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Dukakis: It's Probably Obama in '08, But the Campaign Needs to Improve | The New York Observer
This party needs radical change!
Thoughts?
The Massachusetts Democratic primary, along with nearly two dozen other primaries and caucuses, was held on Feb. 5. Hillary Clinton won it by 15 points, one of her best showings anywhere this year, and Michael Dukakis voted in itbut he wont say for whom.
I voted for a candidate, yeah, is about all Mr. Dukakis, the states former governor and a lifelong resident of Brookline, will say.
Mr. Dukakis has maintained an adamantly neutral public stance throughout the campaign, hoping instead to sell both candidates and their campaigns on the need for assembling a massive grassroots organizing efforta captain and six block leaders in all 200,000 precincts in the countryfor the fall. But he also said that Barack Obama will probably be the nominee and the race decided by early June, and possibly much sooner, with primaries in Indiana and North Carolina on tap next week.
If Obama wins both of those states on the sixth of May, I dont see how as a practical matter he doesnt have it, Mr. Dukakis, who officially clinched the Democratic nomination in June 1988, said in an interview this week.
If he doesnt score a two-state sweep, Mr. Dukakis said, the contest will be decided relatively quickly after the final primaries, in South Dakota and Montana on June 3, with the remaining undecided superdelegates quickly making their preferences known. Asked whether the pledged-delegate countwhich Sen. Obama is assured of leadingand popular-vote tally will be decisive, Mr. Dukakis said, I would think. I mean, weve had a contest. You look at the numbers.
An ally of Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman who has taken a hard line against Floridas and Michigans claims to full convention representation based on their January contests, Mr. Dukakis bristles at the notion that Sen. Clinton should get any creditin delegates or in popular votesfor her nominal victories there.
Florida and Michigan are off the table, he said. I mean, how many times do you move the goal posts? There were no contests in Florida and Michigannone. My solution is to split the delegations and seat them 50-50 (half for Sen. Obama and half for Sen. Clinton). Thats all. The Clinton campaign wouldnt be happy about that.
Thats putting it mildly. Under Mr. Dukakis guidelines, its next to impossible to create a scenario in which Sen. Clinton overtakes Sen. Obama in the cumulative popular vote over the final month of the campaign. So if he believes superdelegates should lean on the pledged delegate and popular vote metrics and that they should not factor Florida and Michigan into their thinking, isnt Mr. Dukakis, in effect, saying that she has no realistic chance of emerging with the nomination?
All I can tell you is at this point it looks as if he is likely to be the nominee, he replied. But, you know, funny things happen in this business. I cant tell you what they might be. All I can tell you is it aint over till its over.
A funny thing, of course, once happened to Mr. Dukakis while he was on his way to the White House. Twenty years ago, Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and the rest of George H.W. Bushs image-makers reduced Mr. Dukakis to a laughable caricature of bloodless liberalism, turning what was once a 17-point Dukakis lead into an eight-point Election Day rout. That example has been cited countless times in recent weeks, with punditsand pro-Clinton forcespositing that Sen. Obama will be vulnerable to similar caricaturing in the fall as a snooty lefty elitist.
Mr. Dukakis doesnt buy it. Nor does he seem particularly alarmed by the material (i.e. Jeremiah Wright) that Republicans will have at their disposal in a fall campaign against Sen. Obama. He thinks, in short, that Sen. Obama doesnt have any electability problem that Sen. Clinton doesnt have in equal measure.
Look, shes got stuff, hes got stuff, he said. Her negatives are higher now than when she started.
He added, Everybody knows what [the Republicans] are going to do, no matter which of these candidates it is.
Bill Clinton was subjected to an even tougher attack campaign than I was in 1992. Nobody remembers that, for two reasons: First, he had learned some lessons from my demise, so he had that unit he called the Defense Department in his campaign that did nothing but deal with it. And secondly, the economy was collapsing. And so even though Bush 1 went after him as hardor harderthan he went after me, it didnt register.
A similar climate prevails in 2008, Mr. Dukakis believes.
In this case, the economy plus the war, he said. Or the war connected to the economy, or vice versa. But youve got to be ready for this stuff.
When the Observer sat down with Mr. Dukakis last summer, he had just begun pushing the candidatesand the Democratic National Committeeto think seriously about a new voter contact model for the fall of 2008. The nomination, he predicted back then, would go to whichever candidate embraced the concept in the primaries. Neither has done so fully, he is quick to report eight months later, but Sen. Obama did in most of the caucus statessomething that has made all the difference when you consider the narrow but seemingly insurmountable pledged delegate advantage that Sen. Obama amassed with his landslide wins in those small caucus states.
In conventional terms, Mr. Dukakis said, Sen. Clinton and her team have run a pretty damn good campaign.
So how come the other guys ahead? he asked. Because at least in the caucus states, he and his people understood better than the Clinton people what it takes to win.
Sen. Obama needs to improve his organization too, Mr. Dukakis said. Obama hasnt done anywhere near as good a job at the precinct level in the primary states as I would have expected, he said. There was no precinct-based organization in Massachusetts. None.
Kitty Dukakis has been contributing to Obama since last spring, he said, referring to his wife, an Obama fanatic. Shes never received an e-mail saying, Will you be a precinct captain? And the guys got, what, 1,200,000 contributorsevery one of whom, in my judgment, by this time should have been enlisted at putting together a 200,000-precinct, 50-state operation. I dont know why that hasnt happened.
This party needs radical change!
Thoughts?
