Dukakis Tells Workers He’s on Their Side : Bush Takes Talk on Law and Order to Notre Dame

Michael S. Dukakis campaigned among union workers in the economically hard-hit steel region of Ohio today and said George Bush’s absence indicates that he doesn’t care about working people. Bush was to give a law-and-order speech at the University of Notre Dame late in the afternoon.

Republican vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle expressed irritation with GOP campaign managers after they abruptly switched his schedule to cancel a trip to South Bend, Ind.--the same city Bush is visiting.

Democratic vice presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen climbed into the cockpit of an F-16 fighter plane for the benefit of television cameras as he renewed his campaign to convince Texans that Dukakis would be strong on defense.

Exhausting Schedule

With only a week to go, the candidates’ schedules seemed stretched beyond endurance. Dukakis arranged four appearances in as many states, while Bush was appearing in Indiana and Wisconsin before heading to Chicago to spend the night.

Dukakis’ first event of the day was in Youngstown, Ohio, a steel-producing region pummeled by recession, and his aim was plainly to win the votes of union members.

He referred to the “merger mania” on Wall Street and said, “I’m not interested in the sharp operators; I’m interested in the lathe operators and the machine operators.”

Bush and Labels

He said Bush likes to talk about labels, a reference to the way the vice president attempts to make him seem like a liberal out of touch with the mainstream. “You know what label I’m interested in? ‘Made in America’ is the label I’m interested in.”

Quayle was chafing at his treatment at the hands of the Bush campaign officials in charge of his schedule, but said it would make “absolutely no sense” for him and the man at the top of the ticket to appear together.

“Still,” he said, “I wish I knew what my schedule’s going to be. It keeps changing all the time.”

Bentsen, a former World War II bomber pilot, squeezed into the latest F-16 fighter plane, lowered the canopy and said, “It fits like a wet suit.” He said the Reagan Administration was trying to cut F-16 purchases by the Pentagon from 180 a year to 100 and said the Democrats wanted to emphasize such conventional weapons.