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                                                                                NATION, Page 28

THE CAMPAIGN

Getting Down and Dirty


On the eve of a critical round of primaries, candidates in both
parties decide to accentuate the negative in their political ads

By LAURENCE I. BARRETT/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Jon D.
Hull/Chicago and Michael Riley/Atlanta


    "We've struck gold in the Black Hills!" crowed Bob Kerrey
after winning last week's South Dakota primary. The political
payoff was slight: the Nebraska Democrat bagged only seven
delegates. More important, his victory, with an impressive 40%
of the vote, attracted contributions to his impoverished
organization. But the money was not enough to allow Kerrey to
take to other states the aggressive TV campaign he mounted in
South Dakota. For three precious days, he was an unwilling
pacifist in a political air war marked by sharply rising
bitterness and intensity. The number of negative ads began to
increase in proportion to the failure of most of the candidates
to build winning streaks with positive messages.

    As the primary competition in both parties quickens, the
importance of broadcast advertising escalates. Democrats face
contests in 22 states this week and next. This brutal pace
precludes extended personal campaigning in any one state,
forcing candidates to adapt their strategies to how much they
can advertise and how much free exposure they can get.

    As Senators from neighboring farm states, Kerrey and
Iowa's Tom Harkin had the most at stake in South Dakota. Because
air time there is cheap, both were able to bombard South
Dakotans with pro-agriculture messages. Kerrey attacked the two
leading Democrats, Bill Clinton and Paul Tsongas, as insensitive
to farmers' problems. He gave Harkin a bye, partly because
Kerrey hopes to inherit the Iowan's supporters if Harkin drops
out. That may not take long: after Harkin placed second with
25%, he lacked funds to advertise anywhere. He had to back away
from larger primaries and concentrate on this week's caucus
states, such as Minnesota and Washington.

    While his advisers drew a new battle plan for the
fortnight after South Dakota, Kerrey went south to deliver what
an aide called "a real hit" on Clinton, the favorite in the
Georgia primary scheduled for this week. A Medal of Honor winner
who lost part of a leg in Vietnam, Kerrey berated his rival for
failing to be candid about how he avoided military service. That
makes Clinton unelectable in November, Kerrey insisted. In an
awkward affectation of Southern folksiness, the Nebraskan
predicted Clinton would "get opened up like a boiled peanut" by
the Republican President. But Clinton barked right back,
accusing Kerrey of using "the disgraceful divide-and-conquer
tactics for which George Bush became famous in 1988."

    The assault by Kerrey violated earlier promises to let the
issue lie. But his camp thought it had to shake the chessboard.
Kerrey has virtually no chance of winning Georgia or any of the
large states up for grabs next week, including Texas and
Florida. So his ploy is to drive down Clinton's numbers while
pursuing a "delegate accrual" strategy -- targeting specific
districts in the hope of picking up small blocs of delegates in
many states. He also looks west, striving for a base that will
keep him in the contest until the final primaries in June. When
Kerrey did begin advertising again at week's end, it was with
a biographical spot in Colorado, his best prospect in the
contests this week. By stressing his background as war hero,
successful businessman and citizen-politician, it aims to prove
Kerrey has the drive to keep his promises. Then the candidate
followed up with an ad challenging Clinton's and Tsongas's
environmental credentials.

    Tsongas seemed to lose some momentum after his New
Hampshire victory, finishing fourth in South Dakota with 10% and
winning the Feb. 23 Maine caucuses with a puny margin over none
other than Jerry Brown. Nonetheless, he pulled in enough cash
after New Hampshire to launch a five-state advertising blitz
last week. Tsongas was outspending the more affluent Clinton in
Maryland, where the former Massachusetts Senator seems to have
his best chance of showing he can win outside New England.

    One spot shows Tsongas diving into a pool, an image he has
used for months to demonstrate that surviving cancer has not
left him enervated. He is one of the few middle-aged
politicians who look more virile in a swimsuit than in a
business suit. Another commercial shows symbols of the country's
angst -- an empty factory, a lot filled with Japanese cars --
while an announcer promises Tsongas will best foreign
competitors "the American way, by making quality come first
again."

