Dukakis Speaks On Liberal Issues by Ben Fritz Michael Dukakis '55 is Swarthmore's most famous alumnus involved in politics. In his years as governor of Massachusetts and in his 1988 race for the presidency, he promoted many of the liberal values and ideals that so many of us at Swarthmore hold dear and on which this publication was founded. Currently, Mr. Dukakis is a visiting professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston. He talked to L-Word editor-in-chief Ben Fritz about his take on liberalism, the current political scene, and his years at Swarthmore. Ben Fritz: The first question I want to ask you refers to one of the reasons we decided to call our paper "The L-Word," your presidential campaign when President Bush tried to label you with, quote, "The L-Word"- Michael Dukakis: Well, I'm not the only guy. BF: I know . . . and you were perceived at that time as running away from the label. So now without the pressures of the campaign, I'm wondering, what does the word "liberal" mean to you? MD: Well, I think the problem with the term is, at least to some people, it seems to connote an easy permissiveness, a lack of values, a kind of "anything goes" philosophy and all that kind of stuff, which I don't happen to share. Now, whether "progressive" is a better word is something for the lexicographers, but my definition of liberal is the same one that Jack Kennedy used to use, and I quoted this repeatedly during the campaign not to any great impact, and I can't remember exactly what he said, but Kennedy said "Look, if by liberal you mean somebody who doesn't have values, who thinks that throwing money at every problem is going to solve it and so forth, then you got the wrong guy. If by liberal you mean somebody who is deeply committed to full employment, equal economic opportunity for every American, a decent education for every American, basic health care for every working family in this country and a decent retirement, then I'm a liberal." And that's my definition. BF: So do you think it's best for liberals to try to reclaim the term "liberal" for ourselves? MD: No, I don't know whether we oughta spend a lot of time trying to define it. You know, Finkelstein, who's the Republican guru, who's [New York Senator] D'Amato's campaign advisor, who D'Amato brought out of the Senate campaign committee, tried to use this again in '96 against [Minnesota Senator Paul] Wellstone, against Jack Reed in Rhode Island, against a number of Democratic senatorial candidates, in which I think his line was "too liberal for Rhode Island," "too liberal for Minnesota," whatever, but he put "liberal" in red. Now, these guys spent a lot of time debating the definition of "liberal," I mean they basically said, "Hey look, we want to go to the Senate, or back to the Senate, because working people and their families in this country have been strapped for the past two years. And we all know what's going on out there: no growth in income for the bottom 80% of working people and their families, 41 million uninsured folks, 90% of whom are working people and their families, middle class families going broke trying to send their kids to college, Social Security and Medicare are in trouble. And so what these guys did was to spend less time debating the word and more time going after the important issues. And they both won handily, along with others. And the Finkelstein strategy was kind of left in the dust. And my own feeling is that that's what we oughta be doing. I mean spending less time trying to play with words and more time . . . I mean, on some issues I'm real conservative. I mean, I'm a very strong environmentalist; that's a very strong conservative instinct. I mean "conservation" comes from the same root as "conservative." Those of us who care deeply about the environment and worry about global warming, these kind of things are attempting to make sure we don't poison the atmosphere and destroy our environment. And that's the problem with trying to spend a lot of time - I mean I have no problem with your title, I think it's terrific. But if folks who consider themselves liberals and/or progressives, whatever the appropriate word is, and who fundamentally believe that there are some very basic issues in this country that we've got to deal with collectively, well that's essentially what we're talking about here. BF: What it seems like I'm hearing you saying here is that even though we hear all these great things about the economy - 4% unemployment and so on - a lot of people are really insecure. MD: The economy in a broad sense is good and I think Bill Clinton deserves a lot of credit for it and I'm all for it. I mean Jack Kennedy used to say the best human services program is full employment and I agree with him. But, within that economy, we've got some very, very serious problems that oughta concern us: the greatest disparity between rich and poor of any advanced industrialized nation in the world and it's growing; a minimum wage that's a joke, I mean it takes $7.50 an hour to reach the poverty line in this country and the minimum wage is $5.15, and we only got that increase after a titanic battle; 41 million people without health insurance, and