1988 race offers lesson

Patriotism symbols could play big role this year, especially with Obama

By ROBIN TONER - The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Sometimes, as Sen. Barack Obama seemed to argue earlier this year, a flag pin is just a flag pin.

But it can never be that simple for anyone with direct experience of the 1988 presidential campaign. That year, the Republicans used the symbols of nationhood (notably, whether schoolchildren should be required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance) to bludgeon the Democrats, challenge their patriotism and utterly redefine their nominee, Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts.

The memory of that campaign — reinforced, for many, by the attacks on Sen. John Kerry’s Vietnam War record in the 2004 election — haunts Democrats of a certain generation.

The 1988 campaign was, in many ways, the crucible that helped create Bill Clinton’s centrist philosophy and his fierce commitment to attack and counterattack, which drove the politics of the 1990s.

Obama has promised a different politics, one that rises above the fray and the distractions of wedge issues. As Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon, recently put it, “The entire Obama campaign is predicated on the belief that it is no longer 1988.”

But is that true?

DEMS MUST RUN AGAINST A WAR HERO

The assertion looks more debatable in recent weeks, after the furor over Obama’s former pastor and his inflammatory views on America, the biggest of a series of “distractions” that have knocked the Obama campaign off stride.

If Obama wins the nomination, such issues will almost certainly rise again, given that he will run against a war hero, in Sen. John McCain, who is advised by several veterans of the campaign against Kerry.

And that’s in addition to his problems as he encounters the racial attitudes of less educated white voters.

In exit polls in Pennsylvania, one in five of the state’s white voters who haven’t completed college said race was an important factor in choosing a candidate, about double the number of white college graduates who said so. Eight in 10 of them voted for Clinton over Obama, and only about half said they would vote for Obama over McCain in November.

Obama himself seemed chastened by the re-emergence of the old politics last week. “Let’s be honest,” he said in an interview on NBC. “You know, here I am, an African-American named Barack Obama who’s running for president. I mean, that’s a leap for folks. And I think it’s understandable that my political opponents would say, ‘You know, he’s different. He’s odd. He’s sort of unfamiliar. And what do we know about him?”’

Capitalizing on those misgivings, Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, is running hard on the notion that she is the more electable candidate.

Clinton maintains that what she calls her “baggage” has been thoroughly vetted. She touts her survival of 16 years of Republican attacks on issues ranging from her handling of the failed health care proposals in her husband’s administration to her early claims that the Bill Clinton scandals were accusations from a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

HOW MUCH WILL SYMBOLS MATTER?

David Axelrod, chief strategist to Obama, argues that any Democratic nominee will be subject to withering attacks on values and character.

He suggests that amid challenging issues such as the war and the economy, voters won’t be “distracted from the fundamental need for change.”

Yet even with so many big issues at stake this time around, the race between Obama and Clinton has often been focused on questions of values, background and character — witness the recent fixation on Obama’s ties to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., or the continued unfounded rumors that Obama is a Muslim.

Like Dukakis in 1988, Obama is relatively new to the national scene, and thus vulnerable to being defined by opponents’ attacks.

Attacks on a presidential candidate’s patriotism are hard for many politicians to take seriously, reasoning that people who subject themselves to grueling presidential campaigns obviously care deeply for the country.

Still, one of the clearest strategic errors of 1988 was the Democrats’ failure to realize that such attacks could stick and open the door to broader efforts to portray Dukakis as fundamentally out of sync with the nation’s values.

In 1988, one of the central attacks revolved around the Pledge of Allegiance. Dukakis, as governor, had vetoed state legislation in 1977 that required teachers to lead their students in the pledge, basing his action on a state court ruling that it was unconstitutional.

By August 1988, his Republican opponent, Vice President George H.W. Bush was rousing huge crowds with a contemptuous question: “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?”

Obama’s challenges with Wright, and other issues including his relationship with a radical from the 1960s, may be taking a toll.

The New York Times/CBS News Poll last week found 29 percent found him “very patriotic,” compared with 40 percent who felt that way about Clinton, and 70 percent who felt that way about McCain, a former prisoner of war.

Contributing: Alan Fram of The Associated Press