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The Dukakis camp was simultaneously overconfident and overly defensive. There was the blustery insistence that the threadbare good-jobs-at-good-wages themes of the primaries would work against Bush, combined with the insecure reluctance to reach out to battle-tested Democrats who had worked for other candidates. There was virtually no planning, no ability to respond to Bush's attacks, and logistics out of the whistle-stop era. Dukakis would have to work until after midnight revising a speech he had just received for the next morning's breakfast event. All too often the candidate would take wooden prose and tired arguments and, miraculously, make them even blander. Small wonder that the campaign message was upstaged by everything from hecklers to a defensive Dukakis response to Bush's latest charges.
Estrich was, and is, an incisive thinker and an intense manager with a keen grasp of policy issues. But she and her lieutenants were simply not adroit in matching the strategic maneuvering through which the Bush campaign dominated the sound-bite agenda. In politics, as in war, whichever side chooses the battlefield is likely to win. Baker and his cadre were designating the battlefield every day. In addition, none of the top Dukakis command, with the occasional exception of Brountas, could tell the candidate things he did not want to hear or make him do what he did not want to do. By early September, even Dukakis realized this was a liability.
But in bringing back Sasso, Dukakis was careful to spare Estrich's feelings at the cost of the bureaucratic coherence of the campaign. Instead of reassigning some of the top staff as the effort expanded, Sasso just worked around them, relying on new, more seasoned hands that he recruited. As a result, there are in effect two campaign hierarchies: the paper structure and the de facto one reporting to Sasso. Even though Baker might blanch at such chain-of-command chaos, a tendency to paper over personnel problems is typical of presidential campaigns but can be near fatal in a President.
More than anything, Sasso has brought an end to turn-the-other-cheek piety in the face of the Vice President's attacks. Flying from Houston to Kentucky last Tuesday morning, the Dukakis staff mulled over how to respond to Bush's substantive event for the day: a visit to a New Jersey flag factory. At Sasso's direction, a group of aides gathered at the front of the plane to concoct a sound bite that would contrast Bush's flag-draped photo opportunity with Dukakis' upcoming speech on universal health insurance. The winning jab: "I have a question for Mr. Bush: Don't you think it's about time you came out from behind the flag and told us what you intend to do to provide basic health care for 37 million of our fellow citizens?"
The line drew large cheers. Sam Donaldson, poking back for the Doonesbury cartoon, told Brountas, "We can't use that." But, of course, he did. On the flight back to Boston, press secretary Dayton Duncan celebrated with a slug of bourbon: "We made the evening news." This, admittedly, was a paltry triumph for the nominee of a major party in September, but it conveys the dire mood that had prevailed in the Dukakis camp and the elation over the shifts that were under way. "This is not brain surgery," said Francis O'Brien, a Sasso recruit to the campaign. "Republicans have done it well for years."