to repeat these are folks who are not loafing, I mean 90% of them are members of working families; the cost of higher education, although I think the newly expanded Pell grants and Hope Scholarships are a tremendous step forward, it's still an enormous burden. Look, when I went to Swarthmore it cost $1200 for room, board, and tuition and you could earn half of that in the summertime. BF: Wow. Now it's $30,000. MD: You can't earn half of that in the summertime! I didn't know anybody who got out of college with a loan. We didn't live fancy lives or anything, you know, we lived lives of Quaker simplicity. But, nobody came out of college with huge debts to pay, it was just unheard of. You know $1200 you worked in the summertime, made five or six hundred bucks, your parents kicked in a few hundred and you worked part time, I mean you made it. You know the whole notion of a safe and secure retirement, which Social Security and Medicare and [are] absolutely critical to. Those are the kinds of issues we've gotta be going after. Obviously the market by itself is not going to do this. In fact, the market's moving in the wrong way. So, that's what we've gotta be all about and I think if we focus on what is happening to the broad middle class in this country - and that doesn't mean you abandon the poor, I mean hell if we're not there for them, who will be? Certainly not the Republicans. That's where we've gotta be. And my own sense, whatever it's worth, is that there's enormous potential for Democrats, liberals, progressives, to once again become the dominant majority party if we focus on these issues and organize intensively among immigrant communities, sixteen million of whom are going to become newly naturalized citizens, and all of whom have taken a look at this Republican Congress and decided they don't like people like us. And that's just a huge opportunity for us if we understand it, go out there, and work at it. BF: But it seems like one challenge also is that conservatives have been very successful in winning the rhetoric game of making programs that help lowincome people or immigrants seem like handouts. MD: But notice what's happening on the immigrant front. The Republicans are stumbling all over themselves to reverse what they did in '95 and '96 because they're beginning to understand that these communities are not going to sit around. In many ways, by denying benefits to legal immigrants who are not naturalized, they have provided the greatest spur to naturalization you could possibly ask for. As I say, these folks get naturalized and then they're going down and naturalizing as Democrats. What happened in '96 in California I think is a strong wind. One million more Latinos voted in California in '96 than had ever voted in history. They just didn't knock out [former California Congressman "B-1" Bob] Dornan. The new Speaker of the Assembly in California is a guy named Cruz Bustamante, the majority leader's a guy named Villaraigosa and Stuart Spencer, the longtime Republican campaign consultant out there and a very smart guy just sent a very tough memo to Republican party leaders saying "Hey look, if we don't start reconnecting with this Latino community, the Democrats are going to dominate California for the next quarter of a century." And he's right. Now, it's not going to happen automatically, you know. We've gotta get out there and we've gotta start getting down to the grass roots where we have not been. BF: Also, even ignoring the issue of support for legal immigrants, how do you feel about last year's welfare reform bill overall and what it means for so many Democrats to support it? MD: You know, when the President signed it, he said "I'm coming back with amendments on this immigration stuff," and in point of fact he got the Congress to turn around because these were lousy provisions in the first place and in the second, Republicans were starting to get scared. BF: But even more fundamentally on the issues of five-year time limits and the work requirements - MD: Oh, I'm for time limits. I mean, I'm also for serious training. I mean, the notion that you can put someone in a minimum wage job and as a single mother she can support herself and her kids is nonsense. We had great success in the '80s around here [Massachusetts] when I was governor with what was generally thought of as the best welfare to work program in the country. But, there was a very strong emphasis on training for real jobs and child care and medical benefits and so forth. We had half the welfare caseload voluntarily sign up for the program, so there's a way to do this. But, I'm a great believer in responsibilities as well as rights and the real question is, if you're going to say to people "You've gotta get off in two years," what are we going to do about it? More specifically, if we go into a recession, what are we going to do about it? At that point you're going to have lots of people who were working who are out of work. Those are the kind of issues we oughta be dealing with. But, I have no problem with the notion that we oughta expect some kind of response to folks who we are helping with difficult times in their lives. BF: Well, on to more political