Dukakis, Bush Kick Off Campaign’s Final Drive : Democrat Pledges to Return Prosperity to Middle America

DETROIT —  One year, four months and seven days after he announced a long-shot run for the presidency, Michael S. Dukakis launched his final drive here Monday, pledging before a cheering Labor Day crowd of thousands that he will “bring prosperity home” for the middle class and the middle of America.

It was a day designed to highlight the Democratic theme of economic opportunity and to attack the Republicans as the party of “the privileged few.” It is an approach that party strategists hope will bring back the millions of voters who in the last two elections abandoned Democratic roots to support Ronald Reagan.

Abortion Protesters

Earlier, in another traditional Democratic stronghold, South Philadelphia, a crowd of anti-abortion demonstrators gave Dukakis a lesson in just how hard it may be to keep the election focused on those economic issues.

At a stop designed to demonstrate the economic concerns of average American voters, Dukakis stood, Phil Donahue-style, in the midst of a narrow, roped-off street talking about education and housing with a friendly group of roughly 60 Philadelphia residents. But an equal number of protesters nearly drowned out his voice with shouts of “Life yes, abortion no, the Duke of death has gotta go.”

Dukakis has faced anti-abortion demonstrations at nearly every stop in his campaign. But Monday’s demonstration, complete with a large effigy of a skeleton draped in black with bloody fingers, was one of the largest and certainly the noisiest. It was aided by the acoustics of the site, with the brick-front row houses of the narrow street echoing and magnifying the chants.

Polls show that the majority of Americans share Dukakis’ pro-choice position on abortion.

Even in Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s centers of anti-abortion fervor, polls two years ago showed the state’s strongly anti-abortion governor, Democrat Robert P. Casey, losing more votes than he gained from the issue in his race against a pro-choice Republican.

Issues Seen as Divisive

But Dukakis and his advisers have been trying to steer attention away from such emotional social issues, which potentially could open fissures in the electoral coalition they need to defeat Vice President George Bush in November.

To solidify that coalition, Dukakis wants to focus on the issues at the heart of Monday’s speech: “I want to be the President who stands up for the families of this country,” he told his audience in Detroit’s riverfront Hart Plaza.

With a huge American flag at his back and a fireboat on the river sending fountains into a chill and cloudy gray sky, Dukakis declared: “I want to build an America where our kids can go to college and afford a new home; where our parents can get decent health care and enjoy a secure retirement; and where every American family is a full shareholder in the American dream.”

A Return to Tradition

Restoring the Democratic coalition was the symbolic purpose behind the decision to hold the campaign’s kickoff rally here, reviving a Democratic tradition last observed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 but taken over--along with many Democratic voters--by Reagan eight years ago.

The return has deep symbolism for the Democrats, for the decline of the Detroit rally involved many of the forces that have broken up the Democratic majority since the Johnson era: the big-city riots that caused Hubert H. Humphrey to skip Detroit in 1968; the rise within the party of a “new politics” of cultural liberalism that caused George S. McGovern to skip the stop in 1972; and the decline of the urban working class, which made the huge Labor Day parade and rally things of the past by the time Jimmy Carter and Walter F. Mondale began their campaigns.

“The Democrats are coming home to their roots,” said United Auto Workers President Owen Bieber--whose union’s yellow caps were scattered throughout the crowd and whose members will be a key to Dukakis’ chances of winning here and elsewhere in the industrial heartland. “We in the labor movement should be coming home to our roots.”

Symbols of Unity

It was a day for symbols of unity and tradition: Ellis Island and the Olympics, which Dukakis used, respectively, to open and close his speech; union banners and buttons; a Catholic priest and civil rights leader who delivered the invocation; and Aretha Franklin, introduced as the “First Lady of Soul,” who closed the rally by asking the crowd to join her in singing “God Bless America.”

It was a day, too, for sharply partisan speeches, for firing up the crowd at the expense of Bush and his running mate, Sen. Dan Quayle, whom AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland labeled “the reluctant Rambo” and a “child of privilege” grown up to become a “fawning tool of privilege.”

Bush and Quayle “are not on the side of workingmen and -women,” Kirkland said. “They won’t forget whose side they’re on, and don’t you forget it, either.

“The flag that his big business buddies pledge allegiance to is made in Korea.”

Bush Tax Cut Plan Hit

Dukakis picked up the theme, attacking Bush for calling recent unemployment statistics “irrelevant” and for proposing a new cut in the capital gains tax.

Bush’s tax proposal would “give those who make $200,000 a year or more a tax break of $30,000,” Dukakis said.

“Who do you think is going to pay for that new tax break?” he asked, receiving shouts of “We will” back from the crowd.

“Look at your kids. Look at your parents. Look in the mirror,” he said.

And, referring to Bush’s statement Friday that last month’s rise in the unemployment rate was “statistically almost irrelevant,” Dukakis said it was “not surprising, coming as it did from the standard-bearer of the party that thought ketchup was a vegetable.” In 1981, the Administration proposed cutting costs by allowing ketchup to be substituted for fresh vegetables in school lunch programs.

“We’re here today to tell Mr. Bush that Americans are not statistics--and we sure aren’t irrelevant,” Dukakis said. “On Nov. 8, he’s going to find out just how relevant we are.”

Local Issue Cited

Dukakis hit at Bush on a local issue as well, something that Democratic critics have accused him of neglecting to do in the past. Bush, he told the crowd, had recently come to Michigan, talked about the environment and “not said one word” about proposals to divert water from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi River. That idea, which is very unpopular in Great Lakes states, has been proposed as a way of helping out river barge traffic hurt by the drought.

In the front of the crowd--the part within sight of the television cameras--the audience members, many of whom were bused in from union locals around the state and had waited for hours through a cold rainy morning, greeted Dukakis’ speech enthusiastically. They lustily chanted, “Where was George?” and shouted “no” on cue when Dukakis asked if the country could “afford four more years” of Republican economic policies.

Elsewhere in the vast plaza, the speeches drew mixed responses, ranging from enthusiastic cheers to impassive interest. A small group of Republican protesters from the conservative Young Americans for Freedom paraded signs attacking Dukakis on crime and taxes.

Meanwhile, Dukakis’ running mate, Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, campaigned in the economically depressed eastern part of his home state and voiced similar themes, assailing the Republicans as the party of the wealthy and the corporate managers.

‘Profits, Not People’

“The Republicans care about profits, not people. They care about the bottom line, not the unemployment line,” Bentsen told a cheering Labor Day rally in Beaumont.

Staff writer David Savage contributed to this story.