Party Time in Dallas

By William R. Doemer

The throat-clearing chore of drafting a platform was complete, and the rafter-reaching speeches were about to begin. Inside the cavernous Dallas Convention Center, workmen folded down the last bright red cushion of the hall's 17,000 seats, providing a telegenic color complement to the acres of blue carpeting. VIPS began slipping into town, ferried between meetings in stretch limousines, some with real Texas longhorns protruding from their hoods. The blast-furnace August climate was performing on cue, with temperatures reaching the 100DEG mark. But the Big D's air-conditioned interiors were frigid enough to give a reasonable life expectancy to the ice-sculpted elephants that will serve as mascots at off-hours bashes. In short, the stage was set last week for the Republicans' Lone Star love fest, their 33rd national convention, which they hope will lead to four more years of G.O.P. tenancy in the White House.

The show's headliner, Ronald Rea gan, was not due in town until Wednesday. Earlier in the week he planned to make campaign stops in Missouri, Illinois and Ohio. He was also putting the finishing touches on his Thursday-evening acceptance speech, an occasion that will mark the beginning of his last campaign for public office (see following story) and provide him with an opportunity to outline his vision of the Republican Party's future.

By the gauge of last week's preconvention maneuverings, the rallying cry of the present is "Rightward ho!" The conservative wing of the party prevailed on virtually all of the relatively few platform contests, including a call to appoint only opponents of abortion to the federal bench, a rejection of the Equal Rights Amendment and support of voluntary school prayer. Gloated North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who fought unsuccessfully for conservative stands at previous G.O.P. conventions: "Tom Sawyer found someone else to paint the fence, and so did I."

Very much in attendance at the preliminaries were members of the so-called Class of'88, the party leaders who hope to win command in the post-Reagan era. A heavy schedule of howdying was blocked out for Vice President George Bush. Congressman Jack Kemp was one of the chief draftsmen of the platform's economic planks, including its stand against a tax increase in the near future. Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker and Kansas Senator Robert Dole were honing their prime-time speeches, as was Dole's wife Elizabeth, the Secretary of Transportation. "We're trying to coordinate them," quipped the Senator. "So far hers is done and I haven't started."

Ironically, for many of the 2,235 delegates and 12,000 journalists in Dallas, the week's top political news was likely to come not from the convention at all, but from Washington. There, Geraldine Ferraro, the Democrats' nominee for Vice President and the only woman ever nominated for national office by a major party, planned to make public her own and Husband John Zaccaro's tax returns since 1978. What turned this normally uneventful chore into high political drama for both parties was a bombshell casually dropped last week by Ferraro as she set off on her first solo campaign trip: instead of attaching both sets of income tax filings to her financial-disclosure forms, as she had earlier promised, Ferraro said she would disclose only her own. Reason: Zaccaro had balked at releasing his returns, claiming that such disclosure would "affect" his real estate business.

By the time Ferraro announced on Saturday that Zaccaro would release his returns too, a great deal of political damage had been done. The suggestion that Walter Mondale's running mate had something to hide, and the clumsy way she had handled the furor, gave the G.O.P. an opportunity to attack the woman candidate without seeming to be male-chauvinist bullies. At last, sighed a G.O.P. strategist, "a genderless issue."

But the Republicans were not free of potentially far-reaching embarrassments either. Reagan's penchant for clever banter got him into trouble not once but twice last week as he carelessly made light of the one subject off limits to presidential humor: nuclear war. The incident began with a request for a voice-level check just prior to Reagan's weekly radio show. Instead of replying with the usual "Testing, one, two, three," Reagan intoned, "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

Though technically off the record (see PRESS), the quip was picked up by newspapers and broadcast on television news.

Reagan was taken to task by Mondale and Ferraro, among other Democrats, and even more vociferously by friends and foes abroad. The Soviet news agency TASS deplored the joke as "unprecedentedly hostile toward the U.S.S.R. This conduct is incompatible with the high responsibility borne by heads of states." But Reagan evidently failed to recognize the danger that the crack would revive his gunslinger image, both at home and overseas. At a meeting with Jewish leaders at the White House five days later, he fueled the controversy by informing his guests with a folksy grin that he was "not going to bomb Russia in the next five minutes."

The Democrats also got political mileage out of a startling admission by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Michael Deaver on the NBC Nightly News. Responding to a question, Deaver confirmed that his boss occasionally dozes off at "boring" Cabinet meetings. Said Ferraro: "Amazing."

Ferraro must have thought some of her own troubles were amazing too.

To her annoyance and the dismay of the Mondale camp, the tax returns issue popped up nearly everywhere she campaigned and completely dominated her sessions with the press. At one news conference, 18 out of 20 questions concerned her family finances. On at least two occasions she became visibly rattled, her hands trembling out of anger or frustration.

That was an especially troublesome sign, since one of the roles Mondale is counting on Ferraro to play is that of political street fighter. Ferraro's self-judgment was hardly kind. Only half-jokingly calling herself "a disaster at this stuff," Ferraro admitted that she has "got to get a little more control of myself."

For the most part, the Republicans let the press carry the issue for them. Among those who did comment was Dole, who was asked how Ferraro can be fairly asked to disclose information not required by law. "It's a tough assignment, but so is dealing with the Soviets," Dole shot back with relish. The crack lost much of its bite when Dole acknowledged that only his own tax return--not that of his wife--was made public when he ran for Vice President in 1976.

Adding to Ferraro's disarray was the reappearance of another old controversy: the illegal funding of her first congressional election campaign in 1978. Though campaign loans are limited to $1,000 per individual, Ferraro's election committee was bankrolled by loans totaling $134,000 from Zaccaro and their three children.

The FEC fined the Ferraro campaign $750 for the violation, after accepting the sworn statements of Zaccaro, who served as campaign manager, and the committee treasurer that they had been assured that the loans were proper by David Stein, a former FEC attorney. Last week Stein issued a statement claiming that he informally advised the Ferraro campaign that "I did not believe that it would be permissible" to accept large family loans. Zaccaro and the campaign treasurer continued to stick to their original account.

Meanwhile, Mondale's staff was holding private negotiations with Jesse Jackson over his role in the campaign, even while the principals bickered in public.

Jackson complained in a Los Angeles Times interview that Mondale has "no coherent regional or national strategy or themes to attract black voters."After that remark was published, reporters overheard Mondale muttering, "It looks like I'm going to have to win this on my own."

In fact, the nub of the talk between the two camps has less to do with strategy than with wings: Jackson wants his own airplane during the campaign. The candidate's relations with blacks were further jolted when Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, upset by the Mondale staffs resistance to outside advice, said the campaign was run by "smartass white boys who think they know it all."

At week's end both Mondale and Ferraro returned to their home bases, ceding center stage to the Republicans in Dallas.

They must have been hoping for the G.O.P. to put on a good show--good enough, anyway, to drown out the din over their own troubles. --By William R. Doemer.

Reported by David Beckwith with Ferraro and John E. Yang /Dallas

With reporting by David Beckwith, John E. Yang