Campaigning Runs in Family, Dukakis’ Son Shows

John Dukakis, son of the Democratic presidential candidate, was pressing the flesh at a Cinco de Mayo festival in Centennial Park in Santa Ana on Sunday when he came to a booth with a TV set tuned to the Lakers’ thrashing of the Utah Jazz in the National Basketball Assn. playoffs.

Dukakis, recently arrived in California to garner votes for his father in the June 7 primary, saw trouble.

“The worst thing that could happen to this campaign would be a Lakers-Celtics series,” quipped Dukakis, a former actor who spent almost five years in Southern California and knows well that early June is no time for a Massachusetts resident to violate the local airspace.

As things stand now, though, Dukakis likes his father’s chances of capturing a majority of the state’s 336 delegates in the primary.

‘Not Voting for a ZIP Code’

“Californians are not voting for a ZIP code, they’re voting for a president,” he said. “And at this point, all the candidates are from the East. This is a state that has both natives and people who have made their way out here from all over.”

Dukakis, 29, coordinated his father’s primary campaigns in the Southern states, where his wife, Lisa, served as financial director.

For the next month, he will serve as political director in California, meeting with local and state officials in an attempt to firm up support before the June vote.

He will also engage in some surrogate campaigning, as he did at Centennial Park on Sunday and later in the afternoon at another Cinco de Mayo celebration at Lincoln Park in Los Angeles.

The Centennial Park celebration, which was held Saturday and Sunday, was sponsored by the Santiago Club, a group of local business and community leaders active in Latino affairs.

The club is not supporting Dukakis or any other candidate, vice chairman Joseph Mazzeo said.

Dressed in a lavender button-down shirt and wrinkled khakis, Dukakis donned an apron at a booth serving Mexican food, tried a taco de carnitas --a soft corn tortilla filled with chunks of deep-fried pork--and chatted with the locals, who were impressed, sort of, to meet the son of a presidential candidate.

“Que bueno “--How nice--Marisela Rodriguez said when told that this was Michael Dukakis’ son. “Where you from?”

“Massachusetts,” said Dukakis, moving on to the next booth.

Dukakis also addressed a crowd of about 400 Latinos in Spanish, with the help of Santa Ana City Council member Miguel Pulido, who hastily translated Dukakis’s comments on a piece of notebook paper before they climbed onto the bandstand.

“Mike Dukakis supports the aspirations that Hispanic families share,” he said in Spanish. “A desire for quiet neighborhoods and world peace; a desire for a good education for our kids; a desire for productive jobs, and, possibly the most important, a desire for equal and just opportunity.”

Before joining his father’s campaign about a year ago, Dukakis worked for two years as a legislative aide to Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.).

Before that, he worked as an actor, appearing in “Jaws 2” and several episodes of the TV show “Family Ties.”