Well, just where was George?
Or, more to the point, where is George, who is he and where does he want to go?
Like any candidate and any party, George Bush and the Republicans have to answer some questions at the convention that will nominate Bush for president this week.
But Bush and the Republicans have two extra complications. First, their questions are variations of the one asked by their least favorite Democrat at the other party`s convention.
”Where was George?” Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy intoned in Atlanta last month. The Democratic delegates responded by chanting the question, and Democrats like it so much they are preparing buttons asking it in various languages, from Spanish (Donde estaba Jorge?) to Yiddish (Voo iz gevven George?).
That Democratic question was about Bush`s role, if any, in some of the Reagan administration`s less successful endeavors. These Republican questions are about who George Bush is and what kind of a president he would be.
Which brings up the second complication. Many Republicans aren`t sure they will like the direct answers to those questions, so they plan to answer them by asking one of their own-”Who is Mike?”-and providing their own anwer: Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis is a big-spending, soft-on-defense, capital-L Liberal.
”We cannot elect George Bush as an evanescent leader,” said Republican political consultant Eddie Mahe. ”Bush has to define himself by defining Dukakis.”
Mahe`s view is that Bush`s best chance is to be thought of as ”an acceptable alternative” to an unacceptable Dukakis. But before getting people to consider Bush an acceptable alternative, the Republicans will have to make Dukakis unacceptable to more voters.
Politicians call this raising the opposition`s negatives, and toward this end the Bush campaign has appointed Andrew Card, a savvy Massachusetts Republican, to head its anti-Dukakis research while Republicans at all levels accuse Dukakis of hiding his real commitment to what the GOP likes to call
”The L-word,” liberalism.
”The main theme of our convention will be to contrast the issues that differentiate George Bush and Michael Dukakis,” said Jim Lake of the Bush campaign. ”Their convention was a convention of personality. We`re going to make ours a convention of the issues.”
It is a tactic that has not worked so far and entails some risk. The latest polls not only show Bush trailing Dukakis, they show that the vice president arouses negative feelings among almost half the electorate while most people have positive attitudes toward his opponent and most of them do not consider Dukakis too liberal.
The Republicans, in fact, seem befuddled by Dukakis` refusal to run an ideological campaign. Maintaining the theme of his acceptance speech that
”this election is not about ideology; it`s about competence,” the Democrat continued last week to talk about leadership and economic growth, unveiling a new television commercial Friday that calls for ”new era of economic greatness in America.”
The ad says that Dukakis created more than 400,000 jobs, increased personal income in Massachusetts ”and erased a massive deficit.”
Playing off his earlier campaign theme of the ”Massachusetts Miracle,”
the announcer says twice, ”It wasn`t a miracle. . . . It was leadership.”
”You cannot divorce national security from economic security. We cannot build a strong nation, we cannot be the strong international leader we must be if we`re teeter-tottering on the edge of financial disaster,” says Dukakis as he stands in the garden of the Virginia governor`s mansion.
Leadership, said Dukakis spokesman Leslie Dach, ”is the L-word in the Bush campaign, the word they won`t mention.”
The conventional political rule is that when a candidate attacks the opposition before establishing his own ”positives,” it will only raise his own ”negatives,” but this is a risk the Republicans may be willing to take. ”It probably will drive up our hard negatives,” Mahe said. ”But we`ve got to get his (Dukakis`) up.”
Still, most Republicans acknowledge that simply bashing Dukakis and the Democrats will not be enough, and that the convention provides Bush and his party their best opportunity to improve their standing with the public.
As Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater put it, the Republicans hope that when the convention ends Thursday evening, voters will think Bush ”is his own man and he has a plan of action.”
A convention, Atwater said, ”is a transforming event in American politics (and) it will be in this case, too. After this convention we will get a sense of George Bush-what he stands for, where he wants to go, where he wants to take the country.”
That sense of who Bush is will be conveyed largely by two events: his selection of a vice presidential running mate and the acceptance speech he gives to the convention and the nation Thursday evening. Bush`s choice for vice president, said Republican consultant Roger Stone, ”will tell you a lot about George Bush the man, about the future of the Republican Party and about what kind of campaign he will run.”
With no doubts about Bush`s nomination and with no disputes about the party platform, the vice presidential choice is the only uncertainty remaining and therefore is the topic of a great deal of speculation, all of it uninformed, and a fair amount of political posturing, none of it likely to influence Bush.
Most of the posturing comes from conservatives, who are mobilizing delegates and holding rallies in an effort to persuade Bush to pick someone from the GOP`s right wing. One organization has been set up to advance the case of former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Sen. Gordon Humphrey of New Hampshire has formed something called the Coalition for a Winning Ticket, designed to pressure Bush to pick a conservative such as Rep. Jack Kemp of New York.
But some Republicans think the party`s platform is already so conservative-Dukakis` spokesman called it ”a right-wing platform mired in the past”-that what Bush should do is pick a centrist Republican, someone who would anger conservatives enough to present a mainstream image of the ticket to the electorate. The favorite candidates of these Republicans are Senators Bob Dole of Kansas and Pete Domenici of New Mexico.
There are three other schools of thought about the vice presidency. One is that Bush should try to improve his chances in a major state by choosing Gov. George Deukmejian of California or Gov. James Thompson of Illinois, even though both men begged off. Another is that Bush should try to improve his standing among female voters by picking Sen. Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, though she, too, has said that she is not interested. The third holds that Bush`s best bet is to choose a younger Republican such as Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana. As to the acceptance speech, Republican strategist David Keene said it would be ”the first time in a very long time George Bush will have the opportunity to speak directly to the American people. It gives him a chance to change that stereotype people have of him as being, well, a little goofy.”
But as Keene acknowledged, there is a risk here, too. ”Of course,” he said, ”it could convince them that whatever they had heard before might be true. But that`s the chance you take.”
