How about Cuomo 1988 or 1992?
Dukakis, Mondale territory is my impression. Wanna be Carter-Clinton-Obama. What a Republican would be if they were more humane and had a little bit of serious concern for the common citizen...not enough to actually prioritize the common citizen of course, that's crazy talk! But take some effort to see to it they have a little bit of the leftovers after the important classes have been taken care of.
I have some clear idea what Dukakis stood for, as noted I was paying attention during the '88 campaign. Perhaps I underestimate Cuomo, but as noted--I was paying attention in the '80s, and Cuomo as the antidote to Reagan was all the rage. So why the hell did he not step up and campaign already? Not in the '80s, not in the '90s...Cuomo appears to have been all hat no cattle.
OTOH, I can see Dukakis as someone that would govern as a liberal (and thus could potentially become the left's Reagan in an unexpected way). He is a regional figure at best, and he is going to have to rely on Ted Kennedy to push forward his agenda nationally, and Ted would surely want something from Dukakis in return (e.g. universal healthcare).
I imagine that - wait for it - Michael Dukakis could pull it off...
Full disclosure, I had not actually read your scenario when I posted above, I just shut down upon seeing the word "Dukakis." So I took some time to read it later, and damn if it doesn't make my case for me.
You see, what you and Thomas1195 above in endorsing are saying, by implication, is that there is just no way in hell a real leftist, with an actual passion for the common citizen, and willingness to think outside the neoliberal box, could possibly actually lead a leftist shift, and therefore the closest one can come to the challenge is a fake "leftist," someone to the left by default because they don't campaign as a Republican outright, pulling off competent neoliberalism to give the left a sort of zoo they can live in unmolested. JFK was exactly that of course; he was pretty darn right wing, Reaganesque in fact, in his policies. I am not blaming Kennedy for getting us into Vietnam; that was Cold War bipartisanship at work, but there was a reason JFK led the ticket and Lyndon Johnson provided regional
and ideological balance. Mind,
@Sam R. has a point--none of the "realistic" candidates, not McGovern, not Clark, not Udall, are real leftists either; American politics simply won't provide any place for that, and possibly conventional wisdom that there is no way in hell a serious leftist can command anything close to a majority vote might be correct categorically. Though a lot of this is about Overton Window moving--indeed your whole case rests on incremental Overton Window shifting, and perhaps, with suitable electoral reforms that moderate leftists might push through allowing more diverse representation, a real leftist can build really impressive levels of support--in fact, if we could talk current politics...but we can't so let's not.
Anyway, while versus the entire actual spectrum that ought to be available in a properly representative country with real freedom, the US spectrum is inherently truncated, there is still enough room I think for meaningful distinctions between neoliberals with a human heart and face who wistfully hope that perhaps some of the less well off might get somewhat more crumbs, and people of the Truman-LBJ-McGovern-Clark type who actually give a passionate damn about the welfare of the common person, and our institutions being actually democratic. I took the challenge to mean, one of these types of people takes the lead, takes power, demonstrates what commitment to the
general welfare actually means, and thereby empowers and inspires others to form a broad and popular constituency taking democracy seriously. That moves the Overton Window quite strongly to the left and nails it down there, much as Reaganism has sent it on a lurching, sometimes slowing, but rarely reversing, course to the right. And let's not give Reagan too much credit; what he did continued a course Nixon was clearly driving for--this is what OTL George McGovern was talking about in his speech where he said Nixon represents the dark side of the American Dream. I see continuity in the Republican project going back at least to Nixon, if not indeed to Eisenhower; we give them credit for alleged liberalism when the truth is they were stuck with the tools and values of their times. But they acted to change them, and here we are. A "Left Reagan" would believe, passionately and without apology, in values countervailing neoliberal commonplaces, and seek practical ways to embody these values to deliver solutions quite different than those favored by folks like Reagan and Thatcher as salutary and exemplary. We'd have a different mentality, a different set of metaphors, a different way of conceiving what government can and should do.
JFK, and Carter, and Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, were operating in terms laid down by their more forthrightly conservative opponents, to try to find a moderated balance that would be more humane. And versus the 200 proof distilled version of neoliberalism, it is definitely preferable to dilute it, and hopefully with something that offsets the basically toxic effects somewhat. So it was worth campaigning for and supporting these people versus the alternatives, it put some brakes on the general drift and considering where that drift is headed, slowing that trend, buying time to stop and think about where we seem to be going, is a good thing as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough to actually take us in a good direction!
