Michael Dukakis official portrait as Governor of MassachusettsDukakis served as Governor again from 1983 until 1991 (winning re-election in 1986 with more than 60 percent of the vote), during which time he presided over a high-tech boom and a period of prosperity in Massachusetts. Residents of the city of Boston and its surrounding areas remember him for the improvements he made to Boston's mass transit system, especially major renovations to the city's trains and buses. He was known as the only governor who rode the subway to the state capitol every day.

Presidential candidate
Using the phenomenon termed the "Massachusetts Miracle" to promote his campaign, Dukakis sought the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States in the 1988 elections, prevailing over a primary field which included Jesse Jackson, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Al Gore, among others. Dukakis' success at the primary level has been largely attributed to John Sasso, his campaign manager. Sasso, however, was among two aides dismissed (Paul Tully was the other one) when a video showing plagiarism by rival candidate Joseph Biden (D-Delaware) was made public and an embarrassed Biden was forced to withdraw from the race. This situation got uglier when Tully implied that it was Dick Gephardt's campaign (as opposed to Dukakis' campaign) that actually passed along the damaging information on Biden.

Despite the claims that Dukakis always 'turned the other cheek,' he did run a particularly effective commercial against rival Dick Gephardt that featured a tumbler doing somersaults while the announcer said, "Dick Gephardt has been flip-flopping over the issues." Dukakis finished third in the Iowa caucuses and then became the first candidate to ever win a contested New Hampshire primary by more than ten points with Gephardt finishing second. Dukakis finished first in Minnesota and second in South Dakota before winning five states on March 8, 1988, the "Super Tuesday" primaries. As his competition continued to fade, Dukakis wound up with a seven-week stretch of one-on-one elections between himself and controversial civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Dukakis lost the Michigan caucus to Jackson but then prevailed by margins of two to one in Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, and New Jersey, clinching the nomination on June 7, 1988.

During the general election campaign, Vice President George H. W. Bush, the Republican nominee, launched several attacks on Dukakis for his traditionally liberal positions on many issues. These included Dukakis's statement during the primary season that he was "a card-carrying member of" the American Civil Liberties Union, his veto of legislation requiring public school teachers to lead pupils in the Pledge of Allegiance, and his opposition to the resumption of capital punishment in the United States.

Dukakis had trouble with the personality that he projected to the voting public. His reserved and stoic nature was easily interpreted to be a lack of passion (which went against the ethnic stereotype of his Greek-American heritage). Dukakis was often referred to as "Zorba the Clerk."

During the 1988 presidential election, a number of false rumors were reported in the media about Dukakis, including the claim by Idaho Republican Senator Steve Symms that Dukakis's wife Kitty had burned an American flag to protest the Vietnam War, as well as the claim that Dukakis himself had been treated for a mental illness. Lee Atwater was accused of having initiated these rumors, although there is no direct proof that he did so.

Views on capital punishment
The issue of capital punishment came up in the October 13, 1988 debate between the two presidential nominees. Bernard Shaw, the moderator of the debate, asked Dukakis, "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis replied coolly, "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life," and explained his stance. During debate preparations, Dukakis's campaign manager Susan Estrich had prepared an answer highlighting the candidate's empathy for victims of crime, noting the beating of his father in a robbery and the death of his brother in a hit-and-run car accident. Many observers felt Dukakis' answer lacked the normal emotions one would expect of a person discussing a loved one's rape and death. Many — including the candidate himself — believe that this, in part, cost Dukakis the election, as his poll numbers dropped from 49% to 42% nationally that night. Other commentators thought the question itself was unfair, in that it injected an irrelevant emotional element into the discussion of a policy issue.

Prison furlough program issue The most controversial criticism against Dukakis involved his support for a prison furlough program that resulted in the release of convicted murderer Willie Horton, who committed a rape and assualt in Maryland after his escape. Al Gore was the first candidate to publicly raise the furlough issue and that a furloughed prisoner had broken into a house, raped a woman and beaten her husband, in a debate held in New York prior to the Democratic primary in that state, although Gore never mentioned Horton by name.

Bush mentioned Horton by name in a speech in June, 1988 and his campaign brought up the Horton case. An independent political action committee not affiliated with the Bush campaign, the National Security Political Action Committee, aired an ad entitled "Weekend Passes" which used a mug shot image of Horton, who is African American. That ad campaign was followed by a separate Bush campaign ad, "Revolving Door," criticizing Dukakis over the furlough program without mentioning Horton. Dukakis was unable to refute criticism of his veto of a bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature to limit the furlough program and he even flatly refused to apologize to Horton's victims. (This part of the campaign was believed to have been orchestrated by Lee Atwater, a political consultant but no credible evidence exists to prove this.)[citation needed]

Almost forgotten in the furor, however, was that Dukakis himself ran a furlough advertisement in the Southwest that featured a Hispanic killer, Angel Medrano. Dukakis was trying to accuse Bush of hypocrisy, however Medrano had actually escaped from a halfway house. He had not been furloughed as the ad suggested, and therefore Reagan and Bush could hardly be held responsible. In addition, Medrano was in prison for dealing drugs and had no history of violent crime, so the police would have had no way to predict any future violence from him. But the commercial backfired when it caused the public simply to see Dukakis himself as just as negative a campaigner as Bush and his supporters could be.