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Whatever Dukakis may lack in comprehensiveness of knowledge, he makes up for in concentration, in the ability to focus on a problem and sort out practical solutions to it. Furthermore, by emphasizing his family's general success story, he makes himself the common denominator of immigrant aspiration, a kind of Everyethnic, ecumenical and assimilated. His individualism appeals to an American (as well as ancient Greek) ideal of self-sufficiency. The outsider riding in to handle a problem is part of our myth. Dukakis' unwavering optimism is an advantage when dealing with an electorate that likes that quality, whether displayed by a Franklin Roosevelt or a Ronald Reagan. Attempts to hedge Dukakis into compromising company -- as a Kennedy spender, or Harvard liberal, or game-theory technocrat, or Carter-Mondale moper -- run up against the serenely enclosed quality of his individualism.
His record in Massachusetts is impressive despite the inevitable imperfections. He deserves credit for the orderly management of a prosperity of which he was more the beneficiary than the cause. He is a meritocrat to his bones, with great respect for equity (if not quite a passion for equality). His claims are more moral than technocratic. He first wanted integrity. Efficiency followed on that. Though he was excessively rigid in his first term, and comparatively lax in his second, the practical result is that he cleaned up Massachusetts, an Augean task, enough to make anyone who did it a Greek hero.
Washington, these days, may well remind Dukakis of the Massachusetts he grew up in. In Ed Meese's town, fending off indictments could follow swift upon the oath of office. Simply to lever the White House out of its sleaze may prove a major feat of moral engineering. There is a more immediate need for management than for ideology in the demoralized departments and scandal-ridden White House. Dukakis, now cagey as well as righteous, may be fitted for a task that will require some rectitude. He has become like Plato's later Socrates, carefully programmed to look less programmed, admitting desire but reining it in, measuredly "crazy" like a fox. Sam Beer says that he finds in Dukakis a leadership like that of Franklin Roosevelt, the man often called a combination of the lion and the fox. So far, Dukakis has half of that act perfected. The rest of the campaign may find us looking for some signs of the other half, the lion.