The Power Populist

By GARRY WILLS Garry Wills is author of The Kennedy Imprisonment, Nixon Agonistes and Reagan''s America.

When they were not firing muskets loaded with rusty nails into each other's faces, they were engaged in a competitive warmth-out -- Michael Dukakis trying furiously to grin, with meager results; Bush's grin wandering, with random abundance, all over his face and off into the air. Given his wrinkles (and his plight), Lloyd Bentsen's grin was hard to distinguish from a wince. Off to the side, Dan Quayle was giving high school students his version of the Stephen Sondheim lyric "Lovely is the one thing I can do."

% The candidates were encouraged to talk about everything but what was happening under their feet. The ground was slipping out from under Americans -- to foreign investors, to revenue collection that has become a vast servicing of our debt, to cold war commitments that do not exude power but exhaust it, to involuntary and unconfessed curtailments of our postwar imperial mission. Who could advert to these amid the smoke of muskets and the feeble blaze of opposed "likabilities"?

Ironically, the campaign began with rival moral visions, offered by two candidates who created the greatest surprise of the election year. These candidates tapped a yearning for moral rebirth that Reagan was supposed to have brought to Americans already. Yet Reagan's rhetoric, unable to re-create the America he invoked, made that America's absence more haunting for those who saw a Sodom around them instead of the Eden they had been promised. Pat Robertson and Jesse Jackson both deplored the loss of family values, the irresponsible sexuality of the young -- what Jackson called "babies making babies." They said that drugs were hollowing out the country's moral center. They called for greater discipline in the schools. Both wanted to get tough on crime. Both used their church network while trying to reach beyond it. Robertson presented himself as a corporate executive and university president; Jackson presented himself as a diplomat-negotiator who had brought back hostages, kept factories and farms from closing, and transcended racial divisions. Robertson gave us a right-wing populism that had shed the overt racism of George Wallace's campaigns. Jackson gave us a left-wing populism that had gone beyond the black base of his 1984 effort.

It was surprising in a time of apparent peace and prosperity to find such personal anguish welling up in response to Robertson's lament for a nation sliding into evil, or to Jackson's claim that white as well as black Americans were being victimized by a system that favored "merging corporations, purging workers and submerging our economy." This was a populism not derived so much from present economic distress as from uneasiness about the future, about the world of debt, of drugs, of illiteracy, of poor jobs or no jobs, that Americans will be leaving their children.

Robertson's effort seemed to flame out earlier. He mobilized his evangelical troops to show up in disproportionate strength at the Iowa straw ballot and the Michigan pre-caucuses. But his appeal went beyond the true believers (important enough in themselves) and had a lasting impact on the shape of the Republican race. By coming in second in Iowa, beating George Bush, Robertson gave Bob Dole, the winner in Iowa, a chance to derail Bush in New Hampshire. In addition, the hard core of the right that Robertson had pre- empted was unavailable to Jack Kemp when he needed it. But Robertson's campaign staggered from one kookiness to the next as the candidate not only professed he was (like all the Republicans) opposed to abortion, but argued that we are committing genocide against ourselves by depriving America of all the wages unborn babies would be earning in the 21st century. He also made wild claims about offensive missiles remaining in Cuba. He finally became a laughingstock when he suggested that Bush's people had engineered the Jimmy Swaggart sex scandal to damage his campaign.

Yet Robertson proved there was an unassuaged moral yearning that Reagan had stimulated without quite satisfying. Robertson's agenda of prayer in school, harsh penalties for drug dealers, a return to patriotism, opposition to abortion and a full frontal attack on liberalism set the model for Bush's campaign in the fall. Robertson issued the marching orders in his speech at the New Orleans convention: "Criminals are turned loose and the innocent are made victims . . . I submit to you tonight that Michael Dukakis is the most liberal candidate ever put forward for the presidency by any major party in American history."

Roger Ailes, Bush's media adviser, is credited with (or blamed for) inventing the Pledge of Allegiance issue, the Willie Horton scare, the A.C.L.U. attacks. All were leftovers from the Robertson campaign. Bush had been criticized as a "lapdog" early in 1987 when he courted the religious right, calling himself a "born again" Christian. It was assumed that he had to undergo these rituals, but that he would move to the center after surviving the Kemp challenge. What Ailes and his campaign allies did was take the Robertson base and build on it, incorporating all its major themes.

