Dukakis Scores Foreign Owners--at Italian-Held Firm

WELLSTON, Mo. —  Michael S. Dukakis may or may not be narrowing the gap with George Bush in the polls, but his campaign still has a way to go in catching up to Republican capabilities for keeping mistakes on the stump to a minimum.

Friday, Massachusetts Gov. Dukakis traveled to an automotive parts factory here, seeking a backdrop to dramatize his argument that the Republicans favor, and he opposes, “foreign owners . . . buying up America.”

Unfortunately, Moog Automotive, the company whose plant he spoke in, has been owned since 1978 by IFI, the giant Italian conglomerate best known for its manufacture of Fiat automobiles.

“Maybe the Republican ticket wants our children to work for foreign owners, pay rent to foreign owners, and owe their future to foreign owners, but that’s not the kind of future (Texas Sen.) Lloyd Bentsen and I and all of you want for America,” Dukakis said.

“Somebody should tell him we work for foreign owners,” muttered a company engineer in the audience.

“I don’t think its a problem,” Dukakis adviser Steven Engelberg later insisted to reporters. Dukakis, he said, “doesn’t oppose foreign ownership,” just “the trend” in the last few years of rapidly increased foreign ownership of American assets.

Later in the day, speaking to reporters in Asheville, N.C. , Dukakis defended his visit to the Moog factory. “It’s a first-rate plant that was acquired way back in the ‘70s. It’s this binge of foreign takeovers . . . that concerns me,” he said. He described his appearance there as “not a faux pas.”

But the snafu detracted from Dukakis’ message. The dissonance also underlined the ambivalence at the center of the Dukakis campaign’s attitude toward trade.

During the Democratic primaries, Dukakis spoke out as a free-trade opponent of protectionism. At that point, trade was the issue for Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt, who accompanied Dukakis on his factory visit Friday.

But as the general election approaches, Dukakis has moved slowly and with some discomfort toward a more nationalistic stance.

“Remember those days when we made nearly all the world’s consumer electronics products?” he asked the audience here. “Now we make hardly any.”

“I’m running for President,” he said, to build “an America that’s No. 1 again.” America, he insists, cannot be satisfied with the status quo.

Economic nationalism could be particularly important to Dukakis in the three states he campaigned in Thursday and Friday--Tennessee, Missouri and North Carolina.

The three border states, Dukakis aides think, hold some of the Democrats’ best hopes of breaking the GOP lock on the South. But Vice President Bush has made major gains throughout the region on the strength of his appeals to traditional, flag-waving patriotism.

Dukakis has sought to capitalize on the defense of foreign ownership that the Republican vice presidential nominee, Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle, made during Wednesday’s vice presidential debate.

That eagerness appears to have contributed to Friday’s embarrassment. Dukakis’ schedulers planned the visit to the plant before the debate, at a time when other aspects of the company--its survival in a competitive market and its involvement in an economically troubled community--seemed more important than the details of its ownership.

When the campaign’s message shifted emphasis, IFI’s role did not get communicated to senior aides traveling with Dukakis, none of whom knew that the Italian company owned the plant until reporters heard about it from workers at the plant.

In addition, although the United Auto Workers picked the site for Dukakis as an example of exemplary labor-management cooperation, several workers grumbled about a recent layoff of 32 employees and a company decision to move part of its now-unionized operations to Tennessee, a right-to-work state.

Even without problems with his backdrop, Dukakis’ embrace of the trade issue has been tentative or, as his aides prefer to put it, nuanced and balanced.

In North Carolina, for example, local members of Congress campaigned hard for a bill that passed Congress last month to block many textile imports. President Reagan vetoed the bill, calling it protectionist.

While Democrats in the House tried to round up votes to override the veto, Dukakis repeatedly declined to say how he would vote if faced with that decision.

He preferred, instead, to repeat his position that he favors import protection for some industries, including textiles, but only with conditions.

The two chief limitations, Dukakis says, would be that protection would last only for five years for any given industry and that the companies receiving help would have to guarantee that they would use that breathing period to invest profits in modernization.

Those sorts of subtleties, however, have a way of being overshadowed on the campaign trail.