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<text> <title> (88 Elect) Taking the Pledge </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1988 Election </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> September 5, 1988 NATION Taking the Pledge </hdr> <body> The mudslinging begins as the candidates argue about patriotism Richard Stengel. Reported by David Beckwith with Bush and Dan Goodgame with Dukakis. The issues bandied about during presidential campaigns typically have about as much to do with running the country as elephants and donkeys do with party platforms. Prison furloughs, school prayer and the Indiana National Guard are not matters that often cross a President's desk. But to campaign consultants, they are "hot buttons," the so-called valence issues that help voters define a candidate's character and values. So last week, while the national debt was topping $2.5 trillion, while a growing army of beggars wandered urban streets and America's overburdened school systems prepared for the return of classes, the electorate was treated to the spectacle of George Bush forcing Michael Dukakis to debate whether elementary-school children should be compelled to recite a loyalty oath before they rattle off their ABC's. The Bush campaign has seized on Dukakis' veto of a 1977 Massachusetts bill requiring teachers to lead their classes in the Pledge of Allegiance to paint the Governor as a dangerous liberal whose concern for civil liberties would undermine American patriotism. "Should public-school teachers be required to lead our children in the Pledge of Allegiance?" Bush asked his audience at the Republican Convention. "my opponent says no--but I say yes." Then he led the crowd in reciting the pledge, a gesture he repeated at a flag-bedecked political rally last week. The subtext of Bush's profligate pledging was simple: "I'm more patriotic than the other guy." Dukakis, whose campaign stops also feature generous reliance on the Stars and Stripes, responds that patriotism means respect for the law rather than ritual. "I can't imagine a President of the United States who knows that a bill is unconstitutional and proceeds to sign it anyway," he declared last week. "If the Vice President is saying that he would sign an unconstitutional bill, then in my judgment he is not fit to hold office." Escalating the hyperbole, Dukakis likened Bush's stance on the pledge--to the wanton disregard for law revealed in the Iran-contra affair: "We've had a series of incidents in this Administration where laws were broken or ignored, and I don't know if this is part of a pattern." Dukakis subtext: "I'm more responsible than the other guy." The Republicans took another side-swipe at Dukakis' patriotism last week when Idaho Senator Steve Symms told a radio interviewer that Kitty Dukakis had been photographed "burning an American flag while she was an antiwar demonstrator during the '60s." The rumor is totally unsubstantiated, but that has, not stopped zealots from spreading it. Replied Mrs. Dukakis, "It untrue, unfounded and there is no picture." Said Dukakis, in obvious frustration and fractured syntax: "I find oneself in the position of denying nonexistent facts." The Republican strategy is to keep Dukakis on the defensive by attempting to shatter his sphinxlike composure. Republicans complain that Dukakis is hiding his liberal record behind a vague platform. If the G.O.P. can keep up the pressure, explains a Bush strategist, "you may just see a Michael Dukakis you don't like. He is talking in nice pictures under false pretenses, and we're not going to let him get away with that." Moreover, Bush must overcome a negative image with a third or more of the electorate--and what better way than to stick Dukakis with some negatives of his own? But the efforts to impugn Dukakis' patriotism are part of a larger, time-tested Republican theme: to portray the Democrats as the inheritors of intellectual doubt and malaise, the party that is soft on defense, that perceives America as being on a long, slow decline. The Republicans, by contrast, have successfully cast themselves as the party of stand-tall patriotism and vigilant anti-Communism. As the hawkish Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia put it, "If this election is between George Bush and someone who is more liberal than George McGovern, we win. If it's an election between two competent leaders, we lose." The Pledge of Allegiance issue is the product of Bush's opposition research team. In 1977, during Dukakis' first term as Governor, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill requiring teachers to lead their classes in the pledge each day. Following standard state practice, Dukakis sought an advisory ruling on the bill from his attorney general as well as the state supreme court. Both found the bill unconstitutional: the landmark 1943 U.S. State Board of Education v. Barnette held that requiring a student to recite the pledge under the threat of expulsion violated the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech and worship. Dukakis' veto was overridden by large margins in the legislature, but the state attorney general ruled that the law was "unenforceable." As in most states, the pledge is still recited in Massachusetts elementary schools on a voluntary basis. "Of course, the pledge is