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Admittedly his earlier losses had been expected or deemed possible by Dukakis -- just as his losing votes in the legislature had been when he first went there. But those losses he meant to use on the way to larger victories. In retrospect, he brought the Redemptive Loss within that same scheme. It would make him a better Governor the next time -- just you wait and see. His mother would take up the theme: All had happened for the best. Dukakis even came to take a kind of perverse credit for the loss, emphasizing that "I should never have lost," and "It was mine to lose," and "I blew it." Ed King was not a big enough figure to do in Michael Dukakis. Only Dukakis could do that.
Dukakis formulated to himself the optimistic concept of the Redemptive Loss while he was at the Kennedy School of Government. But he did not go there like other defeated politicians, to trade campaign anecdotes for some academic polish. That would have been too much like going to Harvard for the social benefits. He went there as he had gone to Swarthmore, to compete and contribute.
There was resistance to his coming, even as a full-time teacher and program organizer (rather than a visiting celebrity). The Kennedy School was from its founding in 1936 rather defensive about its academic legitimacy. Renamed in the '60s, during a time of heady confidence in the application of economic methods to social problems, it stressed the "hard sciences" as a basis for formulating public policy. The students' course evaluations bear the memory of that time, listing the mathematical and statistical skills needed for taking each course. That was a period when game theory was hot, and such games can all be played in the mind. "Field experience" does not make one a theoretician.