Sunday, February 7, 1988

In '88, Gunning For the Early Bird

By Robert S. McElvaine

JACKSON, Miss. -- The suggestion that 1988 is going to be a strange year in the annals of Presidential politics is unlikely to produce much dissent. Yet one of the more unusual aspects of this year's election seems to have received little attention.

Normally, each party hopes that the other will take as long as possible to settle on a Presidential candidate. Protracted struggles for a nomination usually increase intraparty divisions, sap strength and weaken the eventual nominee.

While the party undergoing a preconvention battle is tearing itself apart and its combatants are spewing venom at each other, the other party can, if it unites behind a nominee early, build up that candidate for the general election.

This year, however, each party has an overriding reason to hope that the other will choose its standard-bearer quickly. The specific reasons differ but they both emanate from the fact that this time the person likely to be chosen early by either party would be the one the other party would most like to have as an opponent.

It has long been apparent that the choice of most Democrats for the G.O.P. nomination is Vice President Bush. Many leading Democrats have told me so in interviews over the past two years. "George Bush is certainly my candidate for the Republican nomination," said William Carrick, Richard A. Gephardt's campaign manager. "If the Republicans nominate someone like George Bush," Senator Christopher J. Dodd said, "the Democrats may luck out again," "I think Bush would be easiest to beat," Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. said before he left of the race.

The reason the Democrats want to run against the Vice President was stateed succinctly by Beth Smith, Gary Hart's onetime communications director: "Bush is the Republican equivalent of Walter Mondale." This similarity has sometimes been called the "wimp factor."

It is largely a matter of voice. Like Mr. Mondale and George McGovern before him, Vice President Bush whines when he speaks. The American people are not about to elect a whiner as President.

The Democrats' desire to face Mr. Bush takes precedence over their wish for a Republican slugfest lasting into the summer. Since the Vice President's greatest asset in the Republican race is the belief that his nomination is inevitable, it is widely believed that if he does not win early, he will not win at all.

In recent years, Republicans have asserted that President Reagan is doing for their party what Franklin D. Roosevelt did for the Democrats: making them the lasting majority. If this is to be so, Mr. Bush will have to play Harry S. Truman to Mr. Reagan's F.D.R. The only way that is likely to happen is if the Democrats obligingly cast a new Thomas E. Dewey as their 1988 nominee. As it happens, several applicants for the role are auditioning.

Republicans' preferences in the Democratic race vary, but many Republicans profess to believe that any of the current crop of Democratic candidates would serve their ends nicely.

The best way to assure that the Democrats do choose one of those now actively seeking votes is for one of the candidates to gain an early and commanding lead.

Under usual circumstances, such a development would not be in the interests of the G.O.P. But for a Democratic front-runner to emerge early in the process, it would have to be one of the seven men now in the race. That might be far better for Republicans than the alternative.

If the Democrats enter into the sort of protracted guerrilla warfare that would normally please Republicans, the chances will greatly increase that they will wind up nominating someone not presently in the race.

The indications are that Republicans fear some of the noncandidates -- particularly Gov. Mario Cuomo and Senators Sam Nunn, Bill Bradley and Dale Bumpers -- much more than they do any of the Democrats now running.

Thus, each party has reason this year to make the unorthodox wish . . .