taken all the time in Massachusetts," Dukakis said last week. "We take it in ceremonies and everything else. I encourage schoolchildren to say the Pledge of Allegiance...That's not the issue, and the Republicans know it." Bush professes not to buy Dukakis' explanation for his veto. "Let's face it," the Vice President said to a cheering crowd in Los Angeles, "my opponent was looking for a reason not to sign that bill, I would be looking for a reason to sign that legislation." Bush implied that Dukakis intended to prevent Massachusetts students from reciting the pledge, which was clearly not the case. He then added, "It's very hard for me to imagine that the Founding Fathers--Samuel Adams, John Adams and John Hancock--would have objected to teachers leading students in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States." It is hard to imagine the Founding Fathers being concerned with the pledge at all, since it was written 116 years after they penned the Declaration of Independence. The original 22 words of the Pledge of Allegiance were drawn up in 1892 as a promotional vehicle for a Boston magazine called Youth's Companion. Composed by a staff writer for the weekly publication, which normally featured morally uplifting anecdotes for young readers, the pledge was intended for recital at ceremonies marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of America. According to the official program distributed by the magazine, students first acknowledged the Stars and Stripes with a military salute. then, "the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, towards the Flag, and remains in this gesture til the end of the affirmation." The pledge caught on, and by World War I it was routinely recited in public schools. In 1924 the words "my flag" were amended to "the flag of the United States of America." The formal stiff-arm salute was discontinued in 1942 by an act of Congress; its similarity to the Nazi gesture may have been a contributing reason. In 1954 Congress added the words "under God" after "one nation." Although the pledge has seeped into the popular imagination as a paean to patriotism, religious groups such as Jehovah's Witnesses, who are forbidden to swear secular oaths, have repeatedly gone to court to keep it from becoming a mandatory ritual. In 1972 a federal appeals court ruled that an upstate New York teacher had a right to refuse to participate in the pledge in her classroom. "Patriotism that is forced is a false patriotism," Judge Irving R. Kaufman wrote, "just as loyalty that is coerced is the very antithesis of loyalty." Kaufman's argument no doubt appeals to Dukakis' belief in what the Founding Fathers stood for, as well as his sense of legal nicety, but Bush's aides believe they have struck a vein of patriotic gold with the issue. "It's a winner for us," says Chief of Staff Craig Fuller. "If Dukakis wants to debate the Pledge of Allegiance with us, we're happy to oblige." In the sound-bite brouhahas of a presidential campaign, the dispute over definitions of patriotism has hardly been edifying, and hardly the stuff of a significant national dialogue. <list> <l>October 3, 1988</l> <l>One Flag Too Far</l> </list> On the defensive, Dukakis tries a new tactic: substance By Margaret Carlson. Reported by Michael Riley with Dukakis and Alessandra Stanley with Bush. Five weeks after the Republican Convention, the public can be certain of two things about George Bush: he loves the flag, and he believes in pledging allegiance to it every morning. But some voters may wonder what Bush would do with the rest of his day if he became President. Basking in Old Glory, as he has since the G.O.P. convention, the Vice President turned up at a flag- making factory in Bloomfield, N.J., last week to pose before a Stars and Stripes so large it put the producers of Patton to shame. "Flag sales are up, and America is doing well," Bush declared. It was perhaps his most substantive remark in a week that was notably short on ideas or proposals. Michael Dukakis, likewise, has hardly elevated the level of debate this year with his tiresome mantras, like "Good jobs at good wages." But, trailing in the polls on the eve of last weekend's debate, he took the advice of his handlers and began to fight Bush's symbols on a virgin battleground: substance. In speech after speech Dukakis fleshed out proposals that had remained hopelessly vague during months of campaigning: on expanded health coverage for uninsured workers, on prenatal care, on childhood inoculations. Coming on the heels of earlier proposals for tuition loans, industrial development and defense policy, they brought some beef to Dukakis' flaccid message. In strong performances at sites chosen, of course, with the nightly news in mind, Dukakis challenged Bush: "I have a question for Mr. Bush," he said at one stop. "Don't you think it's about time you came out from behind that flag and told us what you intend to do to provide basic health care for 37 million of our fellow citizens?" Juxtaposed on the news against Dukakis at the bedside of newborns, Bush's Stars and Stripes extravaganza began to look forced. The contrast was not lost on Republicans. It generated the hope that substance might find its way into the campaign to compete with the empty slogans and tasteless nativism that have dominated the dialogue so