PHILADELPHIA -- Republicans are putting on smiley faces to avoid the mistakes of Houston in 1992, when a conservative message more chilling than compassionate turned voters away from the GOP. Democrats are launching attack ads to rewrite the script from 1988, when a Republican vice president won election by turning a harsh spotlight on a Democratic governor's record. For both sides, Campaign 2000 is a lot about avenging the past.
How nasty will that make the politics of the present?
The seeds of this campaign were planted 12 years ago, when George Bush senior ran against Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis. The Bush team used Dukakis's liberal record to scare voters, encountering scant resistance from the Democrats until it was too late. Four years later, President Bush lost his shot at reelection, after diatribes by hardline party conservatives at the national convention pushed enough voters toward the Democrats to send Bill Clinton to the White House for eight years.
Now the son of the former president is running for the country's top office. As Republicans package George W. Bush for maximum national consumption, Democrats are trying to untie the bow on the glittering Bush giftbox before it leaves the City of Brotherly Love.
The Democratic National Committee began the process on Sunday, using a trade union hall as a base of operations for daily press conferences. The first one featured a ''truth squad'' from the Lone Star State which attacked the Bush record in Texas and then unveiled hardhitting political ads.
A succession of Texans blamed their governor for a host of ills, including hungry Texan children denied breakfast because of Bush's refusal to use already-allocated federal funding, air pollution so bad ''we have soccer Moms who can't let their children play,'' and even for the arthritis suffered by one very eloquent preacher who rattled the rafters when he warned ''The Bushes are coming, the Bushes are coming. We can't take it all over the nation.''
The Democratic ads attacking Bush and his running mate, Richard Cheney, have a classic Willie Horton feel to them. They duplicate the ominous-sounding tone that was used so brilliantly against Dukakis in 1988, when Republicans turned a Massachusetts prison furlough program into a litmus test on public safety.
Clearly, Democrats have not forgotten 1988. Many Gore campaign operatives first learned the hard way about the power of negative campaigning, from their Dukakis experience. But is their own mastery of the politics of the smear a solution for the Bush who is running against them in 2000?
Not necessarily. The Democrats' problem is articulated quite clearly by Molly Beth Malcolm, the chair of the Texas Democratic Party: ''George Bush is a really nice guy,'' acknowledged Malcolm at Sunday's DNC press conference. ''He was reelected because he was popular.''
The Duke was never really popular in the sense that voters wanted to hang out with him. Supporting him was more like swallowing medicine because you have to, not because you want to. Bush, on the other hand, looks and sounds friendly. Painting him as cold, callous, and uncaring will be a harder sell than it was with the Duke.
Beyond the difficulty of changing Governor Bush from a likable, if slightly wild and crazy, Texas boy into an evil emperor, Vice President Gore has a problem Vice President Bush never had. His name is Bill Clinton. In 1988, George Bush was running to succeed Ronald Reagan, practically a political icon. In 2000, Al Gore is running to succeed a president whose personal flaws overshadow the story of his political success.
There are other reasons why the politics of 1988 may not work for the Democrats in 2000. With so much negativity in Washington over the last decade, it is hard to believe voters want more on the campaign trail. But if Democrats give it to them, Republicans will definitely give it back.
Then, the main question for Campaign 2000 will be: How low can they go? The politics of revenge has no limits.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist.
