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The structure is more formal at Bush headquarters, where Baker's authority $ is explicit as well as implicit. At 7:30 each morning, seated around the conference table in Baker's office are roughly the same seven or eight key people, including Atwater, TV guru Roger Ailes, pollster Robert Teeter and chief of staff Craig Fuller. "What's the line of the day?" is Baker's invariable call to order -- and that question perfectly encapsulates the bumper-sticker mind-set that dominates both campaigns. Teeter provides the initial answer, usually based on his latest polling. The mood is virtually always low key. "We've all worked together for years in various jobs," explains Margaret Tutwiler, Baker's longtime top aide. "There's no real excitement to it. It's almost boring."
When Baker arrived as planned at Bush headquarters after the G.O.P. convention, he confronted problems far less dire than those that would later bedevil Sasso. One reason: as Tutwiler points out, the top Bush handlers have all fought side by side before. Until Baker took over, this teamwork was undermined by the lack of anyone in firm control of the campaign. Atwater had nominal top authority as campaign manager, but Bush insisted that all decisions be made by consensus. The result was the kind of paralyzing chaos that allowed the Dan Quayle nomination to bring the campaign to the brink of disaster. Almost no decisions were firm, since each of the top advisers reserved the right to mount a back-channel appeal to the Vice President.
As soon as Baker arrived, there was no question who was the final authority. The former Treasury Secretary, who has played a major role in every G.O.P. presidential campaign since 1976, has become a figure of such stature that there is no counterpart to him in the Democratic Party. Sasso owes his authority to his personal bonds with Dukakis; Baker has managed the political fortunes of two Republican Presidents, and directed Bush's 1980 primary campaign. Baker, in fact, represents the rare towering figure who is an exception to the political truism that power depends on physical access to the candidate. Even more than Sasso, Baker has laid down the dictum that almost all decisions are made at headquarters, not in the fuselage of Air Force Two at 35,000 ft.
There is a curmudgeonly line of argument that contends that campaign strategy, like most mystic arts, consists mainly of common sense buttressed by uncommon decisiveness. It is probably also true that Dukakis' July lead in the polls was destined to fade like a hothouse flower. The Massachusetts Governor, after all, is running against the heir to a popular President who is campaigning on peace and prosperity. But even so, it is hard to exaggerate the problems that Sasso inherited when for the second time he took the tiller of the foundering campaign.