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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."