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The people who had brought him into office began to feel like Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium. After a night of trying to seduce Socrates, Alcibiades concludes that he was holding an "eerie inhuman thing" in his arms. Alcibiades voices his bafflement in words that mingle admiration with disgust, which catch the feelings widely shared in Dukakis' circle: "How was I supposed to take that, what with my realization that he had rejected me, yet my awe at his character and control and hardiness, my actual experience of a creature who, for shrewdness and strength, I never dreamed existed, so that I could not quite get angry at not receiving his favors, nor, when it came to winning those favors, was I anything but stumped."
When the legislature forced on Dukakis the inevitable tax increase, after all the damage his resistance had caused to programs for the poor, the first term became a success. He did clean up Massachusetts politics. He brought rational organization to the agencies and the courts. He was so involved in these procedural improvements that he did not notice the failure of his loyalists to return to him. Now it was his turn to be baffled and rejected. He had not seen the loss coming, which made it fall on him more thunderously. It shook his self-confidence, which is his central virtue.
THE MYTH OF THE REDEMPTIVE LOSS
It hurt. But he would take an odd glee, in years to come, publicly describing how much it hurt. The defeat, carefully reconsidered, became his Redemptive Loss, the thing that would absolve Dukakis of former insensitivities. Hurt became a passport to the world of vulnerability. Because of the stress on this humanizing defeat, an impression has spread that Dukakis never suffered political loss before. That helped explain his first term as an aberration -- Dukakis was just stunned, for a while, by his sense of the sacredness of public trust.
But he had, in fact, lost political races before -- his first one, for the Brookline Redevelopment Authority, in 1958; his try at the attorney general's post in 1966; and at the Lieutenant Governor's in 1970. He had departed from public office -- from the legislature to make his 1970 race, whose loss left him in private practice for a while. Besides, he had known personal loss in the brutal deaths of his brother and his aide in car fatalities.
Nor did he need the Redemptive Loss to learn that he had to loosen up at times. His marriage to Kitty -- by his buttoned-up standards a wastrel, undisciplined in her smoking and language, electric with impulses he lacked or leashed in (he did not know then that amphetamines were helping her) -- had been an early recognition that there must be some allowed compartment of the random in his life. Through her he enjoys a vicarious spontaneity. They have a totaliter aliter marriage, reversing each other's tastes and temperaments. Others cannot live up to his standards. She is allowed to have a different set of standards altogether.