Off the Record

■ Remember the “negative” 1988 presidential campaign? The one that was blamed on mean ol’ Lee Atwater, who was accused of using “code words” to foster “racial polarization” and, worse still, win the election.

We are thus waiting for the new Democratic National Committee Chairman, Ron Brown, to clean things up on his own side of the tracks. If it is racist to wave the flag of Mr. Willie Horton, a convicted criminal, for example, the same might be said of the decision to have a sinister Japanese flag flying in the background of Dukakis commercials during the Ohio campaign, or for Richard Gephardt to campaign against the inscrutable South Koreans who are not buying our K-cars. Most recently, in the special Florida congressional election to fill the late Claude Pepper’s seat, when Democrat Gerald Richman unsuccessfully tried to counter Ileana Ros- Lehtinen’s conservative campaign by saying that the spot was “an American seat” (translation: Cuban- Americans are not real Americans), Mr. Brown appeared at a news conference in Miami calling the theme “unifying.”

■ Remember the “negative” 1988 presidential campaign? The one that was blamed on mean ol’ Lee Atwater, who was accused of using “code words” to foster “racial polarization” and, worse still, win the election.

We are thus waiting for the new Democratic National Committee Chairman, Ron Brown, to clean things up on his own side of the tracks. If it is racist to wave the flag of Mr. Willie Horton, a convicted criminal, for example, the same might be said of the decision to have a sinister Japanese flag flying in the background of Dukakis commercials during the Ohio campaign, or for Richard Gephardt to campaign against the inscrutable South Koreans who are not buying our K-cars. Most recently, in the special Florida congressional election to fill the late Claude Pepper’s seat, when Democrat Gerald Richman unsuccessfully tried to counter Ileana Ros- Lehtinen’s conservative campaign by saying that the spot was “an American seat” (translation: Cuban- Americans are not real Americans), Mr. Brown appeared at a news conference in Miami calling the theme “unifying.”