Memories of the ’88 Campaign : Advice Offered in Diner Heeded, Perhaps Too Late

CLEVELAND —  After a year or so the campaign blurs, for candidate and voter alike. Yet some moments glint in the sun and stick in the memory:

All Tim Lachina was looking for when he slid into the booth at Shorty’s Diner was lunch.

What he got was a dining companion. Michael S. Dukakis sat down opposite him. So Lachina did what any red-blooded American is entitled to do. He gave the candidate some advice. A mob of reporters eavesdropped.

“Let’s kick some ass out there,” said Lachina.

“OK,” replied Dukakis. “Very good, we’ll do it.”

But he didn’t say it with much enthusiasm. It was a low day for Dukakis. He had arrived in Ohio to find a new state poll showing him trailing by 11 points and national polls showing him a devastating 17 points behind George Bush. The attention being paid polls was having a “terrible effect,” he told the reporters.

Two days later, Dukakis was in Illinois, holding aloft a Republican campaign flyer and declaring: “Friends, this is garbage.”

The next day, he was again on the attack. In the Bush campaign, as in the Watergate scandal, he said, “truth was the first casualty.”

Lachina later drew satisfaction from what he had told Dukakis. “I felt it was sort of the sentiment of the people,” he said. “I didn’t want to see him pushed around by negatives.”

BOSTON--No one had made such effective political use of Boston Harbor since the Boston Tea Party.

It was Sept. 1, a glorious summer day, and the sparkling surface of the water belied the underlying realities. It was a perfect opportunity to make some hay.

So Bush took a boat ride in Boston Harbor and, with television camera crews tagging along, belittled Dukakis’ environmental record.

The Bush campaign sent its own cameras to capture the scum, floating debris, dead fish and warning signs in the harbor.

“Extremely frustrating” James Hoyte, secretary for environmental affairs in Dukakis’ Massachusetts cabinet, says of that day. He says the campaign should have done a better job in advance of spelling out Dukakis’ environmental record.

Don’t blame us, says Carolyn Kiley, whose firm rented the harbor cruise ship to Bush’s people: “We weren’t a party to slam-dunk any Democrat. They asked us for a boat ride. We’re real good at that.”

NEW ORLEANS--Here’s what the campaign means to Salvador Avocato:

Before the Republicans came to town for their convention, the city fathers had a prominent railroad bridge painted in art deco pastels.

It still glows in pink, aqua and lavender, but Salvador, 17 and in love, could not resist.

One night in September, he painted a message on the bridge: “Sal and Stef.”

Now he’s serving 100 hours of community service--removing graffiti from public places.

AMES, Iowa--Remember the “Invisible Army”?

Those were Pat Robertson’s troops. They first showed their strength in a straw poll of Republicans in the cavernous basketball arena at Iowa State University on a Saturday night in September, 1987.

“I kept hearing rumors. People kept saying ‘you are not going to believe it until you get down there,’ ” said Christy Cobb, whose job was to escort reporters at the gathering. “They were right, I didn’t believe it until I got down there.”

The sight she saw was a roaring crowd of thousands of Robertson backers who had just thumped Bush in the straw poll.

“Not only was I dumbstruck and speechless, with no spit in my mouth. I was heartsick,” she said.

“It was the first time, concretely and absolutely, I saw evidence that George Bush was not going to carry Iowa,” she said.

On Feb. 8, Bush finished third in the state’s precinct caucuses, behind Kansas Sen. Bob Dole and Robertson.

STERLING HEIGHTS, Mich.--Donald Gilleland, spokesman for General Dynamics, has come forth to say that some of the blame for that famous television scene of Dukakis wearing an oversize helmet and riding on a tank belongs to his company .

The Bush camp made a damaging commercial from the videotape, and later even such a good Democrat as Rep. Bob Carr of Michigan spoke of “rather idiotic pictures of the candidate in a helmet looking like Beetle Bailey.”

Gilleland confessed: “He took a lot of editorial caricaturing over the helmet, but it was, in truth, our fault, not his. We required that he wear the jumpsuit because it has straps that would have let us pull him out quickly if need be, and the helmet let him communicate with the tank driver below.”