I listed the successful Democrats after Truman...if we list the failed bids as well, most of them are quite as moderate. Mondale, Dukakis, probably Cuomo (perhaps Thomas1195 can explain how and why Cuomo belongs in the company of people like McGovern and Ramsey Clark--honestly about Udall, I was going largely on that poster's say-so, I do remember their name from 1976--or Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson or some other figures I could name if they were not so recently salient), Kerry (and his running mate Edwards), Al Gore...The Democratic party's hugest win in the Presidential elections since FDR's last election was LBJ's landslide about half a year before I was born; the second runner up for strong popular vote winner was Obama. Between them, and since, and taking Obama as yet another Republican with a human heart and face and a brain, the Democrats have with the sole exception of McGovern seen to it their Presidential candidates are not too threatening to powerful vested interests. And to be honest, Truman and LBJ paid their dues of deep commitment to the sanctity of concentrated private property too. So Truman and Johnson are actually on that spectrum between a Left Wing Reagan and these establishment hacks.
Politics is about values, not technocracy; technocratic competence is what Assistant Secretaries of departments, and hopefully on down the executive civil service ladder, provide. Policy should be set by people intelligent and educated enough to understand the executive summaries of technocratic considerations--enough to make decisions based on values, about what goals we should be pursuing, and let the technocrats hash out just how and present the invoice of what it costs.
Let's review your case:
Meanwhile, Dukakis hits the ground running in Massachusetts, playing hardball with unions and politicos running the state apparatuses. Maybe he keeps labor unions on his side with pledges to protect them during his government reforms or he actually avoids raising taxes
My bolds--in other words, he starts out quite at war with the actual left, such as it is, in Massachusetts.
Pro tip--a left wing champion of the common citizen is not an enemy of the unions, at any rate not of their rank and file. Nor is he or she going to fuel Reagan's rhetorical bonfire about government being the problem not the solution. Right away, you are basing the whole thing on Reaganism Lite. Maybe he holds off from massacring the village in order to save it, but he's still strongarming them from a hostile position. As the cartoon circulating the barracks in Vietnam among GIs deployed there, playing on the trope of "winning their hearts and minds," said, the grunts are in a village, guns leveled, flamethrower at the ready, saying "Gimmie your Goddamned Hearts And Minds or we'll burn down your F-in' hooches!" These are the good guys of course, they don't actually burn down the village and massacre it because the villagers comply, Mission Accomplished.
Naturally you have to have the "Taxes are Too High!" trope in there too, never mind that overall US tax burdens are consistently lower than in most developed countries, and the overall tax structure is at best a flat tax, actually somewhat regressive, when we factor in that a huge part of the total government revenue comes from sales taxes and so forth, and the progressive income tax can be both illegally and legally evaded in the top brackets quite a lot. Campaigning in the late '70s here Dukakis is working in the context of theoretically high top brackets--but his mentor JFK cut them from their Eisenhower era peak.
This is the wrong approach, wrong mentality, wrong values for someone who is championing a genuine grassroots populism of general welfare based on that of the common citizen; it is a matter of service the capitalists first, win their gratitude, and maybe then the good neoliberal with a human heart wins the basic victims some compensation in partial redress later when the crocodiles of capital are replete and complacent.
Additionally, he would gain crucial experience in how to run against and defeat a socially conservative opponent.
You see, a left wing champion wins by convincing, by their superior address to the real needs and concerns of people, that these "socially conservative" platitudes are a distraction and manipulative hooks, and demonstrates who is actually their friend, who actually cares about stuff that matters. Trying to fly under the radar as a Conservative Lite is a good way to fall between stools.
In the lead-up to 1980 Dukakis positions himself to the center-left of the Democratic Party. Comparisons are made to another young-ish star politician from Massachusetts who won the White House 20 years ago, not all of them flattering for the Duke.
Again, bearing in mind that "left" has little scope for context in the USA if someone doesn't expand that space considerably, it is hard to see a distinction between center-left and center-right. Center is the operative word here, it means not pissing off the big donors. Anyway, you are making it clear, your notion of the Hero of the Left stands to its right, as their protector and patron, and does not actually stand on the left himself.
Ted Kennedy's endorsement carries a lot of weight (and pushes the governor to the left on a few issues)
A few indeed I would think. My judgement of Ted Kennedy's character is not of the highest either, but I do think he did consistently push for values considerably to the left of your
enfant terrible Dukakis. Kennedy is apparently paralyzed presumably by Chappaquiddick, and if we are in an ATL where that actually doesn't happen, I suppose he had other scandals, either instead in the ATL, or perhaps OTL ones we don't know about. Whatever the reason, OTL he could never actually bestir himself to express his values--or perhaps, his relative inertia is an expression of his actual values. Again, Dukakis, as Moderate, not leftist, picks and chooses a few issues to use. He is clearly not do or die committed to these.
