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Elisa Lopez | Phoenix Staff

Michael Dukakis ’55 spoke to a crowd of students on Wednesday.

BY JEFF DAVIDSON

In print | September 18, 2008

Wednesday marked Constitution Day, during which all publicly funded schools must hold activities dealing with the history of the United States Constitution. Roughly a year ago, Vice President for College and Community Relations Maurice Eldridge ’61 was in the midst of communicating with former Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis ’55 when he realized that next year’s constitution day would be a great way to get Dukakis to speak again on campus. Long before his entrance into national politics, Dukakis’s political ideals were considered radically progressive for his time. In his years at Swarthmore, he repeatedly invoked these ideals to lobby for institutional change at the college. As a Swarthmore student, Dukakis opened an impromptu barber shop for Nigerians when no one else would cut their hair and petitioned against fraternities on campus. But this was all decades before the Constitution Day spot was booked and the seats began to fill in LPAC cinema in preparation for the Dukakis’s speech entitled “Presidential Election 2008: What’s at stake?”

“It’s too often the case that quite terrific things happen here and they get small audiences because things compete with each other,” said Eldridge. “When we can pull things off that pull a big audience and creates a shared experience for the community, I’m happy.”

Eldridge introduced Dukakis to a crowd that certainly gave him reason to be happy. The speech encouraged students to involve themselves in the public service field whether that be an elected office or simply by campaigning for those one believes in. He also commented on the ability of Barack Obama to win the presidential race and the vicious rifts that exist today between the Democratic and Republican parties. Prior to the talk, Assistant Opinions Editor Jeff Davidson interviewed the former governor. The following is excerpted from what the governor had to say about the politics of his time, the politics of the current era and the entire Swarthmore experience.

Jeff Davidson: Talking in terms of the general Democratic Party’s ideas and ideals, in what ways do you believe the party differs now from what it used to be? Are they headed in a positive direction?

Michael Dukakis: Just to go back, in the 50’s when I was around here, there’s no question that the new deal, fair deal, Roosevelt, Truman had begun to define the Democratic party. But you got to understand that in the congress for example, you had liberal Democrats, and conservative Democrats. You had these southern racist white Democrats, so called, who controlled the congress because of seniority. But they were anti civil rights, they were very conservative in economic terms, many of them opposed a lot of the stuff Harry Truman wanted to do.

At the same time you had liberal Republicans along with conservative Republicans. One of the things that’s happened is that the parties are much more ideologically cohesive today then they were back then. Now some people say that’s terrible because it leads to a lot of partisanship, but at least you know what the Democrats and the Republicans for the most part stand for, which in those days was all kind of a blur.

What I said to these folks is “What’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans?” and I think Republicans would agree with this definition. Generally speaking, Democrats are more willing to use government to achieve important social and economic goals than Republicans are. And I think it’s probably a pretty good definition.

But like all definitions, I think these days when it comes to national security, Republicans tend to be much more of interventionists.

I mean, I think the invasion of Iraq will go down as one of the dumbest decisions in American foreign policy. There is nothing conservative about invading Iraq. It was a radical step, and a dumb step in my opinion — and I think the opinion of the overwhelming majority of Americans today. I don’t think there’s any question when it comes to international: if you look at McCain and you look at Obama today, Obama says look you’ve got to talk to these people and McCain says you don’t talk to them. Bush says you don’t talk to them, “axis of evil” and that kind of stuff. In the international front, Democrats are much more willing to reach out and talk to people, even people they don’t like.

This is a very clear difference between the parties. In this campaign, as in every campaign including my own, republicans are doing their best to try to get people to forget what the issues are by waging the culture wars again. I don’t think they’re going to succeed, I think Obama very clearly understands this. The economy now has become such a dominant issue, that it’s going to be very difficult to persuade the majority of the American people that some of these so-called cultural issues are more important then fundamental strength of the American economy and what’s happened internationally.

But they’re trying, they’re trying. Palin said “We’re serious about national security, they want to read them their rights?” What’s that mean? She doesn’t believe in the constitution — or what? I think that’s typical of this type of thing and they did it to me [when I ran for president] and I did a terrible job of dealing with it. And they did it to Kerry, this genuine war hero who suddenly ends up being soft on national security running against a guy who was reading magazines in Alabama with a running mate who is the most notorious draft pusher in the United States and they managed to pull it off. So that’s the way they run their campaigns and we have to be forewarned.

The Obama campaign isn’t under any illusions – they know they have to hit back and they have to hit back hard. McCain, particularly in the last ten days, has really been making some serious mistakes and been telling America false things.

JD: Is Barack Obama’s current campaign effective enough to make him the new president? What, if anything, could he be doing better?

MD: I would say two things, and remember to consider the source — if I was so smart I would have got myself elected. I think he has to continue pounding away with the economy and continue connecting with people in their every day lives. And give them a very clear sense of what he will do to straighten out this mess just like Clinton did in 1992. You could take a page right of the Clinton playbook in 1992. And I think he’s got to be very tough when they keep coming at him. Now he’s doing that – he and his campaign are doing that. But I think the economic issues are now so dominant that he’s got an opportunity to bring this right down to the level of average Americans who, as Clinton used to say, are getting the shaft and have been for the past eight years. It’s tax cuts for the rich and crumbs for the rest of us, that’s what the Republican philosophy is all about. And he’s saying that; he’s got to keep saying it.

JD: During your time at Swarthmore you were actively campaigning against the fraternities. Although today the number has gone down from five houses to two, they still do exist. The college justifies this by making them non-residential and less discriminatory. If you were a Swarthmore student today, would you still sign that petition and work to put an end to the fraternities?

MD: Oh yeah, I kind of led the fight to get them out. By the way, the guy who led the pro-fraternity campaign and won (we lost it), was a big supporter of mine in California. He’s a very successful high-tech entrepreneur. He always said I’m with Dukakis, but I’m one guy who beat him in an election campaign. And it was the campaign to get rid of fraternities. The case for getting rid of them was — it wasn’t because the Swarthmore fraternities supported these discriminatory clauses, they wanted to get rid of them as well — that, well, if you can’t get rid of them, then you need to get out of national fraternities. In a campus this size I see no need to have them. There were sororities here, too, but they got rid of them. Maybe in a very large university there’s a case to be made for this kind of thing, but I don’t see it in a place like this.

JD: In terms of public transportation, you got the mass transit system back on track in Boston and even rode the subway to work every day, which means the system must have been working pretty well. A step towards cutting back global warming is keeping up and building upon our public transportation. What does the country need to do to get back on track with creating an infrastructure that is safe, reliable, and inexpensive that can match Europe’s?

MD: I’m a big, big supporter of rail passenger systems — I was on the Amtrak board. By the way, John McCain was chairman of the Commerce and Transportation committee. McCain is a guy who just doesn’t get it, he has no conception of why it’s important to this country. I don’t see how you can look at the world ahead, at the energy situation, at global warming, and not conclude that this country has got to invest in a first class national rail passenger system and excellent metropolitan transit systems in every major metropolitan area in the country. When it comes to this, there’s just a huge difference between the candidates in this presidential campaign. One of the things, apart from the fundamental mistake of invading Iraq, is that that thing will cost us well over a trillion dollars. Our infrastructure is falling apart, and we’re spending billions on this foolish thing. It isn’t that we don’t have the resources for this, but our public infrastructure is falling apart while we’re all over there fighting this dumb war.

JD:  Should Obama be returning the attacking ads that he is getting right now?
MD: Oh they’re doing it. I don’t know what you see, but there’s not a single McCain ad these days that’s being shown that isn’t immediately replied to.

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