It was a brilliant stroke to run the incumbent Vice President, who was boasting of his own Administration's success, as the candidate of grievance -- of affronts localized in a liberalism that is soft on crime and defense, exotic as a Harvard boutique yet stealthy enough to win an election by misrepresenting itself to the American people. Populism is supposed to be an < appeal to the powerless. The populism of power is a contradiction in terms. But Ailes and Lee Atwater and James Baker made it a successful contraption for garnering votes.

The Jackson story is almost the reverse of Robertson's. He went further, gained more votes, commanded more attention and remained an important factor in the race right up to the convention. But his themes were not incorporated into the Democratic campaign after the convention. Robertson's cadres would be a quiet but key element in Bush's campaign, while Dukakis treated Jackson as an embarrassment, something he had to cope with, placate, keep a healthy distance from. This would lead him into his worst mistake, the renunciation of ideology, the attempt to build a middle constituency from scratch in the name of "competence." In effect, he fled his base instead of building on it.

This was not a bold decision but a cautious one, based on the conventional wisdom that Jackson had been undermining all through the primaries. Before the 1988 campaign, Jackson was regularly discussed as a threat to the Democratic Party, one who would damage the nominee as he is supposed to have damaged Walter Mondale in 1984. Jackson is the most vivid symbol of those "special interests" (blacks, women, gays, teachers, unions) that were supposed to have trammeled the Democratic Party, making it their captive. (As Studs Terkel points out, the really powerful lobbies, for gun owners and doctors and corporations, are not called special interests -- they are just average citizens, the privileged again posing as populists.)

The Democratic Leadership Council was created to free the party from the "encumbrance" of special interests and move it to the center. A centrist candidate who was strong on defense was thought to have the best chance to win the 1988 election, and Super Tuesday was created in the South to give such a candidate a boost. There was even talk for a while of "Atari Democrats," managerial types who would forget past labels and leap into the next creative age of Government-inspired technology. Democrats, while trying to build their dream candidate, were unconsciously fashioning that Frankenstein's monster of "competence" and computer-friendly conduct, Michael Dukakis.

But while the experts were thinking in these terms, political reality was shifting under their feet. The Democrats had run for and won congressional majorities and statehouses with the help of the special interests that were supposed to burden them at the national level. And then, in 1986, something striking happened: black voters, many of them registered by the Jackson campaign of 1984, turned out in larger percentages than their white counterparts, defying historical patterns, and helped elect liberal whites in two key states, Alabama and California. This, with white liberal victories in other states, returned control of the Senate to Democrats.

That shift in control meant, among other things, that Joseph Biden, not Strom Thurmond, became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. So when Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court, the judge whose qualifications seemed indisputable found himself facing a panel that would respond to the special interests. Bork, by sticking to his record, was in the position of denying rights of privacy to gays and to those using contraception, of opposing civil rights and women's rights as well as abortion. Yet a majority of Americans agreed with the special interests on the rights of privacy, on the rights of women and even on the desegregation legislation of the '60s.

What took shape in the alliance formed to reject Bork was a liberalism that could prevail in 1988. Jackson, who was active in the lobbying against Bork, realized that the "rainbow coalition" he had tried to call into being in 1984 was knitting itself together in this effort. If he could keep these elements united, his 1988 campaign would be far more compelling to far more people than his 1984 race had been.

Jackson had spent the summer of 1987 studying economic solutions to the trade imbalance and deficit with Carol O'Cleireacain, a New York-based economist who has specialized in labor law and public finance. They spent hours discussing the various issues and came up with plans like the use of labor pensions as Government-guaranteed capital for programs to rebuild the decaying infrastructure of America -- the roads and bridges neglected for years. Economists called Jackson's economic policy the best and most complete program being offered by any candidate. While gradually lowering the deficit by taking away tax breaks for the rich, Jackson was offering not austerity but a way to spend and produce our way out of economic dependency.

