Color It Republican

By Jacob V. Lamar

As the votes rolled in on Tuesday evening and the networks' maps took on overwhelmingly Republican colors, it was clear that George Bush was on his way to a decisive victory. His mini-landslide seemed an only slightly diluted version of the two previous Republican triumphs, just as Bush's philosophy seemed an only slightly diluted version of Ronald Reagan's. The triumph was a personal validation for Bush, who had managed during the 1988 campaign to transform his gawky and feckless image into a warm persona that voters found comfortable. It was also an expression of general contentment with the nation's current patina of prosperity and peace and with the Republican Party, which has ruled the White House for 16 of the past 20 years.

Unlike the Reagan triumphs of 1980 and '84, however, Bush's win represented no endorsement of a specific set of policies. Nor was there any consolidation of the fundamental realignment in party loyalties that had seemed possible after Reagan's successes. Instead, Bush's was a split-ticket victory won by a candidate who raised many peripheral issues but neither sought nor received a mandate to make the tough choices necessary to rescue the nation from its mountain of debt.

As a result, the buoyant sense of new possibilities for the nation that is supposed to accompany a landslide was all but absent. Even the victor, standing before cheering supporters in Houston on election night, seemed mildly subdued after winning the office he has coveted all his political life. "To those who supported me, I will try to be worthy of your trust," he said, "and to those that did not, I will try to earn it, and my hand is out to you, and I want to be your President too."

Bush's victory was national in scope: he won 54% of the popular vote, which translated into a likely 426 electoral votes of a possible 538. He ran strongest in the South and the Rocky Mountain states, two regions that have become a rock-solid electoral base for Republicans. In addition, he held on to some of Reagan's key voting blocs, running even with Dukakis among the middle class, winning the majority of independents and most baby boomers. But Bush was hurt by the gender gap. Dukakis won 52% of the votes cast by women, in contrast to 47% for Bush.

It was the first time a sitting Vice President has been promoted by the electorate since Martin Van Buren succeeded his mentor, Andrew Jackson, in 1836. It was also the first time since 1928 that voters granted the Republican Party a third consecutive term in the White House. But to the Republicans' chagrin, this year also marked the first time since 1960 that the party winning the presidential race lost ground in Congress. Because Bush's campaign was largely lacking in substantive issues, it did not help propel like-minded Republicans into office with him. The G.O.P. could lose two spots in the Senate, giving the Democrats a majority of 56, and a handful of seats in the House, giving the Democrats a majority of 262.

Throughout the fall campaign, the issue was not Bush or his record or his plans for the future. Instead, the Vice President and his handlers were able to make Dukakis the issue. The Massachusetts Governor, mistakenly thinking that in the wake of the Iran-contra affair the nation would want an efficient manager to take over as chief operating officer, had declared at the Democratic Convention in July that the election would turn on competence rather than ideology. Bush's campaign leaped on that assertion, correctly proclaiming that any presidential election is inevitably a choice involving values and ideology. Last spring Bush began to paint, in a very forceful and quite misleading way, the technocratic Dukakis as a Democratic throwback to the discredited liberalism of the 1960s. By the end of the Republican Convention, Bush had built a solid lead in the polls that he protected with a carefully choreographed campaign.

In accomplishing this, Bush set a tone that was both negative and trivial. His main issues were odd little matters that would have been dismissed as irrelevant except that Bush was able to make them symbols for larger doubts about Dukakis. In addition, 1988 became the year of the handlers. Reagan had elevated the importance of public relations and image manipulation. This year the effort to control the imagemakers transformed the way campaigns are conducted: instead of carrying a message directly to voters, the Bush campaign (eventually imitated by the Dukakis camp) sought to produce simple and substanceless sound bites that would convey the right signal during the network news shows.

As the loser in a race that neither candidate seemed to deserve to win, Dukakis was characteristically stoic during his concession speech in Boston. Aside from offering gracious congratulations to Bush, Dukakis' address was largely a rehash of his standard stump speeches. Afterward Dukakis and his wife Kitty hurried from the stage without stopping to talk to reporters. The Governor's 85-year-old mother Euterpe, however, when offered a microphone, stated angrily, "We have not compromised our honor."

When Bush launched his attack strategy in August, Dukakis let the Vice President's charges go unanswered. Confident that the once hapless Vice President would eventually self-destruct, Dukakis stuck to the bland themes and rhetoric -- typified by his campaign mantra, "good jobs at good wages" -- that had carried him through the primaries. Voters who knew little about Dukakis' record in Massachusetts readily believed what Bush had to say about him. By September the 18-point lead that Dukakis held over Bush in midsummer had disappeared. Says G.O.P. strategist Lance Tarrance: "This election was probably won by Labor Day."

