During His First 100 Days . . .

By WALTER SHAPIRO

"We thought of doing a speech on the first 100 days of a Dukakis Administration. We did a speech on regional economic development instead."

-- Christopher Edley, issues director

The morning of the New York primary, Michael Dukakis flew back to Boston to pursue his favorite pastime: governing Massachusetts. As others sought out early exit-poll results, the Governor spent nearly two hours in his Beacon Hill office conferring with Top Advisers Hale Champion and John DeVillars. The gravity of the moment, however, was not lost on DeVillars, who was once Dukakis' student at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. DeVillars later marveled at the incongruity of discussing health insurance with Dukakis as it "dawns on you that a year from now this man may be sitting in the Oval Office talking about national issues." Even then, DeVillars speculates, "you won't see that much change in how he approaches being President from how he's been as Governor."

Would the future flow that naturally from the past? Are the contours of a Dukakis Administration that easy to grasp? Would President Dukakis behave as if the U.S. were an elongated version of the Bay State? Does Dukakis fully understand the magnitude of the difference?

There is scant evidence that Dukakis has a clearly defined vision of his presidency. His disciplined, orderly mind has been understandably fixated on the task at hand -- winning the nomination -- and the rigors of a primary ; campaign leave little time for reflective thinking. On the few occasions that Dukakis has permitted himself to muse aloud about the White House, aides say, there was a puckish glee as he toyed with the ironies of being Governor of all the people. At a recent gubernatorial staff meeting, Dukakis joked that he imagined himself in the Oval Office telling Fred Salvucci, his current transportation secretary, that the ambitious plans to use federal funds to rebuild Boston's central artery would have to be scaled back because "Los Angeles needs the money."

As a candidate, Dukakis has drawn one indelible lesson from his experience as Governor: an almost pathological fear of binding commitments. He was defeated for re-election in 1978 in part because he was forced to renounce a campaign pledge not to raise taxes. As a consequence, Dukakis has become as parsimonious with promises as Jack Benny was with dimes.

It is both startling and politically shrewd that Dukakis, in over a year of campaigning, is on record as making just two unalterable if-elected commitments. Neither of them loomed large on the agenda of any special- interest group, nor did they spark a passionate reaction from the voters. But they are emblematic of the mind-set that Dukakis would bring to the presidency. During a debate before the New Hampshire primary, Dukakis the righteous reformer vowed that the first bill he would send to Congress would be one limiting the influence of political-action committees. Even more characteristic is the carrot that Dukakis dangled before Iowa voters: a promise to hold the first in a series of regional economic-development conferences in Davenport in February 1989.

Spurring economic development would be not only a touchstone of a Dukakis Administration but also a likely reflection of the peripatetic quality that he would bring to the presidency. "Dukakis would get a lot of things going very fast," says Frank Keefe, the Massachusetts secretary of administration and finance, who has worked for the Governor since 1975. "What he'd spend lots of his time doing is what he likes best: traveling around the country, convening task forces, talking with Governors and mayors, promoting regional economic development." Longtime advisers predict that Dukakis would chafe at the constraints of life in the White House and try to break out of the splendid isolation of the presidency through nonstop travel. Says DeVillars: "There'll be plenty of work for advance men in a Dukakis presidency."

! Almost as if anticipating facile and unflattering comparisons with Jimmy Carter, the Dukakis camp goes out of its way to insist that the Governor has learned to set limited and attainable priorities. Paul Brountas, who has replaced former Campaign Manager John Sasso as the candidate's closest confidant, contends that Dukakis failed in his abortive first term because "there were far too many legislative initiatives." Brountas predicts that the domestic agenda of Dukakis' first year in the White House would consist of perhaps a "half dozen manageable programs." Seated one row behind a dozing and generally far vaguer Dukakis aboard the campaign plane, Brountas ticked off some of the priority issues in lawyerly fashion: housing, drugs, health insurance, college education and improving the status of teachers.

