Dukakis <i> Agonistes</i> : Finally, the ‘Can-Do’ Candidate Comes Out Fighting

It’s a spectacle to tease pity from a stone, and yet every Democrat I know feels not pity but anger at Michael Dukakis as he fights for his political life. It’s as if we can’t forgive him for raising our hopes last summer only to dash them this fall. We’re angry at his advisers, his advertisements, his lethargy in responding to George Bush’s attacks, his want of verve, drive, eloquence or imagination. Above all, we’re angry at his preternatural calm. (“I get madder at my husband for not taking out the trash then he gets over losing the presidency to a bunch of lying hucksters,” said one friend of mine.)

As he has trooped in recent days from Koppel to Rather to MacNeil/Lehrer, we have been looking for the galvanic phrase, the new thought memorably expressed, that would reveal him as something other than a mechanical man with a pack of mechanically expressed thoughts. But no, he has kept on shuffling the same old deck, hoping that the key to victory will turn up in there someplace.

His woodenness infuriates us. Yet we could bear even that if, with all due stiffness, he showed his brainy side--made a telling reference to history, to ideas, to the inspiriting principles of his party. But even here, especially here, this Ivy League drudge disappoints us: All he seems to know are the sound bites in his dreary pack of cards. His ads pillory Bush as a tool of his handlers, yet Dukakis’ mind seems to have been colonized by his handlers, specialists in the prose of governing, not the poetry of campaigning. Most politicians outtalk their achievements. Not Dukakis, who has done vastly better as a governor than he has talked as a presidential candidate.

A case can be made that Dukakis’ mechanical persistence (shuffle, shuffle . . . ) is really a kind of strength, a sign of self-assurance. We want that in a President, don’t we? Yes and no. Ronald Reagan managed to remain true to himself while adapting to what the polls and his own political intuition told him the public wanted. He has been firm but flexible, against communism in the abstract but four-square behind the world’s No. 1 Communist. Dukakis has some of Reagan’s inner constancy but none of his outer pliancy. His strength, therefore, registers as weakness.

Of course, even his mulishness could have been converted to his advantage if he, or his advisers, had had the wit to heroize it into “I am what I am” authenticity. Richard Nixon, in the hands of Bush’s handler Roger Ailes, appealed to that numerous species, the American jerk. But the nerd, Dukakis’ analogue, is both less numerous and less likable, so he gains nothing by being himself.

And yet if the man sometimes has the persona of a damp sponge, what he stands for and what he has accomplished in Massachusetts remain attractive, and when he talks about the creative use of government in the service of mainstream ideals he can be quietly impressive. Last week, for example, after his depressing appearance on “Nightline,” he held a town meeting in a high-school auditorium with some citizens in the Chicago suburb of Naperville. The event was broadcast by C-Span, and it’s a pity that the millions who’d tuned into Ted Koppel weren’t watching, for the governor was at his best.

The citizens were interested in the Dukakis agenda. They wanted help in financing their education and caring for elderly parents; they wanted a better break for family farmers, veterans, the homeless and newlyweds trying to buy their first home. And to all their questions Dukakis gave candid assurance that, yes, he understood what it was like trying to put kids through college at today’s prices. He knew the indignities to which the heroes in VA hospitals had been subjected by the petty economies of the Reagan-Bush Administration. He could sympathize with the situation of a woman with three children in day care who finds nothing left of her paycheck at week’s end. And he wanted to help, to “make a real difference in the lives of real people.”

This was no senator talking whose words have the weight of wind, no vice president whose portfolio is the state funeral; this was a governor, a catalyst of change who had helped his state navigate the transition from old industries to new that defines the challenge of this historical moment. He had been good for Massachusetts, he was implicitly telling the Naperville audience, and what he had learned in 10 years there would make him good for the Americans close enough to the quick to feel the difference.

The town meeting came to a climax in a dramatic twist. A young woman put a question to the governor about student aid, listened to what he said by way of reply (naturally, it was something like “I have a three-point plan”), and then told him what the woman in charge of financial aid had said after turning down her request for aid: “Come back if Dukakis is elected.”

A rare smile escaped the candidate. “She’s right,” he said, his voice gravid with emotion. “She’s right.” It was a real moment between two real people in the midst of a synthetic made-for-television campaign, and better than any commercial or sound bite. It defined what this election is all about. The “gentler, kinder nation,” which George Bush only talks about in order to disguise the general baseness of his campaign, Michael Dukakis would seek to build.