The State of the Question : The Lives of the Leading Contenders : DUKAKIS

Michael Dukakis, the subject of two books reviewed in the adjoining article, is also co-author, with Harvard Business School professor, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, of Creating the Future: The Massachusetts Comeback and Its Promise for America (Summit: $17.95; 190 pp.). Kanter’s main contribution to the book is a single, long, opening chapter on Dukakis’ economic comeback strategy in Massachusetts. Strikingly, the book says nothing about foreign policy or disarmament. Like Paul Simon in Let’s Put America Back to Work, Dukakis seems to think that Americans are far more worried that their country may be becoming a second-rate economic power than they are about anything else. Kanter’s introduction compares Dukakis I and II (before and after his retreat to Harvard) with Gandhi I and II (the busy South African lawyer and the serene Mahatma). “The analogy is suggestive rather than exact, of course,” she concedes.

Of course.