E-mail a friendMichael Dukakis
airdate February 4, 2008
Michael Dukakis was the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and is generally credited with digging the state out of one of its worst financial and economic crises. He was also the Democratic presidential nominee in '88. Since '91, Dukakis has had posts in academia, including visiting professor at UCLA's School of Public Policy and Social Research. He also co-authored How to Get Into Politics - And Why, to encourage young people to think about public service as a career.
Michael Dukakis
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Michael Dukakis to this program. This year marks the 20th anniversary of his own run for the White House. The former Massachusetts governor was, of course, the Democratic presidential nominee back in 1988. He is now a visiting professor of public policy at UCLA, of course here in L.A. Governor Dukakis, I'm honored to have you on the program, and especially given that I know it must be hard for a Patriots supporter to come out in public today.
Michael Dukakis: We're in deep mourning. (Laughter) They had them.
Tavis: They had them, they did.
Dukakis: They had them on the back field - five of them. And Samuel had his hands on at that ball. It would have been over. Anyway, we're crazy and we've had such tremendous success lately.
Tavis: You've had such a good run lately, though. Such a good run.
Dukakis: Yeah, we've really been spoiled.
Tavis: Baseball and football.
Dukakis: And now the Celtics.
Tavis: Celtics, doing well. Well, we're glad to see you here.
Dukakis: It's good to be here.
Tavis: Let's talk about the other big - you had the Super Bowl and now Super Tuesday, of course. First of all, when you ran in 1988, 20 years ago, I assume there are a lot of lessons you've learned. You've talked about some of them over the past 20 -
Dukakis: Too many, yeah.
Tavis: Too many lessons learned. Let me ask two very direct questions. First, for Hillary Clinton. Based upon what you learned in '88, given where she is as we sit tonight, what's your advice for her?
Dukakis: Well, I've got advice for both of the candidates, and that is - and I'm a little obsessive on the subject - that this party of ours has got to get serious about precinct-based grassroots organizing. We're not doing it, we haven't been doing it. Mea, culpa - I did it in the primary, won the nomination in '88, and stopped it in running for the final.
Why? Because the folks that were supposed to know something about running for the presidency said, "Well, you don't do that." And I'll take a little bit of credit for the fact that Duval Patrick became governor of Massachusetts in part because he listened and went out and organized in every single precinct in the state, and we've got to do that nationally.
And I don't think either one of the candidates is doing it very well. So my advice to both of them if they win the nomination is to go out there with the help of lots and lots of good people and literally organize every one of the 200,000 precincts in the country. And I mean door to door, house to house, every household. We've never done that.
Tavis: How do you do that in such a massive way?
Dukakis: You recruit 200,000 precinct captains, they go out and recruit six block captains in every one of the precincts in the country, and you systematically begin in March. You don't wait until October. You begin in March making personal contact. Now this is not parachuting kids in with two weeks to go. These people have to live in the precinct, look like the precinct, walk like the precinct and talk like the precinct.
But look, Obama's got 650,000 contributors. That's a pretty good pool from which to recruit precinct captains. The Democratic National Committee's got five million contributors. We've got the people out there, but we've got to commit ourselves to doing this, and it's the one criticism I would have. And look, when it comes to presidential politics, I'm very humble.
If I knew anything about presidential politics, I'd here in a somewhat different capacity. But I feel very strongly about this and I think we simply - as soon as we have a nominee, whenever that is, we've got to get out there and organize all 50 states, stop buying into this red-blue thing. If you concede half the country to the other side that's a losing strategy, and I don't see why we should do that.
Tavis: What do you make of this race? There's been so much, of course, written about it and said about it, but to your earlier point, whenever the Democrats get a nominee means that you, like most other folk, don't think we're going to have a clear nominee tomorrow night. What's your sense of this journey that the Democratic Party's on?
Dukakis: Somebody's going to win it. I don't think it's going to go into the convention to be brokered or anything of that kind. But it's a contest. We've got two terrific candidates, each of whom is breaking new ground, historically, and they're both very good; one of them is going to win. And as soon as we know that, and I would guess certainly by the end of February, early March, we should know then. And there's plenty of time to get organized after that. Then we've got to get serious about organizing every single state in the country in a very serious way.
Tavis: You know the minutia of this because you've been through it, obviously. I'm not asking you to endorse or take a side here, but I am curious as to your overarching view of how you think Hillary runs against John McCain, who most people think will, in fact, unlike the Democrats, be their standard bearer for his party tomorrow night. How does Hillary run, how does Barack run?
Dukakis: I don't think it's a difference, but I'm the last guy to try to dope this up. McCain is an interesting guy. He's got a lot of strong qualities but he's profoundly conservative - far more conservative than I would have thought. And of course he's been one of the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for this fiasco of a war. And frankly, Tavis, I don't get it.
Here's a guy who's a career military guy who spent six years of his life in a cage in another fiasco, in Vietnam. Anybody who knows anything about the history of the Middle East and of Iraq should have known if you invaded the place it would set off a religious war, guaranteed. And yet he not only supported that invasion, he's its greatest cheerleader. And now he says the surge is working, whatever that means, and as far as he's concerned we ought to stay there a year, 10 years, 100 years.
I don't get it. So I think the war is going to be an absolutely critical issue. Not only that, but it's costing us $200 billion a year. Now, John McCain's a guy that says he's against earmarks. He's the scourge of earmarks, but he doesn't mind a $200 billion a year earmark for this fiasco. So I think our candidates have got to join on the issues. We've got, I think, everything going for us.
