Color It Republican

Reaping the credit for peace and prosperity, Bush holds most of Reagan's key voting blocs -- and even overcomes the gender gap

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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.

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