Unseating a King

...The King campaign ultimately failed for a number of reasons...

...Indeed, one of the reasons why virtually everyone in Massachusetts is a Democrat is because large numbers of middle-class citizens, who were the bulwark of liberal Republicanism converted to the Democratic party because of people like Dukakis (and later because of the anti-war movement...

...Will Rogers offered the most famous statement of this theme when he declared that he was not a member of an organized political party...

...Massachusetts was deeply in debt...

...There was a concerted campaign by some Republicans to get their fellow partisans to switch to the Democratic party to vote for King...

...In Massachusetts, Democrats come in an especially wide range of shapes and sizes...

...Many of the upper-rniddle-class inhabitants of Newton, Brookline, and Wellesley are Democrats...

...Still, Mr...

...In fact, he might best be viewed as a premature example of what is currently called a neoliberalWhen Dukakis took over as governor after the 1974 elections...

...Something of the same sort of cultural war is going on nationally, has been, in fact, ever since the McCarthy and...

...Part of the bitterness was ideological...

...he also goes to Mass every Sunday...

...Unfortunately, there were no polls taken to test this theory...

...Tax cuts - he's for them, especially for business...

...Neighborhood groups that obstruct his economic development plans, programs generally favored by business - guess...

...Dukakis's people looked like middle-class interlopers...

...For the Dukakis-King race did display the deep cultural rift in the Democratic party between more socially conservative working-class voters and the suburban liberals...

...The King administration had more than its share of scandals - a tax department official facing investigation committed suicide a few weeks before the primary - and moral rectitude became Dukakis's main strength...

...That King, the ardent defender of the well-to-do, could even appear as a hero of the working class is a tribute to the power of cultural perceptions...

...So tough were Dukakis's regulators that the industries they looked after contributed very substantial sums to King, allowing him to run the media campaign that succeeded...

...No doubt Re-publican crossovers helped there...

...None of this hurt him...

...First, working class voters were more worried about corruption than the voting analysts gave them credit for...

...The vastly overworked cliche of the campaign was that King, the candidate of business, really represented the attitudes of "Joe Six-Pack...

...There is a final point to the Massachusetts race that may have a broader application...

...But the very similarities between Sears and Dukakis work in Dukakis's favor: the working-class ethnic Democrats who voted for King will, all things being equal, pick a Greek Democrat over a Yankee Republican...

...King is no neoconservative...

...One positive side-effect of the campaign is that the stock wine-and-cheese image was used so much that detractors of middle-class liberals will have to find a new term of opprobrium...

...Thus did he win endorsements from both Arthur Laffer of the famous Curve and Richard Viguerie, the New Right direct-mail genius...

...The Boston Globe gleefully pointed out after the primary that despite King's image as the Mend of Joe Six-Pack, the governor carried Dover, one of the wealthiest suburbs in the state...

...King became the inheritor of the old Irish Democratic party, even though his views are far to the right of that party's authentic son, Tip O'Neill...

...To the consternation of many liberals, Dukakis cut social-service budgets, along with lots of other things, and raised taxes...

...McGovern campaigns brought mary middle-class activists into the Democratic party...

...The folks in South Boston who are mostly Irish and can't stand busing are Dcmo-orats...

...The intellectuals and would-be intellectuals over in Cambridge are Democrats...

...Abortion - he's strongly against...

...he is also Irish...

...King is perhaps the most conservative Democrat in the country outside the Deep South...

...I'm a Democrat," he said...

...He pointed out, for example, that tough regulation of insurance companies saved people more money in their role as motorists than King's tax cuts saved them in their role as taxpayers...

...Second, Governor King's devotion to the interests of business suggested that he knew far more about chablis than he let on...

...He takes stridently conservative stands on just about everything...

...And third, Dukakis made regulatory issues work for him in a populist way...

...Thus King became known as Ronald Reagan's favorite Democratic governor and Ted Kennedy's nemesis...

...Yet the other lesson of Massachusetts may lie in the fact that the Dukakis campaign finally succeeded in balancing out its appeal to the middle class with a little bit of populism built around, of all things, regulation, and criticisms of the King administration's kindness to the rich...

...Because it has so many members preaching so many doctrines, the Democratic party in Massachusetts is especially fractious...

...he is not liberal on this and conservative on that...

...Welfare - doesn't much like...

...Quite a few Republicans did, which' is yet another sign of how ideology is displacing our political parties as the foundation of our politics...

...In the state Senate, Republicans have become such an endangered breed that the likable Republican minority leader, John F. Parker, once put a sign up in his office declaring: "Not a Minority, But a chosen few...

...however, one aspect of the Dukakis administration that was decidedly left-of-center: As governor, Dukakis appointed some of the country's toughest regulators to oversee the banking and insurance industries...

...Sears has been moving to the right in an effort to pick up King votes and King financial support...

...In Massachusetts, people who are not registered in either party can vote in whichever primary they want, and in any case it's pretty easy to switch your voter registration...

...DIONNE (E.J...

...There was...

...But Dukakis himself is no arch-liberal...

...Viguerie, looking on from his direct-mail house in Virginia, cannot be entirely displeased with the outcome...

...Finally, Ted Kennedy turned out to campaign for Dukakis, making the contest into something of a referendum on Reaganism...

...Dionne, a previous contributor to Commonweal, is Albany bureau chief for The New York Times...

...And this year's Democratic primary between Governor Ed King and former Governor Michael Dukakis was one of the most bitter confrontations in many years...

...The death penalty - he's for that, too...

...The high-tech boom has been good to Massachusetts, and King asserted that the tax cuts he supported helped make this industry grow...

...Many liberals could never forgive Dukakis for these cuts, and in 1978 some abandoned him for a splinter left candidate or abstention...

...Or perhaps King simply won the votes of those rich people who can't stand white wine...

...And Dukakis was cast as the candidate of the "chabtis-and-brie set...

...It's really the only thing that Sears can do, but he may end up alienating suburban liberals without picking up much working-class support...

...and many of the same suburbanites who like Dukakis could easily have voted for Sears over King...

...But what struck many was King's ability to come back from something like fifty points behind to lose by "only" eight points...

...Mike Dukakis's roots are in the middle-class liberal reform movement that started getting off the ground in the early 1960s...

...King, in a model media campaign that presaged President Reagan's victory, united all the right-wing populist protest groups and capitalized on the general view that Dukakis was distant and arrogant...

...King is also a Catholic...

...What King tried to do, through another clever media campaign, was to polarize the Democratic electorate along class lines...

...By 1982, many of the liberals (and some of the not-so-liberals) were rather ashamed of having let King win...

...In November, Dukakis should win with ease over John Winthrop Sears, a Republican who is as Yankee as he sounds, Sears's history is that of a liberal Republican and an honest public servant...

...And in the industrial towns like Fall River, Lawrence, and Haverhill, just about everyone is a Democrat...