Some of those character traits and themes – the integrity, the competence – are Dukakis bedrock. The questions that remain are: 1) how much in demand those attributes will be; and 2) whether Dukakis can convince the electorate of his superiority in a field that includes five other progressive, accomplished Democrats, each with a real record of achievement. During his first term, the governor brought the force of his character to the aid of clearly defined causes, both ideological and reformist; during his second and third, his personal strengths have more often served the vague, ideologically neutral idea of compromise and consensus. After four years of that type of government, the challenge for Dukakis as he goes national is to move beyond nonideological stress on character and vague ideas like “economic opportunity for all” and confront the difficult ideological choices that ultimately must be made to pursue those goals.
At this very early stage it is unclear just how Dukakis will try to sell the Massachusetts economic renaissance. On the one hand, campaign aides say the governor intends to cite the Massachusetts experience only to lend himself credibility in the area of economic rejuvenation. On the other hand, in his preannouncement trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, Dukakis claimed the lion’s share of the credit for the state’s transformation. And during his Monday announcement, Dukakis was hardly retiring about his role, saying, “I would guess that the thing I bring to this campaign is a commitment to economic opportunity for every citizen of this nation and the ability to make that kind of thing happen, to get results, and to create the kind of future for our people that I think every American wants.”
That claim of economic wizardry is shaky. Although Dukakis was in office during part of the economic recovery and has presided over the continuing economic boom, economic experts discount the notion that he is any real way responsible for the state’s success. Instead, they attribute the recovery to a number of factors: a backhanded Keynesian overstimulation of the economy resulting from massive federal deficit spending; a substantial infusion of Defense Department dollars into the state’s high-tech industry; a low rate of immigration into the state, which keeps the work force limited and unemployment down; a well-educated work force; and a computer-industry niche that the Japanese have not yet targeted.
Lester Thurow, who is the Gordon Y. Billard professor of economics at MIT (and who will, in June, become the new dean of MIT’s Sloan School of Management), says Dukakis can claim some credit on the margins but adds, “The New England economy would have grown even if you had had a governor that was in some sense negative.” Barry Bluestone, a UMass/Boston professor of political economy and an expert on economic transition agrees: “No governor has much control over the fate of his economy, for two reasons,” he says. “First, they just don’t have the fiscal and monetary tools, and second, national and international events overshadow anything they could do even if they did have the tools.”
Bluestone says Dukakis does deserve credit for having launched programs to retrain workers and to promote state products in other markets. To that list, Kennedy School public-policy lecturer Bob Reich adds that the administration has helped somewhat by providing financing for high-risk ventures that might otherwise have gone unfinanced and by making some infrastructure improvements that have aided the flow of commerce.
