Claiming credit for his state's New Age affluence, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis has been fast gaining ground in the Democratic presidential race. This is one of a series of occasional profiles of major 1988 contenders.
It was one of the most grueling, yet exhilarating days of Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign. For 18 hours the Massachusetts Governor barnstormed across eastern Texas, drawing attentive crowds and displaying his fluency in Spanish and Greek. Now, after midnight, Dukakis stood with his exhausted 18- year-old daughter Kara on the airport tarmac in Dallas. For the first time all day, the candidate noticed that Kara was teetering on high heels. "Why do you wear those foolish shoes?" he asked, baffled that his child would choose fashion over function. "Why don't you wear running shoes or something sensible like that?"
Sensible is what Michael Stanley Dukakis, 53, is all about. If he were a magazine, it would be Consumer Reports. Dukakis is a man who cannot recall the last novel he read; he once took on a family vacation a book entitled Swedish Land-Use Planning. In his high school yearbook he is facetiously depicted as "Big Chief Brain in Face." He can wax ecstatic over finding a pair of $47 shoes in a discount outlet, and has owned just four cars in the past quarter- century: a Rambler, two Plymouths and the current 1981 Dodge. "My wife says I'm the most uncomplicated man in the world," Dukakis admits. "I guess I am." Even his 83-year-old mother says of him, "What you see is what you get."
What you see is a compact-model candidate, 5 ft. 8 in. tall, with a mop of dark brown hair just beginning to gray at the temples, caterpillar-thick eyebrows and an aggressive Grecian nose tempered by a soft, almost shy smile. But in the Democratic presidential race Dukakis is as hot as a Friday-night traffic jam heading for Cape Cod. Ever since he unveiled his long-shot candidacy in March, Dukakis has been running like a modern-day Hermes in wing- tip shoes. He inherited most of Gary Hart's Iowa organization, raised a record $4.2 million in three months, and was judged by the keepers of the conventional wisdom as the winner of the Houston debate.
In his bargain-basement suits and button-down, short-sleeve shirts, Dukakis offers the Democrats neither charisma nor quixotic causes. Instead, he is running as the Lee Iacocca of state government: the Governor who brought the Massachusetts economy back from the dead. True, a Harvard study concluded that, at most, state government "may have helped sustain the growth once it began." And even Frank Keefe, Dukakis' secretary of administration and finance, claims only that the Governor's policies are responsible for 20% of the drop in state unemployment.
But as a candidate Dukakis radiates a far more simplistic version of cause and effect. "I speak to you as the Governor of a state which twelve years ago was bouncing around at the bottom of the barrel," he said in Tipton, Iowa. "Twelve years later we have a 3.5% unemployment rate, and we're now an economic showcase. How did it happen? Because we worked at it. We invested public resources; we got the private sector in; we involved citizens, mayors, business people."