far. Reflecting the views of some fellow Republicans, political analyst Kevin Phillips said last week that the Vice President's cultural-attack themes "have gotten tinny and repetitious, and are losing steam." The Bush campaign admitted as much. Said a ranking aide: "It's fair to say we went one flag too far." For all his newfound enthusiasm for substance, Dukakis has yet to address seriously some of the biggest issues of all: how he would narrow the federal deficit and how he would pay for new programs without raising taxes. But on the issues he did choose to discuss, Dukakis displayed uncharacteristic style and imagination, not to mention greater candor about the activist role Government would play. After a bad beginning with his Charlie-Brown-Goes-To-Tank-School effort two weeks ago, the wooden Governor seemed finally to be getting the hang of political theatrics. Beginning his week at the, yes, Camelot Hotel in Little Rock, Dukakis turned Kennedyesque with the help of J.F.K. speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. With classic touches, Dukakis described an America "with new horizons to reach and new frontiers to conquer," possible only if Americans are willing to make sacrifices for their country. Dukakis announced his expanded insurance proposal to a cheering nurse-packed auditorium at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green. A similar bill before Congress would require employers to insure all their workers, paying 80% of the estimated $1,300 in yearly premiums, with the employees paying 20%. Although it calls for no new taxes, the plan is not free. Employers will have to pay more in benefits, consumers may find the cost passed along to them in the prices of goods they buy, and the Government may have to subsidize the premiums. Expanded coverage especially troubles small businessmen with a preponderance of low-wage workers, since health insurance costs as much for a $20,000-a-year employee as it does for a $100,000 one. The proposal will no doubt fuel the G.O.P. charge that Dukakis is an overly idealistic, free-spending liberal. But Dukakis did not shrink from the notion that it costs money to help those in need, that some ideals are worth paying for. He invoked his late father, a physician, to make his point: "When Americans get sick, the first question they hear will be the question my father used to ask: not 'How can you pay?' but 'Where does it hurt?'" For his proposal on prenatal care, Dukakis went to Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston with his daughter-in-law Lisa, who is five months pregnant. Medical care for expectant mothers not covered by insurance or Medicaid will cost tax dollars--about $100 million. This is much less, Democrats argue, than what it costs to care for infants born prematurely, seriously underweight or with birth defects. The three-year-old Massachusetts Healthy Start program has treated about 16,000 women and helped reduce infant mortality 14%. At the same time Dukakis has become more forthcoming; he has learned how to respond quickly to G.O.P. assaults. When Bush traveled to Boston last week to surround himself with policemen and attack Dukakis for Massachusetts' prisoner-furlough program, Dukakis retorted with his own clot of men in blue on the lawn outside his statehouse. Ron DeLord, president of the 8,000-member Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, pointed out that local police efforts had received no leadership and little financial support from the Reagan Administration. In the battle of blue knights, the Democrats could claim a draw. Going toe to toe in the sound-bite war and clogging the airwaves with program-heavy speeches, Dukakis hopes to force Bush out from behind his symbols. The week before, in Findlay, Ohio, Bush had presaged his flag-factory appearance by noting how much Stars and Stripes sales were up in this country. In that speech he used the word America 31 times in 15 minutes, once every 30 seconds. At other times last week Bush came close to substance, although it was sometimes hard to hear above the din of his carping. Hidden inside his flag-factory speech were echoes of the "gentler, kinder nation" themes he alluded to in his eloquent convention acceptance speech, of his belief that prosperity is empty without a sense of purpose. Bush spoke of being haunted by poor, inner-city children. "They're waiting," he said, "and we've got to help." Yet beyond vague expressions of concern, Bush has yet to say what he would do about infant mortality, homelessness and other social problems that blight the lives of inner-city children. Data released by the Federal Government last month show that 22.8% of children under six years old were living in poverty in 1987; for minority children, the rate was worse. The Vice President, said his press secretary Sheila Tate, "does not have a tenpoint program for some new social program. He thinks the presidency could be used as a bully pulpit to encourage people to be more involved with other people's pain." As with Jimmy Carter's flawed Rose Garden strategy in 1980, there is a limit to how much a flag can protect a candidate. Bush may soon find that voters who cheered the first, the second and even a third time are waiting, arms at their sides, for him to run something up the pole worth saluting. </body> </article> </text>