The street smarts of Mike Dukakis
Rob Price

Twenty years ago, his hair was shoepolish black; now it's streaked with wide bands of silver, and the face looks more chiseled than the friendly visage that asked voters for their support in the 1988 presidential election.

But Michael Dukakis, peering from the pages of the New York Observer, looks pretty good, maybe even better than in 1988, when he made the terrible mistake of planting an army helmet over his noggin and climbing into a tank for a campaign photograph.

At least he sounds smarter. "We have to organize every damn precinct in the United State of America - all 185,000," he said in an interview. "I'm talking about every precinct, with a precinct captain and six block-captains that make personal contact with every single voting household. And I mean starting a year in advance. I'm not talking about parachuting in with two weeks to go. That's baloney."

If Dukakis sounds a little adamant, it's because he thinks the Republican Party has a better-than-you-think chance of winning the 2008 election, in spite of the abysmal level of support for President Bush. After all, the only group of people whose approval numbers are as bad as Bush's is the Congress.

Dukakis knows the Democrats can blow the 2008 election, because he knows how professionally run presidential campaigns can defy all reasonable odds and fall in on themselves.

In 1988, Dukakis won the Democratic nomination for president and led then-President George H. W. Bush by a whopping 17 percent. Two months later, Bush beat Dukakis by eight percentage points and stomped him in the Electoral College, 426-112.

There have been lots of explanations for how Dukakis blew his lead, and posing in the tank is one of them (In 2004, Democratic nominee John Kerry posed in hunting camouflage after hunting geese and managed to look ridiculous). But Dukakis has refined all those explanations to a simple explanation of how electoral politics work on the street level: Organize your precincts; that's where your voters live and know each other. And use the locals for the organizing: "These people," he said, "are people who've got to be from the precinct, of the precinct, look like the precinct and talk like the precinct."

Have you been getting mysterious recorded phone calls criticizing - oh, say, Congressman Randy Kuhl? I have. I hang up on them right away. Not because I'm a great fan of Congressman Kuhl; I hang up because I don't like being handled by electronic political operatives.

Dukakis knows that modern politics operates at the electronic level. In 2004 John Kerry allowed the Swift Boat veterans to impugn his reputation through the electronic media. According to Dukakis, he would have been better served through a carefully organized network of precinct captains and block captains who were willing to go door-to-door and defend their candidate.

I have a personal reason for preferring precinct-level politics over the huge national campaigns that all look alike. When I was a teenager, I worked on the bi-annual campaigns of a state assemblyman who lived in our neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh.

We knocked on doors, handed out campaign literature at shopping malls, and on election day we had every polling station covered from its opening to closing. We stood (legally) in front of every station and handed out campaign folders to every person who showed up to vote. "Please consider Jim Knepper," we said over and over, hundreds of times in the day.

After the polls closed, we all gathered at Jim Knepper's house for the traditional election night party. There were sandwiches and drinks, and lots of tired people who were ready to let down their hair and party, like the candidate.

We happened to be Republicans, but I'm sure the Democrats were holding their own celebration somewhere. Both political parties operated close to the street in those days; they knew who the voters were; they knew whose kid was on the high school football team; they knew who had just had a baby.

That kind of intimate knowledge doesn't exist in modern national campaigns, and Dukakis thinks it's an undervalued commodity. Obviously, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani can't be expected to know who among their supporters has just gotten married, but their supporters at the street level should.

There needs to be a street level in their campaigns. And it shouldn't be an anonymous electronic voice on the phone asking for your vote on election day. It should be your neighbor down the street.