to overlook errors and discount or ignore unfavorable publicity. The others remain vulnerable to being blown away by the first puff of bad news, as happened to Hart and Biden, and could yet occur to Dukakis. The threat is all the greater for a related reason: without large issues to distinguish the candidates, media coverage has tended to focus on personality and character, tricky subjects for campaigns whose first blast of national publicity may be their last.

The six Republicans already in the race or about to announce officially are less vulnerable. With the exception of Pete du Pont, they are better known than the Democrats. Voters are thus more likely to balance their stands on issues against unfavorable personal publicity. The G.O.P. may experience some fratricidal bloodletting later; some of the candidates are known to have little use for one another. But so far their campaigns have been rather gentlemanly. Among the Democrats, however, the question is shifting away from how many will survive past Iowa, New Hampshire and the Super Tuesday primaries in the South. It is becoming how many will make it even as far as Iowa.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington and Michael Riley, with Dukakis