trends. The President, especially in his '92 campaign, ran on the themes of the "New Democrat". To a lot of people, that seemed like a response to your failure in 1988. I was wondering how you feel about the rise of the New Democrat, the more centrist DLC [Democratic Leadership Council, a group of centrist, pro-business Democrats formerly chaired by Bill Clinton] types. MD: I'm not sure what that terms means either. I mean, I'm not a DLCer, but this business of a "Vital Center" doesn't mean anything to me. These phrases mean nothing to me. The real question is, "Who's prepared to stand up for the vast majority of working Americans and their families who have been getting the short end of the stick for the last twenty years?" That's the real issue. In my judgment it's the progressive community, it's the Democrats, it's the liberal community that should be doing that. And to some extent, and I wasn't anywhere near as effective in doing this as Clinton was in '92, so my hat's off to him - although it's a little bit easier to do it when you're in the middle of a serious recession. But, I think one of the things that happened to us in the '70s and '80s is that we got so deeply into other issues, all of which are important, don't get me wrong. I mean abortion, gay rights, and so on. We kind of forgot that our core constituency has to be that broad middle class and there's a wide range as you know, including a lot of low-income working people who are working their heads off at two or three jobs without benefits. We got so into some of these other issues that we kind of forgot that those folks are some of the folks who were really at the core of the New Deal coalition and the Fair Deal coalition and Kennedy's victory. Remember, by the 1980s, 44% of the union households in this country were voting for Ronald Reagan, so that tells us something about ourselves. So, I think Clinton in '92 helped us to kind of . . . The law enforcement issue, for example; I mean, I'll be damned if I'm going to concede that to the conservatives. Clinton has done a brilliant job in my judgment of taking that law enforcement issue, and it's a very important issue for millions and millions of Americans and taking it away from the Right by focusing on what is after all the most important single thing we can do and that's community policing, and it's working. Now, I'm not a death penalty supporter, you know putting the death penalty on 52 different federal crimes isn't going to make a particle of difference when it comes to securing neighborhoods. But this guy has transformed policing in this country. Now, I don't know where the DLC is on this issue and frankly I don't care. The fact of the matter is that we've got a President who is a Democrat and who went to work on this issue. The best possible way is fundamentally transform the way we do policing in neighborhoods and it's working. So, that's another important issue. So in that sense, I think a lot of what he's done has been not only good but effective politically. I just want to make sure we continue to focus on this broad range of issues that effect the vast majority of Americans and if we do, we're going to be fine. BF: But on issues like balancing the budget and free trade, a lot of liberals have felt like the President has been more on the side of those in the center or even to the Right, including business interests, as opposed to the interests of working Americans, which is where liberals should be. MD: Well, that's a bit of a bum rap. Part of the problem is that if you're the president and you've got a Republican Congress, unfortunately, you can't just stand there in the doorway and do nothing. To the guy's credit, this new budget [the balanced budget deal of this summer], programmatically is terrific. We've got children's health care, a major step forward; the biggest expansion of federal assistance for higher education - I mean community colleges are now going to be free for every kid in America. This is the biggest expansion since the GI Bill. He got every dime he asked for for the EPA, every dime, and this is from a Congress that was gonna destroy the EPA. Although he's still rustling with them on national standards, there's been a very dramatic expansion of the federal government's role in K-12 education. These are all precisely the kinds of issues that good progressives in this country oughta be supporting and to that extent he has done a damn good job. However, I was very unhappy with this tax package. 