The Phantom Race

By WALTER SHAPIRO

The romanticized myths that surround a modern presidential campaign die hard. The nation still clings to the notion that the race to the White House is an endurance contest between two candidates -- their voices cracking, their faces haggard from exhaustion -- who somehow summon the strength to inspire one more crowd, to frame one more argument and to shake one more outstretched hand. This peripatetic image befits the John Kennedy of 1960. On Labor Day 28 years ago, Kennedy attended a union breakfast, dropped by the Michigan State Fair, addressed 60,000 people jammed into Cadillac Square in Detroit, stumped at three different holiday picnics in three other Michigan cities, appeared at a late-night rally and then jetted off at 11 p.m. for a five-hour flight to Idaho.

Every evening the television screens convey the impression that Michael Dukakis and George Bush are upholding this tradition. In truth, these national , campaigns have turned into stylized exercises in imagery masquerading as sincere efforts to commune with the American people. Dukakis, the self- anointed heir to the Kennedy tradition, delivered just ten speeches in five days last week, held two formal press conferences and appeared before a total of maybe 20,000 voters. Bush was, if anything, even more elusive. Labor Day was confined to Southern California, as the Vice President toured a San Diego fish-company plant (forgetting to doff his tie as he dissected a sea bass for the cameras), gave the U.S. Olympic athletes a patriotic send-off at Disneyland and preached a law-and-order sermon at a Los Angeles police department picnic.

This updated style of stumping might be called Politics Lite -- all the pictures of a traditional campaign with less of the annoying heavy substance. Minimalism has been something of a Republican speciality, ever since first Richard Nixon in 1968 and then Michael Deaver, as Ronald Reagan's imagemaker in 1980, figured out that the less the candidate appears in public, the more control the campaign has over the stories that appear on TV. This time around, Craig Fuller, the Vice President's chief of staff, faithfully follows the dictum of "one message per day -- that's the goal." The Dukakis campaign adheres to a similar battle plan. "You can probably go to three places in a single day," says a Dukakis adviser. "But by the third place, you're moving into, not advancing, the story."

Bush has soared since the Republican Convention largely because he has come to excel at this telescoped form of send-them-a-message politics. Each day Bush sprinkles into his campaign texts a few made-for-TV lines designed to place Dukakis on the defensive. Bush has artfully, and cynically, used these daily sound bites to impugn Dukakis' patriotism over the Pledge of Allegiance and to suggest that the Massachusetts Governor is soft on crime and heedless of the nation's security. In typical fashion last week, Bush claimed he would not be surprised if his rival "thought a naval exercise is something you find in a Jane Fonda workout book."

Dukakis, whose speeches have displayed all the lilt of a high-school commencement address, has been curiously inept at responding in kind. "Michael Dukakis tries to create a speech that has a beginning, a middle and an end," explains Campaign Chairman Paul Brountas. "It's not just 30 different sound bites."

But all too often, even when he fights back, Dukakis' rhetoric lacks bite of ! all varieties. He seems to have adopted all too well another of the Deaveresque techniques perfected by Reagan: keep the message issueless and content-free. Through most of the week, the candidate kept being upstaged by his own warm-up speakers. Finally, last Friday, Dukakis displayed some belated fire while campaigning in Texas, when he likened Bush's posturing on the Pledge of Allegiance to McCarthyism: "Now they're attacking my patriotism, and just as they did in the 1950s, the American people can smell the garbage."

Since so much that Bush and Dukakis do and say is prepackaged and programmed, the press naturally emphasizes the rare unscripted moments, whatever their lasting significance. There was a brief and meaningless flap after an overexuberant Bush bizarrely ad-libbed to the American Legion convention that Sept. 7 (and not Dec. 7) was the 47th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The news last Tuesday night featured both candidates fending off hecklers: militant right-to-lifers who shouted Dukakis down in suburban Chicago and outspoken hardhats who jeered Bush in Portland, Ore. There was little evidence that either group was representative of the electorate. But the TV imagery made Bush appear tough as he whipped out his ancient union card from 1950, while all Dukakis could muster were a few limp appeals ("I hope you would respect my right to speak") that seemed more suited for a Brookline town meeting than a Polish-American banquet hall.

What is unfortunate is that television and the daily newspapers, forced to produce a Bush and Dukakis story each day, feed the illusion that the candidates are conducting a dialogue with the electorate. Sound bites aside, little that either contender is saying provides a fresh glimpse of what he might do in office. Bush's two major recent policy addresses -- on the environment and on foreign-policy goals -- were recycled versions of earlier speeches gussied up with new applause lines. Dukakis won front-page headlines for his innovative, if poorly detailed, proposal to allow college students to repay their loans through a small surcharge on their lifetime earnings. But the idea was not quite the policy breakthrough that the campaign claimed; Dukakis had already outlined the proposal in speeches last April and May.

Back in the innocent days of the early primaries, before neighborhood meetings were supplanted by motorcades and media events, Dukakis and Bush had to respond to questions from ordinary citizens. These days, such real-life , voters are useful only as scenic backdrops. That is why it was striking on Labor Day morning when Dukakis tried to hold an informal town meeting with a few dozen voters in South Philadelphia. The questions on schools and the environment were serious, but so was the jeering from 100 antiabortion protesters, who turned a picturesque event into near chaos. The moral: a Dukakis aide predicts, "There aren't going to be too many events like that."

In this void the press has to serve as surrogates for the voters. But campaign press conferences are fast becoming an endangered species. At one point earlier this month, the Vice President went 13 days with just one 13- minute press availability. Hectored by a frustrated reporter at a Boston Harbor photo opportunity, Bush promised to face the press the following day, a Friday. But aides then realized that a spontaneous question-and-answer session would probably overshadow the carefully choreographed campaign message. So they artfully postponed the promised press conference until Saturday (a near invisible news day), when the Vice President cheerfully treated reporters to hot dogs and horseshoes at his official residence in Washington. His duty done, Bush then went all last week without a follow-up.

The political virtues of this Reaganesque aloofness have not been lost on Dukakis. For weeks Bush aides privately marveled that the Massachusetts Governor was willing to sacrifice control of the news on the altar of daily press conference. But no more Mr. Accessible. Dukakis now appears before reporters only when he wants to take control of the day's story.

So far the campaign has been a dispiriting world of illusion dominated by pyrotechnics, platitudes and the Pledge of Allegiance. But this phony war will give way on Sunday, Sept. 25, to the biggest sound bite of them all: the first Bush-Dukakis debate in Winston-Salem, N.C. There will also be a second presidential debate and one between Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen. Each will take place during that late September-early October athletic orgy dominated by the Olympics and the major-league baseball play-offs. While debates are not an automatic panacea for pablum, seeing Bush and Dukakis at long last without their canned daily messages or scenic backdrops can only elevate the campaign.

With reporting by David Beckwith with Bush and Michael Duffy with Dukakis