Dukakis’ Mother : Stumping for a Son

Two days before Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis was to arrive in Orange County on a campaign swing, his mother was paving the way.

At Leisure World Seal Beach on Tuesday, Euterpe Boukis Dukakis, 84, ate Jell-O salad and explained the Greek roots of the word charisma and why her son has it--all in hopes of getting a few extra votes to push him past the competition and into the White House.

She replied in Greek to Margarettha Corne, who shuffled across the lunchroom to say, “ Kale oreksi! (good appetite!)” Dukakis beamed. “You know what I said? ‘Come and join us!’ ”

Her message was clear as she spoke a few minutes later to about 150 Democrats, including Dukakis delegates and several candidates in local congressional and legislative races. “I’m here to ask you to vote for Michael Dukakis, my son,” she said.

The sponsor of the event, the Democratic Club of Leisure World Seal Beach, also invited the Rev. Jesse Jackson representative Josh White, who belongs to both the state and county Democratic central committees. But--even though one octogenarian called her appearance “schmaltzy”--it was Dukakis, not White, who got the standing ovation.

“A real mother, huh?” said Corne, 88, a lifelong Democrat with two hearing aids and a firm handshake. “I think we would all do that for our sons . . . if we thought the same way” they did, she said.

Euterpe Dukakis lives in Brookline, Mass., but, like the other Dukakis family members, she has been stumping across the country--sometimes scheduled for six or seven events a day, three and four days a week--whenever she is asked, said Ada Barry, an aide on Michael S. Dukakis’ staff.

She also knows that her appearances and her explanations of her son’s support for better home care for seniors and expanded health insurance coverage can be useful in winning votes among the elderly. She said lifelong Republican seniors have said they will vote for her son after listening to her speak.

Standing in front of an American flag in a simple lavender dress and sensible sandals, she told her family story: how she and her husband, Panos Dukakis, immigrated as teen-agers with their families to Massachusetts from Greece; how they both pursued education and how Panos was graduated from Harvard Medical School and she from Bates College, having helped to pay her own way by working in a shoe factory. Panos Dukakis died in 1979.

“The child of those two people--I can still see them--is running for President of the United States,” she said. “A first-generation American. If there was any (greater) fulfillment of the American Dream, I don’t know it.”

Dukakis reminded the members of the audience that they could vote by mail if getting to the polls would be too difficult.

She listened, laughed and applauded parts of White’s speech, delivered in a preacher’s style and also aimed at the elderly.

“Jesse Jackson will fight for your issues, champion your causes and ensure that senior citizens are not shut out of the political process again,” White said. “We don’t want the puppet Bush in the White House. We don’t need it.”

Euterpe’s son plans to visit Orange County on Thursday for a 7:30 p.m. rally at UC Irvine’s University Club.

The Greek community, with 18 churches from Bakersfield to San Diego, has been a steppingstone for the Dukakis campaign to spread into the rest of the community, a Dukakis aide said.

But Euterpe said she tells Greeks not to vote for her son just because he is Greek. “I say vote for him because you believe in him.”

She said she knew Michael had charisma (“a Greek word that means ‘grace from God’ ”) in grade school when other children looked up to him.

“The little girls vied to hold his hand in their games,” she said.

“He loved to read and play,” she said. “Maybe he was a little stubborn.”

Today, she’s not crisscrossing the country just because Michael is her son, she said as aides hustled her out to a waiting car. At 84, “85 in September,” she said, “I couldn’t put my heart into it unless I believed in him and his cause.”