75% of it is going to the wealthiest 20%, who've been doing so well over the past twenty years. But, I think you will see him and the Congress focusing this coming year on some very, very important issues that will help to sharpen differences. One of them's going to be a patient's "bill of rights" which [Senate majority leader Trent] Lott is going to oppose and I think we're just going to blow him away on it. There's going to be another major expansion of health care coverage to include about three million near-elderly folks between 55 and 64 who don't quality for Medicare and have no health insurance. But, I share your concern about making sure that people understand where we're coming from. And I gotta tell you, I'm not that interested in this "Vital Center." I think it was Robert Frost that said "The middle of the road is the most dangerous place to be." I want us to focus on those concerns about the vast majority of American and I think that to a significant degree this Administration has been working on and dealing with, but which, in my judgement, have to continue to be the focus of what we're all about. BF: I wanted to talk about what's happening in the Democratic party right now because especially in relation to the recent fast track vote, it seems that there is a real split in the party between the old line liberals following [House Democratic Leader Dick] Gephardt in Congress and the more DLC types like the President. Do you see any problems with this split? MD: Remember, the Democratic party has always been the free trade party. Republicans historically were the protectionist party. Smoot-Hawley was not that long ago and it was a Hoover initiative; we were the free traders and rightly so. Roosevelt was a free trader, Truman was a free trader, Kennedy was a free trader, I'm a free trader and Clinton's a free trader. I believe strongly in that. I think we're all better off when trade barriers are down and people can trade freely. On the other hand, there's a new set of issues which is beginning to develop which in my judgment we have to deal with. Gephardt has evolved significantly. I mean, Gephardt and I went at it on trade in '88 [when they opposed each other in the Democratic presidential primaries], although not in an unfriendly way. His basic pitch in '88 was that if we opened up the United States to more trade and insisted on the same from our trading partners that it would hurt American workers. There's no question some American workers will be hurt by it. Now, I think he and a lot of the Democrats - and by the way Clinton is not uninterested in this - are now saying something far different and I think more relevant. And that is not that we should not have free and open trade and be in the global economy . . . but that nations around the world should be expected to meet certain standards with respect to worker rights and the environment. And that's a very different argument from the type Gephardt was making in '88. And in point of fact, Clinton in '92, when asked about NAFTA said "I will only support NAFTA if there are environmental and workers' rights side agreements." And in point of fact he was very emphatic about that and he got them. The problem is that they have not been enforced effectively. So the real question here is not "Are you a free trader or not?" I would hope most good liberals and progressives would be, that's our tradition. It's "Should we increasingly insist that all people everywhere in the world have certain basic protections in the workplace and certain environmental protections?" That's a whole different issue. Now, on that score, quite frankly if you got Dukakis, Clinton and Gephardt in the same room, we'd agree. How you do it - and by the way this will be resisted strongly by a lot of people, especially professional economists who don't like this kind of stuff - . . . I don't see this as a fundamental divide though. As a point of fact, Clinton himself, in endorsing NAFTA did so only with this important qualification. And my own sense is, I know Gephardt's coming back with a new trade bill and it'll be interesting to see whether that kind of a bill is a trade bill committed to minimum basic standards can achieve the kind of majority that Clinton was unable to achieve with the Republicans on fast track and I think it can. So I don't see that as being a kind of fundamental division, but what it does reflect is an increasing evolution toward something here, which I happen to support, and I say that as a very committed free trader. BF: And what about the splits in the Republican Party right now between the more socially conservative Christian Coalition types and the more business types who are the leadership. Are they going to have problems in the future? MD: Yeah, they're going to have problems. The divisions within the Republican party are far more serious than ours, which doesn't mean that I think everything's hunky-dory on our side. Because a platform that essentially embraces the beliefs of the religious right is a losing platform - you can't win with this kind of platform. And, in fact, just looking at this Republican Congress, whatever you think of it - and I don't think a lot of it - the fact of the matter is that they are not the Congress that arrived in '95 loaded for bag. So they've got very fundamental divisions. My problem at this point, especially with my own party, is that for too long now we've been buying into this notion that the way to win elections is to raise huge sums of money and to spend it on television. I'm not saying that television isn't important - in fact, I'm a great example of a guy who did not deal effectively at all with the Bush attack campaign, which was largely television-driven, so you've got to deal with that issue. But, neither major party is working at the grassroots and if Republicans don't want to work at the grassroots, that's fine by me. But, the only