Word: bites
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Dukakis and his staff nonetheless tend to see themselves in overly high- minded terms, as the innocent victims of sound-bite sabotage. Campaign chairman Brountas pointedly walked to the back of the Dukakis plane last week to give ABC newsman Sam Donaldson a copy of a Doonesbury cartoon that lampooned Bush aide Atwater as dictating the message of the day to a network news director. Similarly, Estrich, who kept her title in the Dukakis campaign while yielding to Sasso responsibility for shaping the campaign's message, claims, "The campaign staff is far more important on the Republican side, where...
Estrich was, and is, an incisive thinker and an intense manager with a keen grasp of policy issues. But she and her lieutenants were simply not adroit in matching the strategic maneuvering through which the Bush campaign dominated the sound-bite agenda. In politics, as in war, whichever side chooses the battlefield is likely to win. Baker and his cadre were designating the battlefield every day. In addition, none of the top Dukakis command, with the occasional exception of Brountas, could tell the candidate things he did not want to hear or make him do what he did not want...
...three days last week designed to counter Dukakis' dovish image, the candidate talked about using economic pressure to force the Soviets' hand on human rights. In Chicago and Washington he professed support for the Stealth bomber and the Trident II missile. And he peppered his speeches with the sound bite-size generalities that TV news adores: "We're going to put our defense dollars where our defense needs are greatest...
Compared with the sound-bite sparring on the nightly news, the 90-minute Wake Forest wordfest may seem like an advanced policy seminar. But the rigid format allows both men to get away with programmed answers and pretested prose. How can you get a sense of the real candidates lurking behind the campaign consultants? Ignore the mock theatrics and instead focus on those unscripted moments that provide a glimpse of how the two men think and react. Use this Spontaneity Scorecard to decide who best displays his fitness to be President, not guest host on the Johnny Carson show...
...often, even when he fights back, Dukakis' rhetoric lacks bite of ! all varieties. He seems to have adopted all too well another of the Deaveresque techniques perfected by Reagan: keep the message issueless and content-free. Through most of the week, the candidate kept being upstaged by his own warm-up speakers. Finally, last Friday, Dukakis displayed some belated fire while campaigning in Texas, when he likened Bush's posturing on the Pledge of Allegiance to McCarthyism: "Now they're attacking my patriotism, and just as they did in the 1950s, the American people can smell the garbage...