Word: sasso
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Dukakis spent the fall on the defensive rather than taking charge of the agenda. He entered the campaign a blank slate, and Bush scrawled all over him. Bush made liberal a dirty word, while Dukakis stupidly insisted that such a label was "meaningless." For John Sasso, the street-savvy alter ego of Dukakis who was rehabilitated on Labor Day weekend to take over the campaign, this single mistake spelled the end. "One of the rules of the business is somebody gets to fill up the cup," he explained. "If you want to be successful, you have to fill...
...When Sasso returned, he inherited this snake pit. He brought in an acquaintance, David D'Alessandro of the John Hancock insurance company, who had never run a political ad shop. In mid-September D'Alessandro arranged the Shoot-Out at the Ritz-Carlton, a demeaning screening of potential scripts. In a cavernous baroque banquet room, ad-makers flipped through their storyboards to impress the new team. It was an amateurish tryout that produced more bitterness than ads. Among those produced was a semicoherent series ridiculing Bush's handlers. Although they are certain to form the core of Kennedy School seminars...
Even after Labor Day, when Sasso finally persuaded Dukakis to venture into the realm of neopopulism with powerful talk of the "middle-class squeeze" and "two-job prosperity," the Governor was wont to abandon the topic without warning. This message madness continued until the final weeks, when he seized on the theme "I'm on your side" and decided to ride the populist pony as far as it would go. Still, he could not master the chords of resentment that are a basic component of economic populism...
During his eleven months in quiet exile, Sasso had only sporadic contacts with the man who banished him for leaking a video exposing Senator Joe Biden's use of lines from a British politician. He and Dukakis talked, but rarely about politics. Even when Sasso attended the Atlanta convention, staying at the same hotel as Dukakis, the two men never saw each other. That did not keep reporters from repeatedly asking if Sasso was coming back...
Dukakis' political problems stem directly from his stiff-necked refusal to heed the advice of others. Campaign strategist John Sasso was the indispensable man because he possesses the unique ability to prompt Dukakis to listen. Dukakis also failed abysmally in translating his much vaunted administrative skills to the discipline of creating a national campaign; he insisted on micromanaging nearly everything from interviewing political aides to approving scripts of TV spots. The result: insularity and indecision. In addition, Dukakis has failed to inspire loyalty, a quality that Bush prizes, perhaps in the extreme. But at this dour moment in the campaign...