Battling for The Post-Liberal Soul

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Almost from the beginning, they sensed they were natural adversaries. Heartland vs. Harvard. Freckle-faced intensity vs. button-down ethnicity. Iowa-caucus king vs. home-turf favorite in this week's New Hampshire primary. Congressman Richard Gephardt vs. Governor Michael Dukakis in a battle to define the post-liberal soul of the Democratic Party. Last August, when the presidential race was still seven characters in search of an audience, they squared off in a debate over trade policy. One sentence from that half- forgotten practice round crystallizes the differences between these rival claimants. Dukakis turned to Gephardt and said, "You want a law, I want to act."

This is now the clash that confronts the Democrats. Paul Simon is struggling to parlay a close second in Iowa into political survival; Albert Gore is hunkering down in a hunting blind in the South, lying in wait for Super Tuesday; and Mario Cuomo still hovers mysteriously in the wings. But for the moment, the two contenders who ran first and third in Iowa will define the Democratic debate. Dukakis' opposition to Gephardt's agenda of get-tough trade policies and an oil-import fee is only part of the equation. More telling are their differences in orientation and outlook. For all his new populist pretensions, Gephardt remains a man of the House, a legislative tactician whose vision is shaped by years of trying to assemble 218-vote majorities. Dukakis, in contrast, offers the skills of a can-do Governor who has prospered by marrying liberal goals with pinchpenny policies.

Gephardt did nearly everything right to win Iowa. In the closing weeks, he was the only Democrat projecting clarity and strength. "What really clinched it for Gephardt was the way he presented the message on trade," theorized Arthur Miller, a University of Iowa political scientist. "It was a strong, sharp image coming across, with a gut feeling of patriotism." The Missouri Congressman's trade plan touches on nativist fears, and he rivals the Walter Mondale of 1984 in interest-group pandering. But he was the only Democrat to cut through the deficit doldrums to touch on deeper economic fears. "We are losing our standard of living," Gephardt warned in countless speeches, and union members, farmers and the elderly nodded their assent.

For all that, Gephardt's Iowa victory had about as much artistry as mud wrestling. Once again, Democrats had trouble tallying the returns, and the results are still incomplete. The state party's figures give Gephardt 31% support, Simon 27%, Dukakis 22% and Jesse Jackson a respectable 9%. Simon found the results galling; he finished a close second, yet his post-Iowa prospects were widely reported as near hopeless. Dukakis' mediocre finish was a fitting reward for a fuzzy campaign; yet he jetted off to New Hampshire with the euphoria of a MacArthur returning to the Philippines. At a Democratic dinner the day after the caucuses, Senator Ted Kennedy joked, "Only eight years ago I finished second in Iowa, and my presidential campaign was finished. This year Mike Dukakis finishes third, and he's on his way to the White House." For Bruce Babbitt and Gary Hart, the Iowa returns meant seats in the balcony at the Democratic Convention. Garnering just 6%, Babbitt left Iowa with a sad smile and a stack of glowing press clippings. Hart registered nary a beat; there were giggles in one north Des Moines precinct when no one stood up to support him.

Once the Iowa results were in, New Hampshire quickly became the Avis primary: a bitter race for the No. 2 try-harder slot. With victory all but ceded to Dukakis, Simon embarked on a last-ditch struggle to dethrone Gephardt as the principal challenger. Gone was the Illinois Senator's reticence about direct attacks; already in debt, he borrowed $110,000 to pay for ads deriding ! Gephardt's weather-vane voting record. But Simon's scorched-earth tactics could in the end mostly benefit Dukakis and Gore, whose money and organizational strength will keep them well equipped for the march through the South.

Gephardt's dire economic warnings seem ill suited for booming New Hampshire. But the Missouri Congressman insists that he does not need a depressed farm economy to sell his brand of downbeat realism. "Even in New Hampshire," he argued in a TIME interview, "there's the feeling that people are not getting ahead economically; they can't buy the house; they can't afford the education. It's more jobs, more work, less income, more debt." In any case, Gephardt does not have the luxury of tailoring his appeal to New England voters. Even though an oil-import fee is wildly unpopular in these frigid climes, Gephardt must hold his ground in a belated effort to demonstrate ideological consistency.

For Dukakis after Iowa, New Hampshire fits Robert Frost's definition of home as "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." The mood and tenor of his campaign changed as soon as he arrived, particularly in the Manchester neighborhood where his Greek-immigrant father Panos first settled in 1912. Dukakis appeared able to relax now that he no longer had to purport to be fascinated with Iowa farm problems or subdue his natural 78- r.p.m. speech rhythms. While he did not fully abandon his innate caution, he did seem more adept at sniping at his rivals. He even feigned ire when Simon called him a manager rather than a leader. "When a fellow comes to town and calls me a technocrat," said the Governor, who normally delights in talking about industrial incubators and photovoltaics, "I've got to respond."

But Gephardt's aides believe they have taken the measure of Dukakis and found him less formidable than once imagined. Their new orthodoxy is that Dukakis' almost willful blandness is the perfect foil for Gephardt's populist pyrotechnics. "Duke's is a very unclear message," says a ranking Gephardt adviser. "He doesn't know what he's trying to say, and it's been the same since ((Campaign Manager John)) Sasso left last October." Sasso's departure in the wake of the Joseph Biden "attack video" caper has left the Dukakis campaign with no one of that stature to override the candidate's own stubbornness. Even now Dukakis vows not to neglect his Governor's duties for the campaign trail. He still balks at suggestions that he adopt a more moving oratory, and resists foreign policy briefings that would remedy his woeful lack of sophistication in that area.

It is odd that the same armchair analysts frustrated with Dukakis' inability to play the rhetorical heartstrings of compassion are equally irate over the plasticity of Gephardt's populist persona. In a sense, Dukakis is faulted for being too much his own man and Gephardt for being too much everyone else's. As a Democratic insider puts it, "Gephardt is a campaign manager's dream. He does exactly what he's told ((and)) he will do what is necessary."

Yet even without the ministrations of campaign imagemakers, the philosophic cleavages between Gephardt and Dukakis would be profound. Both came to political maturity against the backdrop of a conservative era. Gephardt represents the party's congressional realists, who chose partial accommodation with the Reagan tide in the early 1980s over symbolic protest. Dukakis is an exemplar of the new-breed Democratic Governors who were forced to develop innovative programs in the face of fiscal constraints and a restive electorate -- liberalism on the cheap. Dukakis' upbeat economic message flows from the discovery of how much can be achieved with limited resources. Gephardt's pessimism probably has its roots in his congressional experience. After seven years of frustration under Reagan, it is easy for a new-era congressional Democrat to conclude that only draconian legislative remedies can restore the economy's luster.

The Gephardt-Dukakis showdown almost wipes away the past six months of Democratic boomlets and burnouts. The Simon surge last fall may have been a final hothouse flowering of nostalgic liberalism. Hart's dramatic return was clearly an irrelevant distraction. The brief Babbitt bubble is a reminder that the power of the press can be overrated. Aside from Jesse Jackson, each of the three likely survivors after New Hampshire (Dukakis, Gephardt and Gore) represents distinct pragmatic strands of a new Democratic tapestry. At stake in their coming struggle is not only the nomination but whether Democrats can forge a winning new-age ideology for the post-Reagan era.

With reporting by Michael Duffy and Michael Riley/ Manchester