Now, With His Campaign on the Ropes, Dukakis Must Show That Victory Matters

Incipient despair has taken hold here about Gov. Michael S. Dukakis’ chances of victory.

To judge by a look at the out-of-town papers, a less acute form of this mood is spreading as fast as fear among Democrats elsewhere. Polls here show Dukakis in a virtual tie with Vice President George Bush. “If he can’t even carry his own state . . . “ people say, then stop, realizing the portentous implications of those words.

The hometown press, which had largely been rooting for the governor, has changed with the local and national polls. An acidulous columnist in the Boston Herald, a Rupert Murdoch paper that has been and will be against Dukakis for all eternity, sets the new tone: “It’s Monday, and the governor is on the road . . . the road to oblivion.” In the usually pro-Dukakis Boston Globe, one columnist describes the “Duke” as a “missing person” who may not be found before the November election, while another flatly predicts, “Without a miracle finish, he is headed for a repeat of ‘78”--when Dukakis was repudiated by his own party in his first bid for reelection.

Meanwhile, the candidate himself looks even more dour than usual. Although he has been newly buttressed by the return of top strategist John Sasso, the closest that Dukakis comes to a smile now is a subtle accommodation to the possibility of mirth that, on rare occasions, takes place south of his brooding eyebrows and north of his efficient chin. On television he looks as if he has no idea what hit him, as if it never occurred to him that in his 12 years as governor he has made decisions that, outside the cocoon of this one-party state, could come back to haunt him. The vice president’s erasure of a 17-point gap in the polls may well have planted the alien seed of self-doubt behind the governor’s bristling self-confidence.

What Dukakis had going for him before Bush’s demagogic onslaught began to register was the aura of success. Here at last, Democrats said to one another after the Atlanta convention, is a candidate who can win.

“They can taste victory,” said the television commentators about the convention delegates. And they weren’t the only ones.

Before Bush’s offensive opened at the Republican convention in New Orleans, Dukakis was uninspiring. But, because he looked like a winner, his blandness didn’t seem to matter. Now it matters.

Before New Orleans, the Dukakis campaign had shallow intellectual and programmatic roots. Deliberately vague on the issues, Dukakis sought to deny Bush ammunition to use against him. Of course, this “stealth” tactic kept him undefined as a candidate. But that didn’t seem to matter while the polls were good. Now, with Bush defining Dukakis with a vengeance as a dreaded liberal , it matters.

Before New Orleans it did not appear to matter that the people who ran the Dukakis campaign, in point of relevant experience, did not belong in the same room with James A. Baker III, Bush’s veteran handler. Now it matters.

It is understandable that voters who have had their hopes raised by the prospect of Dukakis-as-winner should feel let down by the prospect of Dukakis-as-mere-contender. But consider: His bulge over Bush was gained in the highly asymmetrical political circumstances of last June, when the logic of the campaign had defined Dukakis as the white moderate who defeated a black radical in primary after primary while Bush, his victory assured months before, all but slipped off the screen.

Now, with most polls showing Bush slightly ahead, Democrats must not let the false expectations of June sap their morale. The fact is that, given our current peace and prosperity, Dukakis is doing very well to still be in the race, which he unquestionably is. And, in the two weeks since Sasso has been aboard, Dukakis has gone off the defensive and taken steps to put himself in a stronger position for the home stretch.

That said, it must also be said that something about Dukakis elicits only a provisional investment of the emotions; his coolness toward causes, as well as his personal reserve, begets a coolness toward him. His call to make the election a referendum on “competence” looked like a clever way of avoiding ideological trouble in Atlanta, but now it looks like a singularly incompetent political choice. For better or for worse, voting for the President remains a highly personal decision, and, while it might be admirable, competence is not likable or, indeed, even discernible. Besides, it is what Bush called it in New Orleans: “a narrow ideal.”

It will be a hard blow for this proud man if he loses to Bush, but he does not seem able to communicate his personal vulnerability in the way that Bush did on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. Having just lost to Sen. Bob Dole and Pat Robertson in Iowa, Bush, his whole career in the balance, peered into the camera in the final seconds of his closing remarks during the last candidates’ debate and, awkwardly but movingly, asked the voters of New Hampshire to help him. Such moments remind us that Bush, for all his ineptitudes, has what a shrewd observer has called “a gift for intimacy,” and in New Hampshire it helped to save him. Dukakis has no such gift; projecting need is just not in his emotional repertoire. This makes it hard for voters to bond with him, and that in turn makes it easy for them to be with him in the thick but not in the thin.

This election may hinge on Dukakis’ capacity to transcend himself--to reach into his depths for the anger to confront Bush in a histrionic moment that defines him not as a technocrat and not as a Massachusetts liberal but as a proud and passionate man.

“Mr. Bush,” he could say, “you and your surrogates have questioned my love for this country and have spread malicious falsehoods about the woman I love. I’m not going to get down in the gutter with you, Mr. Bush. I’m not going to call you names or slander your family. I’m just going to beat you, so help me God!”