Waxing Elegiac, He Says Dukakis Made Him Proud to Be His Partner : Bentsen’s Reelection to Senate a Bittersweet Victory

AUSTIN, Tex. —  It was a bittersweet evening for Lloyd Bentsen.

Even as the returns rolled in Tuesday showing that Texas voters swept him back into the Senate by a comfortable margin, they also showed a rejection of the national ticket he had shared with Michael S. Dukakis.

“I recognize the difficulty you had to go through as friends of mine, and supporters of mine, I think truly unlike any campaign that has gone before,” Bentsen told an overflow crowd at the historic Driskill Hotel here.

Bentsen did not concede his loss on the national ticket, but his tone was elegiac as he spoke of Dukakis and the campaign they waged.

“He and I waged a campaign that’s worthy of the American people,” he said. “We told you the truth, and we stepped up to those issues. We challenged America to do better.”

Bentsen had urged Dukakis to be more aggressive in answering Vice President George Bush’s attacks. While Bentsen has made no secret of his belief that the campaign should have switched gears earlier, he praised the Massachusetts governor’s performance in the campaign’s final days.

“I have never seen a candidate that worked any harder, who in those last three or four weeks delivered a message any stronger,” Bentsen said. “He made me proud to be his partner.”

By choosing the conservative senator as his running mate, Dukakis made it clear that he would not concede Texas and its 29 electoral votes to Bush, who also calls the state his home.

Bentsen had spent roughly a third of his 119-day campaign in the state. But not even Bentsen, who ranks in polls as the most popular politician in Texas, could make voters in this state warm to Dukakis.

An unusual state law that had been passed to accommodate the presidential aspirations of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1959 made it possible for Bentsen to appear in two spots on the Texas ballot simultaneously.

Johnson, too, had ultimately found himself sharing the ticket with a politician from Massachusetts. But this time, the country had not swung around the “Boston-Austin axis.”

Candidate Faces Supporters

Facing his supporters in the same Austin hotel where Johnson had celebrated his 1960 victory on John F. Kennedy’s ticket, Bentsen said of his two campaigns: “Every hazard was there. Every difficulty was twice as hard.”

Jack Devore, a longtime Bentsen aide, added in an interview with reporters: “The moment where you say the good news and the bad news is probably the hardest part of the whole dual campaign.”

“On the one hand, there’s gratitude to the people of Texas,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s not.”

Although he did not win the vice presidency, Bentsen will go back to Washington to resume the chairmanship of the powerful Finance Committee.

What’s more, he will return to the Senate as a national leader, whose standings in the opinion polls are more favorable than those of anyone else on either ticket.

“Lloyd Bentsen wins, no matter what happens,” said Ann Richards, the Texas state treasurer and keynote speaker at last summer’s Democratic National Convention. “If there is any loss at all, it is the nation’s loss, if Lloyd is not vice president.”

Bentsen benefited in large measure from comparison with his GOP counterpart, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle. But Bentsen, who had never been seen as a particularly effective speaker in the Senate, also proved a better campaigner than even his longtime associates had hoped he would be.

He traveled what the campaign estimated to be 107,500 miles through 32 states and the District of Columbia. His job was to sell the campaign on the local level, and he gave an average of more than 90 local interviews a week.

Bentsen said Tuesday that the vice presidential nominee mattered to voters “more than it ever has. We’ve never seen that kind of an impact.”

He noted that some polls showed that when voters took the number two spot of the ticket into consideration, Dukakis gained six percentage points in Texas and nine points in California.

But in Texas, where Bush’s attacks on Dukakis’ liberalism had been especially potent, six percentage points were not enough.