And they also better expect the attack campaign will begin. It may not come from the McCain campaign, but as one guy who did not anticipate what was going to happen, believe me, there will be independent committees. It may not be Willie Horton, it may not be swift boats, but it will be something, and whoever our candidate is, they'd better be ready for that from the get-go.
Tavis: If Willie Horton could work successfully against you, what say you then about that same kind of issue working against a guy who has a lot more medical anyone in his skin - melanin in his skin than you do? A lot darker, even, than you.
Dukakis: Not only that, he has an interesting background that includes a stepfather who I guess was Muslim and so on and so forth. Look, they'll use it all. I don't think we ought to kid ourselves. And although I would hope - and I don't think - that John McCain would do that, there are lots of so-called independent committees around who are prepared to do so.
So whether it's Hillary or Barack, each of them has to be ready for that from the get-go and they've got to do what I didn't do, which is to come out with a carefully thought-out strategy for dealing with it from the beginning. Now, part of that is the precinct organization, because if you have thousands of people out there organizing at the precinct level, as soon as the attacks begin, bang, out they go, start banging on those doors again, reconnect with the folks that they've already met with and talked with and begun to enlist in the cause.
It's probably the most effective way to do it. But I don't think we should be under any illusions here, and I'm not accusing John McCain of anything. It's just obvious to me that there will be people in the right wing of this country's politics that will start the attack stuff early. It was a so-called independent committee that started with me, and Willie Horton was a so-called independent committee that started with John Kerry and the swift boat. So whether it's Hillary or Barack, they'd better be ready for this.
Tavis: On the Iraq issue - and I'm playing devil's advocate here just to push you a little bit more on this; this is not my point of view, I'm playing devil's advocate here, just to be clear about this - in a worst-case scenario, on the Iraq war, John McCain's a hero. Neither Hillary or Barack have ever been in the military. John McCain argues, and the numbers underscore right now, he could make the case at least that the surge, for the moment, is working.
We're at war. Do you want to trust somebody who doesn't know anything about this or do you want to trust me? And one of them happens to be a woman, and we're at war. To your point now I can see this stuff coming, so I'm not altogether sure at that just because a majority of the country wants out of Iraq that John McCain can't spin this to his advantage.
Dukakis: I'm not sure either except I know this: it's robbing us of $200 billion a year at a time when our bridges are collapsing, our infrastructure's falling apart. We can't provide health insurance for the children of working families whose parents aren't fortunate enough to be employed by somebody who provides health insurance, and we've got kids to educate.
I think that's a very powerful argument, and I don't care whether he was in the military or not. I think his judgment in the case was badly flawed. We're winning? Ninety-one people just got blown up the other day. We're rapidly approaching the 4,000-death mark for young Americans and thousands more who are back, maimed, crippled for life. If that's victory, I don't know what it is.
And as we both know, it was an attack against somebody who had nothing to do with 9/11. The whole thing was built on a lie. So I think not withstanding his military background, I think his judgment in this case is highly questionable. If I were a candidate, I'd be taking this issue to him because I think the overwhelming majority of American people know it was wrong, know it was a mistake.
And by the way, somebody said to me the other day, "Well, what's the blueprint?" I said, "A couple of fellows named Baker and Hamilton gave us that blueprint, and Jim Baker was the president's father's secretary of state and a very smart guy." When the Baker-Hamilton Commission issued its report and essentially gave the president a way out of this mess, he rejected it and instead increased the number of troops. So if John McCain or somebody else says, "Well, what are you going to do?" Answer: read the Baker-Hamilton report and follow its recommendations.
Tavis: You are from Massachusetts so you understand this Camelot thing as well as anybody because you grew up around it.
Dukakis: I was in Los Angeles in 1960, Tavis, as a recently graduated law student, just taking the bar exam. One of my buddies came out here to watch our hero get nominated in this town in 1960.
Tavis: Bobby Kennedy.
Dukakis: Jack Kennedy.
Tavis: Jack Kennedy, I mean Jack Kennedy in '60, exactly. I wonder, then, whether - I don't want to color it. What do you make of these comparisons now to Obama?
Dukakis: Well, I think they're very strong. You have two relatively young men - Kennedy and Obama - at a time when the country isn't feeling good at all about itself, when its international prestige has been badly damaged by the Bush foreign policy and by this crazy war. And when we aren't focusing on serious problems here at home.
It's exactly what it was like in 1960 and, by the way, with a candidate who was a Catholic, something which a lot of people said would make it impossible for him to win. Well, he won. Now we've got somebody else coming along who has a lot of those same qualities and seems to have a lot of appeal, especially to young people and folks who are independents, sitting on the fence, haven't really engaged in the politics of the country.
Tavis: Our time is just about up. When you ran, you had all kind of endorsements. Do endorsements matter?
Dukakis: Sometimes. Ted Kennedy's endorsement has helped. But if the endorsement brings with it people and resources, it's even more important.
Tavis: Any predictions at all?
Dukakis: I don't think anybody can predict what's happening.
Tavis: Kind of muddled, yeah.
Dukakis: No, we've got two good candidates, they're working hard. I'd be proud to support either one of them. One of them is going to win the nomination and I hope the presidency.
Tavis: There's a bold prediction. One of them is going to win the nomination. I think the governor's right about that.
Dukakis: Well, it's down to two.
Tavis: No, I'm serious, yeah.
Dukakis: The field's been narrowed now.
Tavis: It has indeed. I'm honored to have you on the program.
Dukakis: It's great to be here.
Tavis: We're glad to have you here at UCLA.
Dukakis: Thank you, thank you.
Tavis: Governor Michael Dukakis.
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