Dukakis Breaks the Mold of Easy Labeling

At 53, Michael S. Dukakis, the three-term governor of Massachusetts and presidential candidate, is a man on cordial terms with himself, a skillful politician, an able chief executive, and a devoted husband and father. Indeed, he’s a folk-hero family man who takes out the garbage, does a good deal of the cooking, dresses in off-the-rack suits bought in a local bargain basement and rides the subway to his Boston office.

People make jokes about his reluctance to part with a dollar, his squareness and, lately, his marital fidelity. As for his integrity, it’s singular in a state where peculation is the only sport practiced year round; after 20 years in politics, as a state representative and governor, Dukakis has only $15,000 in the bank, drives a 1981 Dodge and owns a two-family house inBrookline, a Boston suburb.

Dukakis is the son of Greek immigrants, but in his personal style he is about as ethnic as George Bush; heavy doses of Swarthmore, Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard have blanded him over, making him safe for middle America. His father, Panos Dukakis, now dead, was a doctor, and his son’s persona is that of a doctor of the body politic. Unflappable, cautious to a fault, Dukakis deals with charged issues in a professional, nonpartisan, dispassionate way. In the name of rational government, he takes the passion out of politics and, with it, the magic.

That is Dukakis’ major fault as a candidate, one that may limit his persuasive power as a President: As a speechmaker he is to dullness what Mario Cuomo is to eloquence. National political reporters, fresh from enlightening encounters with cab drivers taking them from Logan airport to downtown Boston, tend to take a different view of his liabilities. They tag Dukakis a “northern ethnic liberal,” and they claim that any of those labels, much less the three in fatal combination, is poison in much of the rest of the country.

There is nothing Dukakis can do about the “northern” rubric, but “ethnic,” when you see or hear the man, is ludicrous, and the dread “liberal” isn’t much help in understanding him, either. If by liberal you mean someone who believes in using government to redistribute wealth through transfer payments on the model of the New Deal and the Great Society, then it’s preposterous to apply it to Dukakis. He believes in using government, all right, but to increase, not to redistribute, wealth.

The politics of productivity is his standard, and the “economic miracle” of Massachusetts--which went, under his tenure, from being a depressed industrial back-water to a high-tech boom economy--is his boast. Dukakis wants welfare recipients to work and businessmen to make money. These are not liberal causes, and Dukakis was voted out of office in 1978 largely because liberals could not abide his pinch-penny social service budgets.

The liberal label derives from a cliched view of Massachusetts. Yes, the state has its green belt of liberal suburbs around Boston. But once you’re past them you are in a state seething with populist anti-tax sentiment of the most mindless kind, with powerful class resentments, and ethnic, religious and racial antipathies as venerable as they are passionate.

It’s a tribute to Dukakis’ political skill that he has been able to build a strong machine in such a state and to master its volatile political chemistry. Indeed, getting elected three times to state office in Massachusetts may not be a bad proving ground for a candidate with far horizons.

It is not his state that is the Duke’s big problem, nor his ethnicity, nor his liberalism. It is his lack of spark, his deficit of passion. As a chief executive Dukakis is a maestro of efficiency and creativity, but his approach to leadership is as technocratic as his rhetoric. He does as much as he can do administratively, then, when he has no choice but to seek popular support, he waits for a consensus to form--instead of risking political capital in an effort to win the public to his point of view. The strengths of this approach to government are clear, but it is a recipe for competence, not greatness.

And yet, after eight years of Ronald Reagan, what a sea change mere competence would represent! The Dukakis candidacy will test whether after so much illusion the voters can still respond to plain sober sense. If he throws away his prepared scripts and instead trusts his gift for crisp off-the-cuff speech, Dukakis should be able to exploit the smooth television manner he picked up during his years as a host of the PBS series, “The Advocates,” and get across his message of economic growth through active government.

There is big economic trouble coming: We all sense it. We have been on a deficit-driven binge, and on bad days--when the stock market takes a dip, or interest rates rise--we can almost taste the impending hangover. Perhaps a man who believes in frugality as a principle would make the right President to preside over a period of relative austerity, a period of, say, less consumption and more investment. We could do a lot worse, and probably will.