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Spurring economic development would be not only a touchstone of a Dukakis Administration but also a likely reflection of the peripatetic quality that he would bring to the presidency. "Dukakis would get a lot of things going very fast," says Frank Keefe, the Massachusetts secretary of administration and finance, who has worked for the Governor since 1975. "What he'd spend lots of his time doing is what he likes best: traveling around the country, convening task forces, talking with Governors and mayors, promoting regional economic development." Longtime advisers predict that Dukakis would chafe at the constraints of life in the White House and try to break out of the splendid isolation of the presidency through nonstop travel. Says DeVillars: "There'll be plenty of work for advance men in a Dukakis presidency."
! Almost as if anticipating facile and unflattering comparisons with Jimmy Carter, the Dukakis camp goes out of its way to insist that the Governor has learned to set limited and attainable priorities. Paul Brountas, who has replaced former Campaign Manager John Sasso as the candidate's closest confidant, contends that Dukakis failed in his abortive first term because "there were far too many legislative initiatives." Brountas predicts that the domestic agenda of Dukakis' first year in the White House would consist of perhaps a "half dozen manageable programs." Seated one row behind a dozing and generally far vaguer Dukakis aboard the campaign plane, Brountas ticked off some of the priority issues in lawyerly fashion: housing, drugs, health insurance, college education and improving the status of teachers.
The innate caution of Dukakis' campaign style sometimes leaves aides in the peculiar role of providing both the specificity and the passion that the candidate so assiduously avoids. Chris Edley, for example, talks animatedly about Dukakis' moving immediately after the election to forge a "vigorous consensus on a multi-year deficit plan." Implicit in this prediction is an awareness that far more overt sacrifice will required to douse the deficit than merely mobilizing an army of IRS agents to hunt down tax scofflaws. "There will be real action on the economic front," Edley says. "On the three fronts of the budget, economic development and international economics, you can expect to see a lot of hard pushing."
Part of the problem in depicting a Dukakis presidency, of course, is that soaring poetry and air castles of ideas are as alien to Dukakis as they are natural to Jesse Jackson. But in fairness, it must be said that the reality of a Dukakis presidency would be more uplifting than its anticipation. As a pragmatic problem solver, Dukakis is often at his best reacting decisively rather than initiating boldly. "Michael likes to make decisions," Hale Champion, the Governor's chief of staff, has said. "He never stalls to get irrelevant information. His basic impulse is to get on with things."