Michael Dukakis, the former Governor of Massachusetts and the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, spoke at Brandeis U. Wednesday evening, recounting his past in politics and views on a medley of current issues.
He began with a brief speech exhorting students to consider a career in government. “I hope every single one of you here is seriously thinking about a career in public service and a career in politics,” he said, before launching into the story of his path to higher office. He reflected on the sacrifices made by his parents. “Who was I?” he asked. The “son of immigrants. Both of my parents came to this country. Both of them did extraordinarily well,” he continued. According to Dukakis, his father immigrated to America in 1912 without “a nickel in his pockets,” and Dukakis’ uncles worked in the textile mills in Lawrence and Lowell, Mass. Twelve years later, Dukakis’ father graduated from Harvard Medical School, and his mother was the first Greek-American woman to go to college in American history, according to Dukakis.
He credited his initial success in Brookline, Mass. town politics to his willingness to go door-to-door, personally meeting and talking with voters and developing personal relations with them. He joked that many of his constituents voted for him because they thought he was Jewish. Dukakis blamed many of the Democratic losses in the 2010 congressional election on the candidates’ failure to instill a similar grassroots campaign.
Dukakis blamed himself for his loss to George H. W. Bush in 1988. With his voice rising, he said, “I owe you all an apology, for God’s sake. If I had beaten Bush I, you would have never heard of Bush II, and we wouldn’t be in this mess. So it’s all my fault.” He expressed the same regret in an interview with Katie Couric at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
During a lengthy question-and-answer session, Dukakis expressed his displeasure with a slew of recent domestic developments. He called the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court on corporate free speech an “outrageous decision” and Mitt Romney “a fraud” with a poor economic record in Massachusetts. Dukakis decried the failure of Congress to raise the minimum wage and the decline of union membership in the private sector to 7 percent, and he called for for the elimination of the tax reduction on dividends and capital gains.
On foreign policy, Dukakis advocated a doctrine, which, while far from isolationist, called for significantly curbing American interventionism. He stated that the notion that America had to be the “world’s policeman” was antiquated after the Cold War and that defense spending should be sharply curtailed.
The most recent war in Iraq “may be the dumbest thing we ever did with one exception—that was overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953,” he stated. Dukakis also expressed his vehement opposition to the death penalty on moral as well as practical grounds and his discomfort with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Kitty Dukakis, Governor Dukakis’s wife, accompanied him to the event. She praised Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s credentials and personality. Kitty Dukakis would have been the first Jewish first lady if Governor Dukakis had been elected President. Dukakis credited his successful marriage to their rule of having a 6 p.m. family dinner and no politics on Sunday.