Ostensibly, many Club members reported for once-a-year duty because it was Election Night. Almost as an afterthought, after Mr.Dukakis had left the building, Tom Camarella was elevated to club president, by acclaim. He succeeds Darryl Cherness, who came to the presidency last winter on a night when there was an ugly, lingering fight over which of two factions would lead the club. This time it was as tame as a tea party for two-year-olds.
But the three-ring attraction for the capacity crowd of a hundred and seventy-five persons at the Vets Auditorium was the charismatic Mr. Dukakis, a part-time professor at UCLA. “My mission these days,” he said, “is to encourage young people to enter public service.”
Charm to Spare
He charmed ‘em down to their pom-poms. They especially loved his repeated sallies into the seldom-visited political world of humility, a loser confessing his failings. But the crowd wasn’t all that discerning. No litmus tests on this night.
By way of introducing himself in returning to a diminished spotlight as a downsized political celebrity, he presented himself as Everyman. It is his favorite lifelong self-image. “I am one of you guys,” he is fond of saying.
Such was the scale and sting of his defeat in the 1988 election that Democratic office-seekers ever since have publicly shunned Mr. Dukakis, so as not to be associated with one of the party’s bitterest memories. He adjusted smoothly.
He has comfortably graduated to the third stage of political life, from rising star to Presidential nominee to elder statesmen. His latest role may be the best fit of all because he can shed stigmas by believably portraying himself as a plain working guy.
Teaching at UCLA for the eleventh winter in a row, Mr. Dukakis and his wife Kitty maintain an apartment in Westwood. A vigorous advocate of self-reliance and public transportation, he almost turned purple in criticizing the car-choked streets and freeways of Los Angeles. He avoids stress, he boasted, by walking the mile and a half from home to classroom.
He promptly sought to put his audience at ease. “If I knew anything about Presidential politics,” he half-kidded, “I would be here in another capacity.” This was the only time the audience was tentative about responding.
From the Past to the Future
Chatty and engaging, Mr. Dukakis spoke forcefully and confidently. Like plugging in an iron, he connected immediately and stayed hot as long as he was in the room. He covered his forgettable past and the Democratic Party’s supposedly ineffective present before laying out a blueprint for returning the party to power.
With the Democrats having lost five of the last seven Presidential elections, Mr. Dukakis said they need to return to the old-fashioned tactics that made them the party of the people.
The first act, he said, should be to eschew the modern campaigning techniques that value the impersonal over the personal and direct. It is ineffectual and self-defeating, he believes, to emphasize reaching masses of voters by telephone or email because those voters are faceless.
The touch must be personal.
“I am talking about going door to door,” admittedly not a popular contemporary strategy in national campaigns. “We need the human touch,” Mr. Dukakis said. “Face to face.
“People knocking on doors, going from door to door, people who look like, talk like, act like the neighborhood they are in. I am not talking about parachuting (out-of-town) groups into a community two weeks before an election.
“I am talking about hometown people. We must get back to our roots, back to what made the Democratic Party great. How many precincts do you have in Culver City?”
Seventy-seven, someone called out.
Know the Territory
“Every one of those should have a precinct captain and a block captain,” he said. “Know your neighborhoods. Know the people. Know what is going on. Get involved.
“We need to organize,” Mr. Dukakis reiterated. “We have gotten away from it. We must get back to our roots. I am talking about putting together an old-fashioned kind of organization, precinct by precinct. Precinct captains and block captains. Organize.
“This has to begin a year before an election. People ask me who I think is going to run in ’08. Forget ’08. There will be plenty of candidates when the time comes. We need to think about winning seats in Congress in November of ’06.”
Democrats have erred, Mr. Dukakis said, by not capitalizing on their broadly based foundation of donors. He said intense follow-up contacts should be established and nurtured with the record two million persons who contributed an average of $113 each to the last Democratic Presidential contender John Kerry.
Heaps of Humility
Dapper and diminutive, Mr. Dukakis was cradled lovingly in the arms of forgiving fans. Their abiding ardor for a man who took a hefty pratfall in losing to George Bush the father would have restored the self-confidence of a dead man.
Ivy League casual in his dress, he could have passed for the world’s first seventy-two-year-old magazine model. His accessibly blended attire gave him a made-for-television look— button-down blue shirt, tieless, gray trousers, topped off with a vivid red sweater, a full head of salt and pepper hair, and those trademark black eyebrows that weigh about fifty pounds apiece.
His round-shouldered gait, however, appeared to further reduce Mr. Dukakis’s height.
Whether modesty came naturally to the three-time governor of Massachusetts or was an enforced necessity later in life, he deftly deployed it to advantage.
For more than an hour, there was a horse race over which posturing the audience loved more. Was it his repeated admissions of “screwing up” his 1988 run for the White House or his skin-splitting, pointy jabs at the Bush administration? “Worst President in my lifetime,” Mr. Dukakis said.
The former governor may have shined brightest during the question-and-answer period. Even though he was on his way to LAX to pick up his wife, he patiently and elaborately responded to fourteen audience members during the last forty-five minutes.
Some inquiries came equipped with built-in pitfalls, but Mr. Dukakis handled them skillfully without offending. One man asserted that Al Gore defeated President Bush in ’00 and Mr. Kerry beat Mr. Bush the last time.
The most loaded question was fired by a man who presumably amazed the whole room. Since Judge Samuel Alito appears on the ledge of being voted onto the U.S. Supreme Court as the fifth Catholic member, the man said, can’t someone with influence “raise the issue that this would put too many Catholics” on the Court? “Especially,” he added, “since they are all conservative.”
No, said Mr. Dukakis, who is Greek Orthodox. Many effective legislators “on our side” are Catholic, starting with Sen. Ted Kennedy.