Three-Way Gridlock

By WALTER SHAPIRO

On the old Mickey Mouse Club, Wednesday was officially dubbed "Anything Can Happen Day." But for the star-crossed Democrats, it was Super Tuesday that ushered in the season of anything-can-happen politics. The members of the Democratic troika, Michael Dukakis, Albert Gore and Jesse Jackson, each declared victory as they split almost equally the 20-state delegate harvest. But the fates decreed that the 9.5 million Democratic voters would deprive any contender of the kind of breakthrough that would unfuddle the nomination muddle. In fact, the verdict on Super Tuesday for the Democrats, unlike that for the Republicans, may be that never before have so many primary voters armed with so little information gone to the polls in so many states to leave a race so unsettled.

There were no grand themes, no cutting issues, no electric enthusiasm for any candidate save Jackson and his over-the-rainbow dreams. Rather than a Democratic referendum, the Super Tuesday primaries turned out to be little more than a multiple-choice exam in which voters chose their favorite 30- second TV spots. Both Dukakis and Gore invested heavily in negative ads to define themselves in opposition to the pseudo populism of Richard Gephardt. The get-Gephardt pincer attack worked: the Missouri Congressman carried only his home state and faded from contention. While Dukakis, Gore and Jackson all had ample reason to exult in their Super Tuesday delegate flow, their brags should be tempered by major red flags.

Dukakis, now universally regarded as the party's front runner, kept boasting that he was a "national candidate" thanks to his clear-cut victories in Texas and Florida. But an artfully tailored campaign that garnered the support of Hispanics in South Texas and Frost Belt refugees in the condo canyons of South Florida did not transform Dukakis into a win-Dixie Democrat. Actually, the Massachusetts Governor left few footprints in the red clay of the traditional South; in Alabama and Mississippi, he won less than 10% of the vote. "Dukakis gained a half step on everyone else this week," said Democratic Pollster Peter Hart. "But he still has a lot of work to do. He has to get to working-class Democrats, and to do that he needs an economic message of change. One of his biggest problems is the label as a status quo Democrat."

Gore, whose last-minute media surge obliterated the ill-funded Gephardt, could point to the six Super Tuesday states he carried as evidence that you can run for President and still get a good tan. But for Gore, who played possum while the others scrambled up North, his Southern victories could prove as evanescent as Bob Dole's I'm-one-of-you Iowa sweep. Few voters displayed any deep commitment to the still ill-defined Gore candidacy; even in states that abut his native Tennessee, Gore won much of his support in the final 72 hours of the campaign. As Georgia Democratic Chairman John Henry Anderson, a Dukakis supporter, put it, "People voted for Gore because he was viewed in the end as the Southern candidate. No one else caught on."

Jackson, the only candidate to win delegates in all 20 Super Tuesday states, attracted a virtually unanimous black vote along with almost 10% of the white electorate. "We have the poorest campaign but the richest message," Jackson told supporters on primary night. "We are the smallest dog with the biggest bite." Yet Jackson's growing strength remains a precursor of deadlock to come, since the most potent long-term rationale for his candidacy is to play kingmaker for the eventual nominee. Such power fits his determination to serve as the "party's conscience." But with Jackson holding the potential to arrive at the Atlanta Convention with one-quarter of the delegates, he makes it almost impossible for a contender to win the nomination the old-fashioned way: by corralling a majority of the delegates by the end of the June 7 California and New Jersey primaries.

The next two weeks will test the extent of Democratic fragmentation. Paul Simon, who all but abandoned campaigning after his crippling third-place finish in New Hampshire, might still win a hefty share of his home-state delegates in this week's Illinois primary. If Simon survives a strong challenge from Dukakis and Jackson, he plans to keep struggling on in hopes of picking up pockets of delegates elsewhere. New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who remains resolutely in the stable but clearly enjoys handicapping the race, appreciates the logic of Simon's position. "If the candidates believe there's going to be a brokered convention," he explains, "then it makes sense for them to stay in the race with as many delegates as they can hold. They figure, 'I can hang on with a couple of hundred delegates and then I'm in the game.' "

