Dukakis Lauds Immigrants on Ellis Island Visit

For Michael S. Dukakis, it was a pilgrimage.

With his mother, Euterpe, standing by his side, the Democratic presidential candidate rode the boat to this famed former immigration processing center in New York Harbor on Saturday to laud the millions, who, like his parents three-quarters of a century ago, came here “seeking a better life for themselves” and “worked to create a better life for us all.”

But this is a presidential campaign, so nothing is simple.

Talks of Family Pride

The emotion was real, but also staged. The 76 flags whipping in the breeze were a tribute to the immigrant heritage but were also a political message. The talk was about family pride and immigrant roots but also about unemployment, rising interest rates and George Bush.

On Friday, the government reported that unemployment had risen to 5.6% from 5.4%, signifying an increase of 226,000 in the number of people seeking jobs but unable to find them. Vice President Bush, asked Friday about the increase, had tried to make the point that, although the number of people looking for work had increased, so too had the number of people with jobs. In doing so, he dismissed the unemployment figure as “statistically almost irrelevant.”

Dukakis and his host for the day, New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, seized on that unfortunate turn of phrase. Characteristically, Cuomo’s rhetoric was better.

In flaying Bush, he denounced what he called Republicans’ “simplistic slogans and pandering pretenses of patriotism” and a “cynicism (that) is in them, a strain so powerful that not all the consultants’ hypnotism nor advance man’s makeup can mask it for long.”

“Two hundred twenty-six thousand Americans out of work, many with families,” Cuomo said as he stood facing the building, now a museum, to which immigrants at Ellis Island were taken on arrival. “And they call it irrelevant--and it is, to them, but not to those of us who remember what this place means.”

The Democratic ticket, he said, offers a message of “prosperity, even for the ‘irrelevant.’ ”

Dukakis, for his part, called Bush’s remark “troubling.”

“These are our neighbors, they’re honest, hard-working people with families,” he said of the unemployed. They have “the right to be full shareholders in the American dream.”

The emotional coolness that limits Dukakis’ ability to match Cuomo’s flights of speech apparently is a family trait, as reporters discovered when they tried to question Euterpe Dukakis about her experiences in crossing the Atlantic.

The weather was “dreadful,” she recalled, and the passage “was definitely steerage, not very elegant, I can tell you.”

But for the cameras recording Dukakis’ every move--the ones working for the television networks plus the ones filming footage for campaign advertisements, the visual images of the day made up for the emotions that the Dukakis clan keeps buttoned up:

--Dukakis standing with the Statue of Liberty at his back, surrounded by flags whipping in the breeze.

--The candidate and his wife, Kitty, silhouetted against the towers of New York as he traced the route of the boat that took his mother from the purgatory of Ellis Island to the promise of America.

--Euterpe, small but upright and proud on the day before her 85th birthday, holding overhead a certificate showing that her name will be inscribed on the Ellis Island museum’s Immigrant Wall of Honor.

The point of the images was to evoke Dukakis’ immigrant roots and offer a subtle visual defense against one of Bush’s repeated attacks.

For weeks, Bush has hit Dukakis’ 1977 veto of a bill that would have made the Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in Massachusetts schools, an attack designed to raise doubts about the Democratic nominee’s patriotism.

So, before the day’s speeches began, Dukakis, Cuomo and their wives led an audience of Ellis Island immigrants and families in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then, all remained standing to recite the pledge.

Later, in his speech, with the flags and Statue of Liberty at his back, Dukakis said: “I don’t know what some people see when they look at that flag, but I know what I see. I see a quarter of a billion faces, of all ages, all colors, all shapes and all sizes” and “a nation dedicated to a belief in individual rights (and) family values.”

Family values--the values of thrift and hard work and fidelity--are at the center of the immigrant image that Dukakis has sought to project throughout his campaign as he tries to convince voters that he, rather than Bush, shares their experiences and goals.

The immigrant story, he said Saturday, “is your story, it is our story, it is the story of America.”

“What an inheritance we have,” he said, “and what a responsibility.

“We must never forget--though some already have--that no one in America is irrelevant. In America, everyone matters.”