way Democrats can win is to go back to the grassroots, raise their money there, and organize. And in point of fact, low dollar fundraising, as a means for organizing, which is the way I always did it, and very successfully - there's only one organization in this country that's doing serious grassroots campaigning and that's the Christian Coalition. And they're effective at it. And if you have declining turnout because nobody's knocking on anybody's doors these days, it's all become kind of a movie where we sit on our chairs and watch television and maybe half of us, go down to the polls, then an organization that's doing serious grassroots campaigning, but only represents about 7% of the electorate is going to have an inordinate influence, especially in marginal elections, and that's what's happening. I think we've got to get back to the grassroots. We've got to get seriously organizing at the grassroots and while that doesn't mean you don't have to do the television and the strategic stuff and all that kind of thing and do it well, that's where we're going to win elections. So, in some way, the best thing that's ever happened to us is that most of the PAC money is now going to the Republicans, which is where it oughta go, frankly, that's where those people are anyway. A lot of folks that are running for Congress are beginning to say "Hey, if I don't get back to bean suppers and barbecues and tag sales and raise my money at the grassroots, I'm not going to win." We're making the discovery that doing the fundraising that way, we begin to create armies of workers who are going to go out there and knock on doors and we just haven't been doing it. BF: I wanted to ask you a few questions about Swarthmore. To what extent to you think your time at Swarthmore, the Quaker values and our liberal tradition, affect your political views? MD: A huge and very important influence on me. I certainly came with some instincts and ideas and stuff, but there's no question the experience at the school was a very, very important part of my development. BF: I don't know how true this was when you were here, but now there's a certain sense that people at Swarthmore, especially when it comes to politics, are very out of touch and unlike more average people out in the rest of the world. It seems like that's one problem for Swarthmore students involved in politics: that once you leave here, you're no longer in a community full of liberals. For instance, myself, back where I'm from I'm considered real liberal, but here I'm more in the center. So, a lot of people here when they leave Swarthmore and go out into the real world of politics, they have a hard time dealing with it or are just out of touch. MD: I don't think anything has changed in that sense. I mean, it's a very tight, intensive campus, it was in the '50s and it is today. The question is how do you leave and get out there and start being effective. There were two of us when I was there who were talking about running for elective office. One of them was named Dukakis and the other guy's a guy named Carl Levin [currently a Democratic senator from Michigan]. We both managed to achieve a certain degree of success - I don't think anyone's ever accused us of being disconnected from average folks. But, you can't go out there and be effective if you're walking around in some kind of ideological cloud. And if you talk to Carl, I mean I think he'll tell you the same thing I'm telling you. One of the things we did was to go out into our communities and start knocking on doors and listening to people and doing our best to not only reflect our own strong values, but the concerns of the people who we were asking to vote for us. If you do that, you can be fine. BF: The only other question I wanted to ask you is what do you want to say to the 1400 mostly liberal students here and what do you think are the main challenges that we're going to be facing in the next twenty, thirty, forty years? MD: I'll tell you what I tell every group that I speak to on a college campus and I speak on a lot of college campuses. If you really want to have an impact on the future on this country or, for that matter, on your community, then you've got to get into politics, you've got to take politics seriously. It's the most open political system in the world. If it wasn't a guy named Dukakis or Levin would never have seen the light of day, or for that matter a Clinton. The place to get involved is at the grassroots, in campaigns. The sooner you can do that, the better. For whatever it's worth, I mean I've had my wins and my defeats, but if I'm not a living testimonial to the proposition that you can be effective in this country politically even if you don't have a famous name and a bag full of money, then I don't know who is. It's wide open, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and it's an enormously fulfilling and satisfying life. I just hope, especially that the folks who've had the privilege of going to Swarthmore, will take that seriously and get out and start getting deeply and actively involved in the politics of their community and their state and their country.

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