When Jackson took his new economic populism to Iowa at the beginning of 1987, it elicited an astounding response. In Greenfield, 700 people left the televised Super Bowl to hear him talk farm economics. He adopted the town as his headquarters and won 66% of its caucus delegates a year later. He began showing up at farm auctions and factory closings. In Wisconsin he pleaded with Lee Iacocca to keep a Chrysler plant open in Kenosha (which supplied some of his most enthusiastic delegates to the Atlanta convention). The improbable romance between Jesse Jackson and aggrieved whites was heating up -- he would win three times as many white votes in the 1988 primaries as he had won in 1984, and white populists such as Jim Hightower said his message was the same as theirs. While Jackson was reaching out, party brokers like Ann Lewis and Bert Lance were taking his cause to Democratic regulars, saying Jackson was a player this year.

Dukakis, like most other Democrats (all but Gore in his desperate courting of New York's Jews), was careful not to criticize Jackson. Republicans had given Robertson the same polite treatment, thanking him for broadening the party's appeal. Yet Dukakis thought of himself as self-sufficient and did not actively seek partnership even with powerful white politicians in his fall campaign -- people like Sam Nunn and Edward Kennedy. He was certainly not going to let himself be seen as indebted to a black man with heavy baggage from the past. Dukakis had profited, after Super Tuesday, by the narrowing of the race to two candidates, of which he was the only white left running. Tuesday after Tuesday, he won victories over a more liberal candidate, taking on the aura of a moderate and defining himself as the alternative to Jackson.

So Dukakis was (among other things) declaring his independence from Jackson when he said, "This campaign is not about ideology. It's about competence." Jackson was the most prominent of the party's progressives -- and Jackson, not coincidentally, had never held office or managed anything with generally acknowledged competence. Dukakis, instead of recruiting the energies of his party's most zealous wing, as Bush had done by including Robertson's troops, was telling them in effect to get lost, or at least to lose their labels, while promoting his own credentials as a manager. It was a weird rallying cry: "Let Michael be Michael."

Dukakis' convention speech gave Ailes just the opportunity he was hoping for. Dukakis, moderate in the context of Massachusetts (where reform rather than substantial justice was always his theme), is a liberal by national standards. He is undemonstrative by temperament, in any case; but for him to forswear at least part of his own heritage made him look positively furtive. He seemed to be hiding secrets as well as his smile. That would help Ailes in the crucial assignment he had given himself -- turning the unrelentingly nice George Bush into a vicious campaigner.

In the past Bush's affability had come across as slightly sappy. To get him serious enough, Ailes had to convince Bush he was being roughed up. Ailes has recalled how he braced his man to launch the ad hominem assault on Dan Rather when he appeared live on the CBS Evening News by persuading Bush there was a dastardly plot to eliminate him from the campaign. In the limousine on the way over to the network, Bush protested that he could answer questions about Iran; he had been doing so all along. Ailes said, "You don't understand something. This is a hit squad . . . They've got you up against the wall. They're putting the blindfold on you. It's all over, pal." It was all a plot on the part of Dan Rather, Ailes argued, who was not a newsman but an ideological hit man.

Ailes saw his job as that of a fight manager animating his contender with energizing drafts of hatred for the foe. Before Reagan's second debate with Mondale in 1984 (Ailes was called in because Reagan had done so poorly in the first one), Ailes sent the President into the ring with these words: "When you see Mondale, remember, this man had twelve years as Senator and Vice President, and it was a mess. And what he wants to do is get your job so that he can undo everything you spent your entire life doing."

Roger Ailes had to make George Bush, who is not very good at hating, hate Michael Dukakis. Ailes went around spreading the word that Michael Dukakis is "Mr. Elbows and Knees" when it comes to dirty campaigning, that Kitty was behind the release of the Biden tape, that Dukakis had mental problems he was hiding, that he "is a classic narcissist."

The clincher, so far as convincing Bush went, was the fact that Dukakis was being deceptive about his past, trying to deny his liberalism, to mask the menace to the nation presented by his softness on crime and defense. If Ailes could make that case to Bush, then the Pledge issue, the Horton horror stories, the A.C.L.U. membership (clashing with Dukakis' nonideological pose), would make sense to Bush as defensive actions against the broad assault of Dukakis' lie.