The innate caution of Dukakis' campaign style sometimes leaves aides in the peculiar role of providing both the specificity and the passion that the candidate so assiduously avoids. Chris Edley, for example, talks animatedly about Dukakis' moving immediately after the election to forge a "vigorous consensus on a multi-year deficit plan." Implicit in this prediction is an awareness that far more overt sacrifice will required to douse the deficit than merely mobilizing an army of IRS agents to hunt down tax scofflaws. "There will be real action on the economic front," Edley says. "On the three fronts of the budget, economic development and international economics, you can expect to see a lot of hard pushing."

Part of the problem in depicting a Dukakis presidency, of course, is that soaring poetry and air castles of ideas are as alien to Dukakis as they are natural to Jesse Jackson. But in fairness, it must be said that the reality of a Dukakis presidency would be more uplifting than its anticipation. As a pragmatic problem solver, Dukakis is often at his best reacting decisively rather than initiating boldly. "Michael likes to make decisions," Hale Champion, the Governor's chief of staff, has said. "He never stalls to get irrelevant information. His basic impulse is to get on with things."

For Dukakis, a decision often begins with a staff-written memo, generally a few pages long. The next step is a meeting in which the Governor displays an almost obsessive concern that his staff has consulted virtually all points of view. This quest for consensus is likely to be a hallmark of a Dukakis presidency. "You won't see three people or eight people talking to Dukakis; there will be hundreds," predicts Keefe. "Maybe there'll be three people sitting around at the end of the day, but even they won't have a monopoly on input." Unlike Carter, Dukakis has painfully learned to delegate responsibility. "Michael won't waste time deciding who gets to use the White House tennis court," says a longtime associate. "His principal concern would be why do members of my staff have time to play tennis?"

When Dukakis embarked on his quest more than a year ago, he knew little and cared less about foreign policy. In the words of a close friend, "This was a man who had never heard of a D-5 missile before March 1987." Although he has recently grown more adept, Dukakis' early campaign appearances did nothing to quiet concerns that foreign policy was his personal window of vulnerability. A deep moralistic streak prompted Dukakis to stress rule-of-law pieties: he argued that aid to the contras violated the Rio treaty and lamented the failure of the U.N. Security Council to halt the Iran-Iraq war.

For all the tumult over Dukakis' mastery of foreign policy flash cards, the initiatives he would be likely to pursue as President are right out of the Democratic Party mainstream. There would be an immediate effort to pick up on arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union wherever the Reagan Administration left off. "We want to avoid the historical pattern of wait- and-see delay that happens with presidential transitions," says Edley. At the same time, advisers like Robert Murray of the Kennedy School sound a note of realistic caution. "What you don't do," explains Murray, "is to march off to Moscow with a new set of rules about relationships." Dukakis' own words about Mikhail Gorbachev sometimes betray a palpable eagerness to negotiate face to face, one economic reformer to another. This aspect of the candidate's world view was best expressed by Brountas when he said, "He's dying to get across the table from Gorbachev and see what the problems are, to get to know him, to discuss their mutual hopes."

A bit more predictable are Dukakis' attitudes toward the defense budget. As a candidate, he has ritualistically denounced Star Wars, the B-1 bomber and the MX missile, the D-5 Trident missile and even the proposed mobile Midgetman, a darling of centrist arms-control advocates. But he has scrupulously avoided the beguiling trap of promising dovish Democratic voters cuts in overall military spending. Rather, Edley speaks in terms of keeping the defense budget "stable," and Murray uses the phrase "zero real growth." After talking to Senator Sam Nunn last year, Dukakis began emphasizing the need to improve conventional forces rather than build new strategic systems. But none of his top advisers believe that he could instantly reorient spending. As Edley explains, "It's very hard at the outset to be bold with the defense budget."

A year ago, Governor Dukakis was just another Democratic minnow adrift in the broad sea of presidential politics. A year from now, President Dukakis may be completing his first 100 days in the White House. But for that to happen, he must begin to flesh out how he would use that period to be more than just the nation's Governor.