Dukakis faults Bush, but GOP aide backs strategy

By Curtis Wilkie, Globe Correspondent, 10/4/2000

ormer Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis, who engaged in the presidential debates of 1988 and suffered for his reaction to a hypothetical question, felt that Governor George W. Bush of Texas made a strategic error last night by opening up the issue of campaign finance late in the debate.

While Bush used his sharpest language of the evening to criticize Vice President Al Gore for his role in questionable fund-raising in the 1996 campaign, Dukakis said it gave the Democratic nominee an opportunity to promise, if elected, to support sweeping campaign finance reform as his first order of business next year.

''The most critical issue facing this country is campaign finance,'' Dukakis said in an interview moments after the close of the first debate of the fall.

The discussion also enabled Gore to express support for a campaign finance bill sponsored by Republican Senator John S. McCain, a onetime rival of Bush's and a popular national figure in this year's primaries.

Giving partisan support to Gore, a candidate he faced during the primary season in the fight for the Democratic nomination 12 years ago, Dukakis said Gore appeared well-prepared and stuck to a plan that eschewed personal attack.

Gore earned a reputation as a tough - and sometimes mean-spirited - debater in the contest with Dukakis. It was Gore who first mentioned Dukakis's handling of the Willie Horton case at a Democratic debate in 1988, an issue that the campaign of the elder George Bush later seized upon.

Of Bush's strategy, Dukakis said the Republican's repeated pledges to work with Democrats as well as Republicans were ineffective. ''I thought his positions were fuzzy,'' Dukakis said.

Bush's chief strategist, Karl Rove, defended his candidate's line of attack when asked about Gore's character. Bush complained about Gore's statement that there was ''no controlling legal authority'' that would fault his Democratic fund-raising efforts. ''There needed to be a better sense of responsibility of what was going on in the White House,'' Bush said.

The Texas governor, Rove said, ''is a plain-spoken guy and he said the same things he's been saying on the campaign: that Al Gore went to a Buddhist temple and raised money and never said it was wrong. That Al Gore participated in a dash for cash in '96. That Al Gore called Clinton the greatest president. The American people have a reason to be disappointed.''

Rove called Bush's use of a question regarding Gore's character ''an appropriate response to an appropriate question'' that had been incorporated into their game plan for the night.

Although Bush relied on old Republican themes by complaining about a Washington-oriented approach to government, he seemed to go out of his way to position himself as one who would ''be able to work with Republicans and Democrats'' in Congress.

Rove charged that it was Gore who injected a negative tenor to the debate by ''making weird assertions'' about Bush's tax plan.

''What we wanted to show was a very sharp contrast between a candidate who believes in limited but effective government and Gore, who defends an expansionist government,'' Rove said.