Dukakis made these absurd accusations credible by his refusal to take them seriously. On the Pledge, he did not angrily grab the flag back and say it belongs to all Americans and he would defend it always, but constitutionally; he just cited Massachusetts' highest court, as if putting a footnote in a law- review article. On the A.C.L.U., he did not get indignant that the honor of good people (people who had, by the way, sued him as Governor of Massachusetts) was being impugned. Protectors of civil liberties should not be mistreated, any more than his own wife should be raped. But just as he ignored the personal implications of the brutal question asked him by Bernard Shaw in his second debate with Bush, he ignored the chance to defend liberals who had stood by those being deprived of their constitutional rights.

The contrast between the two campaigns' responses to attacks was made clear at the Republican Convention when a furor broke out over the nomination of Dan Quayle for Vice President. The day after that announcement, delegates found, waiting for them on their seats in the convention hall, statements from veterans' groups that it was no disgrace to serve in the National Guard and from National Guardsmen saying it was an honor to serve with them. By the time the convention session began, each floor whip had a set of quotations from military spokesmen defending Quayle's patriotism. Attacks were anticipated by the Republicans. They were ignored even after they occurred on the Democratic side.

What Dukakis should have done when the Pledge came up was appear with John Glenn and other patriotic icons of the Democratic Party to say the flag was being cheapened by the attack on Supreme Court rulings. On the Horton issue, Dukakis should have had a panel of penologists appearing to explain the nation's furlough systems, their risks and rewards as proved over time, and comparing the various state and federal programs with the Massachusetts one. On the A.C.L.U., Dukakis should have appeared with officers of that organization and joked about all the times they had disagreed in the past, while asserting that what makes America great is the preservation of free discussion and advocacy. This is what columnist Christopher Matthews, Tip O'Neill's onetime aide, calls seeking to "hang a lantern on your problems." But Dukakis' problem was that he did not know he had problems.

With Jackson, instead of trying to hide him for a while (as if that would affect the people determined to vote against the Democrats because of race), Dukakis should have shared the platform with him, saying the Democratic Party has nothing to hide -- unlike the Republicans, who were smuggling Dan Quayle into grade schools where girls could squeal and boys could ask questions as dumb as the answers. By the time Dukakis began to respond, it was by desperately imitating Bush's first flag rallies and by producing mean copies of the Horton ad, substituting victims of the federal furloughs (something Dukakis had earlier said he would not do).

The result was a dreary spectacle. Not only were two fundamentally decent men acting in foul ways, but they were being impelled in part because of their decent traits. Bush's reluctance to attack meant that he had to be overstimulated, and Dukakis' self-containment was read as a form of acquiescence that stirred the other side to greater boldness. While describing all the "tough choices" he was going to make as President, Dukakis let himself be pilloried by petty political hatchet men -- hardly a recommendation for standing up against Gorbachev!

Apportioning guilt for this unhappy outcome is not itself a very productive exercise. The Bush operatives were swift and ruthless in attack. But Dukakis' renunciation of ideology left a vacuum that was bound to be filled with something more than his endless incantations of "good jobs at good wages" or of "decent, affordable housing" rattled out with machine-gun rapidity all over the country. Dukakis could not talk meaningfully about the deficit, since his only response to it was the laughable proposal to collect more of the taxes due. Having deprived himself of the liberal network that defeated Bork, he tried to appeal to a purely cerebral group of Americans who wanted things better done, a managerial elite that does not exist and could not be conjured up by his energetic assurances that he would continue to be himself.

It was only in desperation, at the bottom of his plunge in the polls, that Dukakis went back to his base, to the special interests, to unions and women and blacks. Jackson was at his side again; the liberal label, once dismissed, was belatedly embraced. The slow climb back up in the polls was nerve-racking in its contrast to the way he had plummeted. Would he make it back? His end- game strategy served as a testament to the resources he had squandered. Even though the appeal came late, the interests helped him finish with pride.

Bush won by default, and by fouls. His "mandate" is to ignore the , threats to our economy, sustain the Reagan heritage of let's-pretend, and serve as figurehead for what America has become, a frightened empire hiding its problems from itself.