Perhaps. But what maddens Democrats is that Dukakis could probably have recovered had he reacted more quickly and more vigorously to Bush's assault. In the final weeks of his campaign, Dukakis executed a shift in strategy that nearly rescued his moribund candidacy. He finally responded to Bush's distortions of his record and successfully made an issue of the Republicans' negative tactics. He countered Bush's talk about values with a powerful message of economic populism. He learned to hit Bush where he was most vulnerable, condemning the patrician Vice President as an enemy of the middle class. "I'm on your side," Dukakis said in one stump speech after another until he went hoarse.

Dukakis also broke out of the message-of-the-day campaign style that his handlers had adopted from Bush's. While Bush continued to avoid spontaneous encounters with the press and the public, Dukakis began behaving the way presidential candidates used to before they became obsessed with the value of TV sound bites. Instead of worrying about whether he would step on some carefully crafted line-of-the-day, he began crisscrossing the country to take his crusade directly to as many voters as possible. With a sharper speech and rolled-up sleeves, he began invigorating crowds and generating an enthusiasm that showed the importance of shallow nightly news coverage had been overrated. His new vitality, along with his populist message, translated into a modest boost in the polls, giving the campaign hope that he might pull off a real Massachusetts miracle. By the final weekend of the campaign, Dukakis had closed to within about 4 points of Bush.

During a manic last burst of campaigning, the candidate traveled nonstop 8,500 miles in 53 hours, sleeping on the lumpy couch of his campaign plane, accompanied by an assortment of celebrities. Focusing on the most encouraging polls, staffers chanted, "Surge, surge, surge!" As Dukakis invoked Harry Truman at every campaign rally he attended, his aides began to hope for a miracle. "The odds are long," said one staffer, "but we have to play them."

Dukakis' late rally -- as well as his victory in ten states -- somehow made his loss all the harder for Democrats to take. Had the Governor been the victim of a Mondale-style blowout, Democrats could have shrugged their shoulders and said that nothing could have staved off defeat. But by Tuesday night, the eleventh-hour comeback bid had led to disillusioned what-if scenarios and bitter finger pointing among party strategists, and a general exasperation with a candidate who might have won if he had only got his act together sooner.

With Dukakis struggling to pull off an upset in the campaign's closing days, Bush suddenly found himself on the defensive. His ads damning the Governor had become one of the prickly issues of the campaign. Polls showed that some undecided voters were moving toward Dukakis out of disgust with Bush's negative campaigning. In an angry speech in California, Bush accused Dukakis of "whining" and quoted Truman's line about how those who cannot stand the heat should get out of the kitchen. He also charged that the Democrats initiated the nastiness when they mocked him with taunts of "Where was George?" at their "idiotic" national convention last summer.

The Bush campaign was terrified of making a mistake that might doom the election in the home stretch. Bush's running mate, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, was kept virtually out of sight, consigned almost exclusively to . small, solidly Republican Southern and Midwestern towns, where he spoke before audiences largely made up of high school students too young to vote. In the 30-minute Bush campaign commercial that aired Monday night, Quayle's name was never mentioned.

By the morning of Election Day, the Bush camp's confidence was replaced by a case of last-minute jitters. The Vice President's pollster, Robert Teeter, was horrified to learn that Bush's lead had shrunk to 4 points overnight. Early exit polls showed the candidates running neck and neck in several key states. Bush and his staff were getting edgy. At one point the Vice President's son Jeb yelled, only half in jest, at two senior aides, "For crying out loud, lighten up! Go have a drink or something, but stop worrying out loud."

Bush did not begin to rest easy until he learned that he had won Connecticut, Maine and Missouri, in addition to sweeping the South. At 10 p.m., Reagan phoned with his congratulations. Ten minutes later, Dukakis called to concede. Among the others calling with their congratulations: Dukakis' running mate Lloyd Bentsen and Jesse Jackson.

Bentsen, who handily won re-election to his Senate seat, will remain chairman of the Finance Committee and probably become a venerated figurehead and statesman of the Democratic Party. Jackson, who was gracious in his round of network interviews but clearly believes his more forceful populism would have been better for the party, has made it known that he plans to join the swarm of people likely to seek the Democratic nomination four years from now. And Dukakis, while not ruling out another run, will concentrate for the time being on winning re-election as Massachusetts Governor in 1990.

Bush, after a Houston press conference Wednesday morning, flew to Washington to meet with Quayle and start planning the transition. On election night, he fulfilled a lifelong dream. But however grueling the process, becoming President is easy work compared with being President. Bush comes to power at an odd and troubled juncture in U.S. history, when a desire for cautious change and unhappiness over the decline in the nation's economic dominance coincide with a general satisfaction with the mixed prosperity of the Reagan era. Having proved he can win a rough-and-tumble election, Bush must now prove he can manage the nation's pent-up fiscal problems and set the stage for its entrance into the 21st century.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, David Beckwith and Dan Goodgame with Bush and Michael Riley with Dukakis