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Dukakis believes he has found an answer to the Democratic Party's desperate search for a post-New Deal ideology: liberalism on the cheap. He offers the traditional vision of "economic opportunity" and "full employment." The difference is that Dukakis insists that these goals can be achieved largely by rechanneling existing federal resources. As a candidate, he resists putting price tags on programs: "I don't think you have to prepare a budget, for God's sake." But even Dukakis' showcase proposal -- a regional-development fund that he mentions in almost every speech -- would cost just $500 million a year, about what the U.S. spends on aid to Pakistan. As he talks eagerly about harnessing the "enormous capacity at the state and local level," Dukakis at times sounds like a man whose fondest ambition is to be Governor of the United States.
There is another element in the Dukakis campaign, one that is politically more problematic. With Mario Cuomo on the sidelines, Dukakis, the son of Greek immigrants, is the only claimant to give-me-your-tired-your-poor ethnicity. But this first-generation heritage can also make Dukakis seem like a political outsider, especially in the South. Introducing him at a speech in Corpus Christi, Texas Land Commissioner Garry Mauro said, "Governor, when I saw the two k's in your name, I can tell you we've never had a Dukakis run for anything in Texas."
Five years ago, in his comeback race for Governor, Dukakis had to be coaxed into talking at all about his father Panos, who died in 1979, and his mother Euterpe. Now he revels in it. "Each of my parents is an American success story," Dukakis boasts in his standard stump speech. "My father, eight years after he came to this country as a 15-year-old Greek immigrant, was entering medical school . . . My mother was the first Greek girl ever to go beyond high school in Haverhill, Mass."
Buried within this autobiography is the portrait of a family that belies easy ethnic stereotypes. By the time Dukakis was born, in 1933 (three years after his brother Stelian), the family was living comfortably in the prosperous Boston suburb of Brookline. The Dukakises were, by all accounts, demanding parents. Sandy Bakalar, Mike Dukakis' high school girlfriend, remembers Panos as "scary." She recalls, "He had high standards for the boys, strict high standards. They had a very structured life at home. They had specific responsibilities."
This stern upbringing owed as much to New England Puritanism as it did to Greek ethnicity. Dr. Nicholas Zervas, a close friend of Dukakis', describes Euterpe as a "really patrician woman. She would have made a wonderful Brahmin." Unlike many immigrant families, the Dukakises were not religious, supporting the Greek Orthodox Church primarily for cultural reasons. If anything, the family was governed by what Bakalar calls the "quintessential Protestant ethic. Whatever gifts you received, you had to give back. They really believed that money corrupted."