The same play-it-out rationale applies to the beleaguered Gephardt, who just a few weeks ago was seen as almost certain to battle Dukakis all the way to California. Now Gephardt vows to regroup in the March 26 Michigan caucuses, where his talk-tough trade policies had been expected to appeal to United Auto Workers' rank and file. But even as he moved virtually his entire campaign staff into Michigan, Gephardt paid an immediate price for his Super Tuesday disaster when the U.A.W. leadership chose to remain neutral in the caucuses. Dukakis is determined to drive Gephardt from the race with some Motown momentum of his own. Detroit Mayor Coleman Young, one of the few black leaders pursuing an independent course, is expected to endorse Dukakis and allow him to challenge Jackson for a fraction of the inner-city caucus vote. But as in Illinois, a badly splintered outcome in Michigan would be tantamount to a vote for a bruising nomination fight that might go all the way to Atlanta.

After Super Tuesday, Dukakis is the only contender with a clear formula for victory. His well-financed, well-organized run-everywhere strategy is designed to transform him into the Duke of Inevitability: the Democrats' presumptive nominee by sheer dint of his steadily rising delegate totals. The Dukakis camp privately estimates that after the primaries are over, they should have a minimum of 1,500 of the 2,082 delegates needed for nomination. That would be close to what politicians regard as the tipping point: the moment when wavering delegates climb aboard for both personal gain and to avoid a convention bloodbath. The Democratic Party rules have encouraged such a bandwagon bonanza through the creation of 645 "superdelegates" who are not formally tied to a specific candidate. Mostly members of Congress and party officials, these free agents should temper the exuberance of ideologues with the pragmatism of political professionals.

The laid-back political calendar for the next month provides the Democrats with a respite from the frenzy of Super Tuesday. Aside from Illinois and Michigan, the only major contests are the Connecticut (March 29) and Wisconsin (April 5) primaries. This schedule provides Gore with a serious where-do- we-go-from-here problem. With a belated start in Illinois and no major bloc of support in Michigan, Gore may find his introduction to Northern-style politics chilly. At the moment, the Gore camp is considering bypassing both Connecticut and Wisconsin to concentrate on the string of major industrial- state primaries, beginning with New York on April 19. This dubious gambit would dissipate Gore's Super Tuesday halo and could accentuate the impression that he is primarily a regional candidate.

Thus, for the moment, the Democratic race resembles tag-team wrestling. It is Dukakis and his $2 million campaign kitty vs. an ever shifting array of opponents: Simon in Illinois, Gephardt in Michigan, Jackson in the black community and Gore wherever he finally chooses to take his stand. A national TIME poll conducted last Thursday night indicates the strength that the Massachusetts Governor brings to the coming series of grudge matches. More than seven times as many Democrats (58% to 8%) have a favorable rather than an unfavorable image of Dukakis. In trial pairings, he is currently the strongest Democratic contender against George Bush. Outside the South, Dukakis runs virtually even with the Vice President.

This TIME poll calls into question Gore's loudest justification for his candidacy: electability. "For those who want another election blowout, who want the Democrats to lose 49 out of 50 states, go ahead and vote for Mike Dukakis," Gore told voters in Illinois last week. This style of attack is Gore's way of linking Dukakis with the too-liberal-to-be-elected legacy of George McGovern and Walter Mondale. The underlying equation is simple: new politics (Gore) vs. old politics (Dukakis).

But the 1988 campaign is not simply a remake of the Walter Mondale-Gary Hart spats of four years ago. Despite some differences on foreign policy, Gore and Dukakis represent much the same style of end-to-ideology Democratic pragmatism. Gore prospered in Congress by stressing a host of technocratic issues, ranging from the ozone layer to organ transplants. Ever since his comeback victory as Governor in 1982, Dukakis has artfully avoided most of the pitfalls of free-spending liberalism. His major initiatives, like welfare reform and industrial development, were designed to blur ideological differences rather than accentuate them.

In fact, Dukakis' almost willful blandness is a major reason that his nomination is far from assured. Even after nearly a year of campaigning, Dukakis has yet to discover precisely what he wants to say. His constant references to "economic opportunity" and "good jobs at good wages" turned the Massachusetts economic revival into a much ridiculed cliche. Only in recent weeks, with Gephardt as the target, has Dukakis found his voice as a campaigner, railing against everything from protectionist legislation to the Missouri Congressman's votes for Reaganomics. Similarly, Dukakis' most successful ad in the South was a depiction of an acrobatic Gephardt flip- flopping through midair. Now with his favorite debating foil reduced to Simonesque proportions, Dukakis is again adrift, a candidate without a straw man.