    Tsongas's ad campaign reflects his low-key personal style
-- minus his dry wit. To date, Tsongas is the only candidate in
either party to abstain from ads blatantly attacking any of his
rivals. But that may soon change: his media advisers are
preparing a counteroffensive on the theory that in voters'
minds unanswered charges amount to confessions.

    Clinton went after Tsongas by airing a new spot in
Colorado, Georgia and Maryland that paints the ex-Senator as a
Wall Street pawn. Of the dozen Clinton ads shown this year, the
whack at Tsongas is the only one in which Clinton is barely seen
and is heard not at all; an anonymous announcer does the
kneecapping. Most of the other Clinton commercials mirror his
candidacy -- smooth, warm, persuasive, calculated with an
insider's finesse to play on the public's anger at insiders.

    Clinton routinely hails "the forgotten middle class." Of
the items in his economic-recovery program, the one mentioned
most often is a tax cut for middle-income Americans. For
conservative Georgians, he unveiled a new promise: "insisting
that those on welfare move into the workplace." His commercials
make good use of Clinton's rapport with the camera. His media
adviser, Frank Greer, manages to blend the candidate's persona
and platform into a seamless series of spots.

    Those ads will get their biggest test this week. Though he
is the ostensible front runner, Clinton has yet to win a
primary or caucus. Now the Governor of Arkansas is playing in
his home region, where many of the primaries through March 10
will take place. Because Clinton must score decisively in the
area, he was spending twice as much as Tsongas last week in
Georgia.

    Yet Clinton may have hampered that effort with a bizarre,
unscripted TV performance. Preparing for a satellite interview
with an Arizona station, he was told -- inaccurately -- that
Jesse Jackson was about to endorse the failing Harkin. Clinton,
unaware that the camera and microphones were on, delivered a
tirade in which he accused Jackson of "backstab bing" him. That
outburst got nationwide display, free exposure that Clinton may
rue for weeks. As Clinton tried to mollify the Democrats'
best-known black leader, Jackson complained about the "blast at
my integrity." For Clinton, the possible cost of the incident
was loss of black support, on which he counts heavily.

    If the Democrats were getting feisty, the Republican air
war in Georgia was going nuclear. Pat Buchanan wounded George
Bush in New Hampshire with ads charging the President with
deception on the tax issue. Now, in his next opportunity to take
on Bush directly, the right-wing columnist charged Bush with
tolerating sexual perversion and anti-Christian values. One
Buchanan spot shows gay men cavorting in skin-tight leather, a
scene from a film produced with federal assistance from the
National Endowment for the Arts. "Even after good people
protested," intones the narrator, "Bush continued to fund this
kind of art." "Nobody wants a trade war," Buchanan says in
another ad, "but we can't be trade wimps."

    The Bush campaign launched its first attack ad squarely at
Buchanan. In it General P.X. Kelley, retired commandant of the
Marine Corps, denounces Buchanan's opposition to the Persian
Gulf war. "The last thing we need in the White House is an
isolationist like Pat Buchanan," says Kelley. A second ad
designed to boost Bush's leadership credentials shows the
President sitting awkwardly on the edge of his desk reviewing
papers while an announcer recites his agenda.

    But Bush's campaign was clearly not generating the
excitement that carried him triumphantly through the primaries
four years ago. Last week in South Dakota, where Buchanan was
not even on the ballot, nearly 1 out of 3 Republican voters
spurned the President in favor of an uncommitted slate of
delegates. In view of those results and the mediocre grades
Bush's spots have been getting, it is not surprising that some
White House advisers are talking about the need for a different
approach. The pugnacious brilliance of media adviser Roger Ailes
and the late Lee Atwater, the authors of Bush's jugular-oriented
1988 ads, is missed by the President. Ironically, their spirit
seems to have migrated to Buchanan's campaign and may be
influencing some of the Democrats as well.