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Dukakis, Once Burned, Refuses to Be Optimistic About 2008
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Candidate
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Aug 21, 2007 03:57pm |
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| Category | Interview |
| News Date | Tuesday, August 21, 2007 09:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Michael Dukakis has seen this script before: a Republican administration besieged by scandal and running out the clock on its second term, while wide-eyed Democrats confidently lick their chops, knowing there’s no way in hell voters will reward the G.O.P. with four more years in the White House.
It was around this very moment 20 years ago, the summer when Oliver North told Congress he was “authorized to do everything that I did” and Reagan fatigue took hold, that Mr. Dukakis, then the 53-year-old governor of Massachusetts, emerged at the head of a crowded Democratic presidential pack. By the time he was formally nominated in Atlanta the following July, he’d opened a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush.
“We’re not going to outspend the other guys,” he said during an interview in his modest office in the political science department at Northeastern University, where he was the first to arrive (at 7:30 a.m.) on a recent midsummer morning. “We’re probably not going to outstrategize them. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we’ll be back in Bush-land again.”
“We have to organize every damn precinct in the United States of America—all 185,000,” Mr. Dukakis said. “I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. I didn’t do it after the primary [in 1988]. Don’t ask me why, because that’s the way I got myself elected from the time I was running for town meeting in Brookline to the time I ran for governor.”
Mr. Dukakis says he pleaded with Mr. Kerry to build a meaningful precinct-based organization in 2004, but couldn’t break through. Now he’s working informally with the Democratic National Committee, where Chairman Howard Dean—he of the 50-state strategy—is much more receptive to the concept. But so far, Mr. Dukakis said, none of the 2008 Democrats seem serious about his brand of organizing. |
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