The Campaign

By LAURENCE I. BARRETT WASHINGTON

"We've struck gold in the Black Hills!" crowed Bob Kerrey after winning last week's South Dakota primary. The political payoff was slight: the Nebraska Democrat bagged only seven delegates. More important, his victory, with an impressive 40% of the vote, attracted contributions to his impoverished organization. But the money was not enough to allow Kerrey to take to other states the aggressive TV campaign he mounted in South Dakota. For three precious days, he was an unwilling pacifist in a political air war marked by sharply rising bitterness and intensity. The number of negative ads began to increase in proportion to the failure of most of the candidates to build winning streaks with positive messages.

As the primary competition in both parties quickens, the importance of broadcast advertising escalates. Democrats face contests in 22 states this week and next. This brutal pace precludes extended personal campaigning in any one state, forcing candidates to adapt their strategies to how much they can advertise and how much free exposure they can get.

As Senators from neighboring farm states, Kerrey and Iowa's Tom Harkin had the most at stake in South Dakota. Because air time there is cheap, both were able to bombard South Dakotans with pro-agriculture messages. Kerrey attacked the two leading Democrats, Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas, as insensitive to / farmers' problems. He gave Harkin a bye, partly because Kerrey hopes to inherit the Iowan's supporters if Harkin drops out. That may not take long: after Harkin placed second with 25%, he lacked funds to advertise anywhere. He had to back away from larger primaries and concentrate on this week's caucus states, such as Minnesota and Washington.

While his advisers drew a new battle plan for the fortnight after South Dakota, Kerrey went south to deliver what an aide called "a real hit" on Clinton, the favorite in the Georgia primary scheduled for this week. A Medal of Honor winner who lost part of a leg in Vietnam, Kerrey berated his rival for failing to be candid about how he avoided military service. That makes Clinton unelectable in November, Kerrey insisted. In an awkward affectation of Southern folksiness, the Nebraskan predicted Clinton would "get opened up like a boiled peanut" by the Republican President. But Clinton barked right back, accusing Kerrey of using "the disgraceful divide-and-conquer tactics for which George Bush became famous in 1988."

The assault by Kerrey violated earlier promises to let the issue lie. But his camp thought it had to shake the chessboard. Kerrey has virtually no chance of winning Georgia or any of the large states up for grabs next week, including Texas and Florida. So his ploy is to drive down Clinton's numbers while pursuing a "delegate accrual" strategy -- targeting specific districts in the hope of picking up small blocs of delegates in many states. He also looks west, striving for a base that will keep him in the contest until the final primaries in June. When Kerrey did begin advertising again at week's end, it was with a biographical spot in Colorado, his best prospect in the contests this week. By stressing his background as war hero, successful businessman and citizen-politician, it aims to prove Kerrey has the drive to keep his promises. Then the candidate followed up with an ad challenging Clinton's and Tsongas's environmental credentials.

Tsongas seemed to lose some momentum after his New Hampshire victory, finishing fourth in South Dakota with 10% and winning the Feb. 23 Maine caucuses with a puny margin over none other than Jerry Brown. Nonetheless, he pulled in enough cash after New Hampshire to launch a five-state advertising blitz last week. Tsongas was outspending the more affluent Clinton in Maryland, where the former Massachusetts Senator seems to have his best chance of showing he can win outside New England.

One spot shows Tsongas diving into a pool, an image he has used for months to demonstrate that surviving cancer has not left him enervated. He is one of the few middle-aged politicians who look more virile in a swimsuit than in a business suit. Another commercial shows symbols of the country's angst -- an empty factory, a lot filled with Japanese cars -- while an announcer promises Tsongas will best foreign competitors "the American way, by making quality come first again."

Tsongas's ad campaign reflects his low-key personal style -- minus his dry wit. To date, Tsongas is the only candidate in either party to abstain from ads blatantly attacking any of his rivals. But that may soon change: his media advisers are preparing a counteroffensive on the theory that in voters' minds unanswered charges amount to confessions.

Clinton went after Tsongas by airing a new spot in Colorado, Georgia and Maryland that paints the ex-Senator as a Wall Street pawn. Of the dozen Clinton ads shown this year, the whack at Tsongas is the only one in which Clinton is barely seen and is heard not at all; an anonymous announcer does the kneecapping. Most of the other Clinton commercials mirror his candidacy -- smooth, warm, persuasive, calculated with an insider's finesse to play on the public's anger at insiders.

Clinton routinely hails "the forgotten middle class." Of the items in his economic-recovery program, the one mentioned most often is a tax cut for middle-income Americans. For conservative Georgians, he unveiled a new promise: "insisting that those on welfare move into the workplace." His commercials make good use of Clinton's rapport with the camera. His media adviser, Frank Greer, manages to blend the candidate's persona and platform into a seamless series of spots.

Those ads will get their biggest test this week. Though he is the ostensible front runner, Clinton has yet to win a primary or caucus. Now the Governor of Arkansas is playing in his home region, where many of the primaries through March 10 will take place. Because Clinton must score decisively in the area, he was spending twice as much as Tsongas last week in Georgia.

Yet Clinton may have hampered that effort with a bizarre, unscripted TV performance. Preparing for a satellite interview with an Arizona station, he was told -- inaccurately -- that Jesse Jackson was about to endorse the failing Harkin. Clinton, unaware that the camera and microphones were on, | delivered a tirade in which he accused Jackson of "backstabbing" him. That outburst got nationwide display, free exposure that Clinton may rue for weeks. As Clinton tried to mollify the Democrats' best-known black leader, Jackson complained about the "blast at my integrity." For Clinton, the possible cost of the incident was loss of black support, on which he counts heavily.

If the Democrats were getting feisty, the Republican air war in Georgia was going nuclear. Pat Buchanan wounded George Bush in New Hampshire with ads charging the President with deception on the tax issue. Now, in his next opportunity to take on Bush directly, the right-wing columnist charged Bush with tolerating sexual perversion and anti-Christian values. One Buchanan spot shows gay men cavorting in skin-tight leather, a scene from a film produced with federal assistance from the National Endowment for the Arts. "Even after good people protested," intones the narrator, "Bush continued to fund this kind of art." "Nobody wants a trade war," Buchanan says in another ad, "but we can't be trade wimps."

The Bush campaign launched its first attack ad squarely at Buchanan. In it General P.X. Kelley, retired commandant of the Marine Corps, denounces Buchanan's opposition to the Persian Gulf war. "The last thing we need in the White House is an isolationist like Pat Buchanan," says Kelley. A second ad designed to boost Bush's leadership credentials shows the President sitting awkwardly on the edge of his desk reviewing papers while an announcer recites his agenda.

But Bush's campaign was clearly not generating the excitement that carried him triumphantly through the primaries four years ago. Last week in South Dakota, where Buchanan was not even on the ballot, nearly 1 out of 3 Republican voters spurned the President in favor of an uncommitted slate of delegates. In view of those results and the mediocre grades Bush's spots have been getting, it is not surprising that some White House advisers are talking about the need for a different approach. The pugnacious brilliance of media adviser Roger Ailes and the late Lee Atwater, the authors of Bush's jugular- oriented 1988 ads, is missed by the President. Ironically, their spirit seems to have migrated to Buchanan's campaign and may be influencing some of the Democrats as well.

With reporting by Jon D. Hull/Chicago and Michael Riley/Atlanta