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Moreover, 1988 has become the Year of the Handler partly because of the great voids this time. Among them: the lack of visceral issues to shape the campaign, the absence of a commanding personality on either ticket, and the fuzziness of the national mood on both economic and foreign policy issues. In this environment, small tactics and forced errors can have a large impact. Experts in offensive gambits and defensive damage control are indispensable. With no margin for error, the danger of a gaffe, a mistake that will reveal too much, induces a crippling level of scripted caution. After the feel-good placebo of the Reagan years, neither Bush nor Dukakis dares to realistically ; address such pressing questions as the $2.8 trillion national debt. Devoid of content, the campaign almost inevitably becomes a technical exercise, akin to an overcoached Super Bowl with all plays taking place within the 40-yd. lines.
To be sure, there are major differences between Bush and Dukakis in the ease with which they have adapted to the discipline of send-them-a-simple-message politics. It was the Vice President who dominated the airwaves and lowered the level of the debate with a series of irrelevant and inflammatory issues, ranging from the Pledge of Allegiance to the Massachusetts prison-furlough program. Few, however, would describe Dukakis as waging a campaign of ideas, despite a recent laudable flurry of substantive speeches on defense policy and health issues. Within a week, the Massachusetts Governor both posed in an M-1 tank and flew halfway across the country for a photo opportunity at Yellowstone Park.
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 the pollsters and the media advisers are running things and where the Vice President seems willing to do anything they say."
In truth, the two campaign staffs, like rival armies, increasingly tend to resemble each other. Every weekday morning, Sasso in Boston and Baker in Washington preside over strategy meetings designed to fine-tune that day's thematics. The longer-range questions at both meetings are similar: Where will the candidate go next? What will he say? What is the target group of voters? What do the polls say? Which states warrant a heavier advertising budget?
At Dukakis headquarters the major political decisions used to be made at the 9 a.m. departmental meeting that Estrich still chairs. Sasso has pre-empted some of the decision making by creating a loose, informal 8 o'clock gathering with a few key advisers, such as Kirk O'Donnell, Jack Corrigan and Peter Jacobs.