It was around this very moment 20 years ago, the summer when Oliver North told Congress he was "authorized to do everything that I did" and Reagan fatigue took hold, that Mr. Dukakis, then the 53-year-old governor of Massachusetts, emerged at the head of a crowded Democratic presidential pack. By the time he was formally nominated in Atlanta the following July, he'd opened a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush.

"I can handle this guy," Mr. Dukakis supposedly replied around that time when John Sasso, his consultant in exile, asked to return to the campaign. "You worry about the first 100 days."

So you can understand why the numerous harbingers of a triumphant 2008 for Democrats--George W. Bush's Nixonian approval ratings, polls that show voters favoring a Democratic White House candidate by double-digit margins, the electorate's historical aversion to three-term rule by one party--haven't prompted Mr. Dukakis to begin planning his trip to the 2009 inaugural celebration.

"We're not going to outspend the other guys," he said during an interview in his modest office in the political science department at Northeastern University, where he was the first to arrive (at 7:30 a.m.) on a recent midsummer morning. "We're probably not going to outstrategize them. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we'll be back in Bush-land again."