The Dukakis high command is keenly aware that it has a medium without a message. For several weeks the Governor's top advisers had been preparing a major economic address that would define the candidate's agenda in the industrialized Northeast states. But the speech that Dukakis delivered in Chicago late last week seemed to borrow much of its beef from Gephardt's very own plate. Where until recently Dukakis had been direly warning of trade wars, now he was changing his emphasis by reverting to one of his previous themes: tariff protection for companies that agree to modernize their plants. There was no logical contradiction, no reversal of position, but there was a characteristic blurring of Dukakis' political identity as he tried to repackage himself to reach Gephardt's Rustbelt constituency.

When it comes to political elusiveness, Dukakis has met his match in Gore. For months Gore had been floundering as he groped to find a rationale for his candidacy more compelling than Georgia Senator Sam Nunn's failure to enter the race. Gore kept trying to identify himself as a hawk almost in the Scoop Jackson mold even as his private pollsters were insisting that Democratic voters in the South were as uninterested in nuclear strategy as voters elsewhere. But Gore stubbornly refused to modify his approach, even though his record was far less right-of-center than his rhetoric was. According to a top strategist for the candidate, "99% of the problem was Gore's. He refused to give a clearer message and forget about all this defense business."

But two weeks before Super Tuesday, Gore gulped down the favored elixir of Democrats facing defeat: a healthy slug of old-fashioned populism. Suddenly the stiffly serious Gore began larding his speeches with nonstop promises to "put the White House back on the side of working men and women." There was nothing wrong with the sentiment except that Gephardt, Gore's main rival in the South, had long been telling the same blue-collar voters, "It's your fight too."

But Gore had a major advantage in this battle of mock-populist converts: a television-advertising budget more than double the size of Gephardt's. In one TV spot, Gore angrily declared, "The corporations of this nation have to understand that they are American corporations, and they've got to start investing more money here for a change, and creating more jobs here for a change." In the shoot-out on the Southern airwaves, Gephardt was simply outgunned and outmaneuvered by Gore. As Joe Trippi, a top Gephardt adviser put it, "It was like there were two televisions, and ours got turned off and their volume got turned up."

But when it comes to substance, aside from defense policy, the Gore campaign remains an empty vessel waiting to be filled. Perhaps as a reflection of the old schoolyard adage "It takes one to know one," the slipperiness of Gore's political persona particularly irks the Dukakis camp. "First Al Gore ran as Sam Nunn," complains Leslie Dach, the Governor's spokesman. "Then he ran as Dick Gephardt. Now he's running as Gary Hart."

Gore stalwarts are equally annoyed over the way Dukakis keeps lurking behind the trees and refusing to come out and fight like, say, Walter Mondale. "Dukakis hasn't said anything," grumbles a Gore lieutenant. "All he's talked about is good jobs at good wages since the beginning of his campaign."

Perhaps these comments more than anything else explain Jesse Jackson's growing appeal to liberal white voters. In the kingdom of the bland, the preacher who has got a sermon to sing is king. That may explain why Jackson received 19% of the vote in Dukakis' home state, even though blacks make up just 3% of the Massachusetts voting-age population. At a Jackson rally in Little Rock, a onetime Simon delegate who had switched her allegiance told the crowd, "I'm tired of trying to figure out who's going to win. I want to vote for the person I believe in."

Some Democratic leaders are already frustrated over the party's inability to coalesce around a nominee, especially now that the Republicans have all but chosen their standard-bearer. But the Super Tuesday delegate jam may have given the Democratic contenders -- particularly Dukakis and Gore -- a chance to catch their breath and remind themselves that a campaign should be a battle over ideas and visions, not merely synthetic campaign messages. At the moment, it is a democratic principle that only Jackson seems to understand.

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: NO CREDIT

CAPTION: NO CAPTION

DESCRIPTION: Poll of Democratic voters giving their first choice for President and impressions of the four Democratic candidates.

CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: NO CAPTION

DESCRIPTION: Chart showing the number of delegates needed to be nominated, odds, typical supporters, strengths, and weaknesses of Democratic candidates. Pictured candidates Michael Dukakis, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, sitting on top of a color illustration of a donkey.

With reporting by Michael Duffy with Dukakis and Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta