Former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis blasted most of the candidates running for his old job in the 2010 midterm elections, including incumbent Gov. Deval Patrick, at Northeastern University on Thursday.
"It's a tough race for [Patrick]. He got out to a difficult start, made a bunch of mistakes &- if any of you run for elected office, don't buy new furniture, don't change the carpets," Dukakis said, addressing the crowd while noting Patrick's well-publicized missteps early on as governor.
Dukakis and two other panelists, political science professors Bruce Wallin and William Mayer, spoke in front of an audience of about 70 students and faculty members in Northeastern's Shillman Hall.
The panel discussed topics of the 2010 campaign season so far, focusing on both the Massachusetts governor's race and the races for the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Drawing on his extensive experience campaigning first-hand as a three-term governor, Dukakis analyzed Patrick's fight to keep his position on Beacon Hill.
He said Patrick's biggest concerns should be his dangerously low approval ratings in the face of the economic slowdown in the American economy, saying "being a governor during a recession is hell."
"You're not responsible for [the recession], there's not a whole lot you can do about it, but your revenue is falling off the table," Dukakis continued. He listed other
But Dukakis added that Patrick was lucky neither of his major opponents have run a good campaign so far.
"Neither one of them has earned any gold stars for their campaigns," Dukakis said, referring to Republican Charlie Baker and independent Tim Cahill.
Dukakis and his fellow panelists also talked about national elections, discussing everything from the effects that President Barack Obama's time in office would have on Democratic candidates to whether or not the Tea Party movement would be successful.
"My take on the 2010 elections can be summarized in a sentence: it's going to be a bad year for the Democrats. The only issue to be solved is how bad," Mayer said
Mayer listed poll numbers that suggested the Democrats could lose anywhere from 22 to almost 50 seats in the House of Representatives. He blamed Obama's sagging popularity as the major reason for the potential Republican takeover of both houses of Congress.
As with Patrick, Dukakis attributed most of Obama's unpopularity to the sinking economy.
"We were in deep economic trouble when the president was elected, and expecting that to change dramatically in 20 months was somewhat unreasonable, but folks may be unreasonable," Dukakis said. "They want action, they want change and they're not seeing it."
Despite Obama's struggles in public opinion polls, Dukakis still invoked the president's successful grassroots campaign in the 2008 election as a way in which the Democrats could stifle some of their losses on the state and national level.
"Two months in politics could be a lifetime. Whether that bleak forecast changes for the Democrats, it will at least have something to do with what candidates are doing in their districts," Dukakis said.
Wallin argued that the headline-grabbing Tea Party movement has latched on to this same grassroots strategy. But Wallin also said the effects of the Tea Party's could either be extremely successful or disastrous in the end.
"[The Tea Party] makes a lot of noise, but they cut both ways...they've put out some fairly radical candidates in Republican primaries who in some cases have won but in some cases have lost in the general because they're too radical," Wallin said.
Mayer agreed.
"They're mobilizing people but a lot of these people might have been mobilized anyway," he said.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