"He's a doer, not a talker," is how he'll bill the fight with Reagan.
It does seem that he does and does not talk because if he were to articulate what he is about, he would demonstrate that fundamentally there is little difference between himself and Reagan.
In office, Dukakis gets to work on the economy, which has been his wheelhouse since he took over in Massachusetts 6 years earlier. It's an issue on which he would have authoritative grasp and so he gets to work selling his plans to his allies in the Democratic-led congress, passing much of his agenda in the first couple of years.
Here you don't actually describe what this technocratic expertise actually entails, in terms of real policy. What actually are these plans? You don't say.
As things rebound in the early part of the decade,
Since you have not said
what it is Dukakis does, we have to fall back on presuming it is the same stuff that "worked" OTL. You aren't alone in this thread on simply taking a "rebound" in the 1980s for granted--you should realize though, that the Republicans lost a brief grip they had on the Senate after 1980 in 1982, and that the "rebound" did not really get started until after that election.
Provided McGovern can staff his administration competently, he benefits like Reagan with the economic recovery, which frankly would have happened anyway once the supply shock of the Iranian revolution was over, become popular, and get a few of his ideas enacted.
I gave this a Like overall, but I'd be remiss not to point out this scenario for McGovern 1980 also just assumes a recovery though at least it makes an attempt to justify it.
But OTL, the "recovery" of the 1980s was clearly intertwined with the general neoliberal attack on New Deal taxes, regulations and so forth, on organized labor, on Volker's Fed policy, on Yankee Thatcherism generally. The recovery benefited the richest first of all and mostly, came bundled with major tax cuts that were advertised as stimulus but were in fact simply pocketed without industry generally visibly responding to them, and turned into the casino economy of corporate raiders, accenting and throwing into overdrive a trend of polarization between general incomes and those of the richest that has only continued since. If there is to be real recovery on left wing values terms, it requires quite a different program, and its pattern can hardly be assumed since it would be quite ATL.
In the context of McGovern, I trust his commitment to values that would at least try to find some other basis of recovery, though indeed he might ironically benefit from Volkeresque "supply side revolution" policy of the prior administration. If McGovern just rolls with it, his values are worthless as a left wing champion. If he taps into it by observing rising incomes for the rich, and managing with political capital to get them to hold still for tapping into it with progressive taxes that shift some of the pork down to the grassroots and lay groundwork for real and substantial stimulus where it matters--that's ATL. It also runs dead against the prevailing ideological currents of the age--OTL. To get away with it McGovern would have to make his case politically, and by 1984 the benefits of his ATL approach should be clear at the grassroots level, securing his reelection
in the face of a quite scurrilous corporate backed campaign to oust him!
Your Dukakis-he's just gonna roll with it, and maybe tap into it a little bit, later, perhaps.
and if Dukakis can avoid any foreign policy disasters, then he starts looking like a sure-thing in 1984. If his coattails are big enough to bring in a lot of allies to Congress, he may be able to pass a Kennedy-care bill at some point during his tenure. By the present day I don't think that he would have the iconic stature on the left that Reagan enjoys on the right. Nevertheless, he would save the Democratic left and prevent the rise of the DLC, even if only for a few years
And that bolded bit--that is apparently the entire payoff!
Now again, it is better for everyone I believe when these neoliberal lite Democratic moderates manage to pull off some small incremental reform here or there their Republican counterparts would just laugh off. It represents progress if only, more often than not, as prevention of regress or slowing it down a bit.
You neither commit to the idea Dukakis must do this, or specify exactly what the bill is. If it were something as sweeping as total coverage of all citizens in full paid for out of progressive taxes, or even a mix of income tax and payroll taxes, that certainly would be a help, a real help, to the citizens. Note it would also pull the plug on health insurance private profits. The less comprehensive, the more reliant on private HCI, your notion of the "Kennedy Bill" is, the less use it is of course.
I am not saying Dukakis is a bad bad man, or that we might not have been better off with him.
I'm saying--that's not a leftist. That's you clearly not believing that a real leftist is a real thing that can exist, and calling it "leftist" if it deviates from Reaganism in any way that isn't an acceleration of it.
My problem is of course that no such leftist champion did in fact emerge, not back in these days anyway, who plausibly bid for victory, That could be because such a thing is impossible in America. If so though, say so, don't pretend someone is a leftist who clearly isn't!
