The iceman cometh.

MICHAEL DUKAKIS has one ambiguous asset in his quest for the White House: an almost invulnerable ego. In his own mind, he doesn't make mistakes. His rigidity is legendary. When he made one of the major gaffes of this campaign-denouncing foreign ownership of American industry in what turned out to be an Italian-owned factory-he insisted afterward that "it wasn't a faux pas." Nobody else agreed.

Dukakis's ego suffered one shattering blow when he lost his first gubernatorial re-election bid to Edward King in 1978, but it seems to have made a full recovery. No fact can pierce the armor of his self-assurance, and unlike most politicians, he is undeterred by adverse public opinion. If the American people favor a mandatory Pledge of Allegiance in their schools, they are wrong. His state supreme court tells him so. And his opinion is only fortified by the fact that the court is dominated by his own appointees.

This is why the Duke can unblushingly offer himself to the nation on the the "competence"-even though an August opinion survey found 56 per cent of Massachusetts residents rating him "an ineffective governor." Only 36 per cent approved his performance. By September, the polls showed the Democratic nominee in a dead heat with George Bush in his own backyard.

Dukakis may think he's been an outstanding governor, but this is definitely a minority opinion in Massachusetts. His failure to excite the admiration of those who know him best should send a signal to voters in other parts of the country.

Dukakis drones on about the "Massachusetts Miracle" -the economic renaissance allegedly wrought by his brilliant policies. These claims are widely disputed. Even economists generally sympathetic to his programs acknowledge that the business boom of the early 1980s was due to factors beyond his control, including the stimulus of increased defense spending on high-tech industry and the effects of relatively stagnant population growth. Lately, the miracle has lost its luster, with the elimination of more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs and other gains in unemployment.

Far from being a snow-belt Shangri-La, Massachusetts is one of the most unlivable states in the union. In the past twenty years, the quality of life in the Bay State has declined decisively, due in no small part to the interventionist policies of the man who has governed it for half that period.

The state legislature recently came back into session, over the governor's objections, in an effort to deal with the crisis of auto-insurance rates. In the past two years, rates have risen 32 per cent, and the insurance industry has requested a 19.2-per-cent increase for 1989. Even without that increase, Massachusetts has the fourth-highest auto-insurance premiums in the nation.

NOT THAT INSURERS are making a mint off Massachusetts motorists. The industry as a whole is losing a million dollars a day in the state. After a number of national firms retreated from the field, the state began to block the departure of others. (In an unprecedented move, the insurance commissioner renewed the licenses of local agents selling the insurance against the companies' will.) Still, many insurers are so frantic to leave that they've paid exorbitant bribes, in the form of contributions to the state's high-risk pool, for the privilege of departing. One hundred million dollars was extorted from The Kemper Group in this manner.

The genesis of the emergency lies in the state's no-fault law, enacted in 1967. The man behind it? Then-state representative Michael Dukakis (D., Brookline). The irresponsibility engendered by the no-fault law contributed to making the Massachusetts motorist the tire-screeching terror of the highways. The state has the highest liability-insurance claim rate in the nation-more than half its drivers are in the high-risk category.

Along with the no-fault law came massive state intervention in auto insurance. Rates are set by the state's insurance commissioner, resulting in startling inequities. Highrisk inner-city drivers are subsidized by suburban and rural motorists. For a typical insurance package, an 18-year-old male in Charlestown-part of Greater Boston-pays $2,458, while the same insurance costs his counterpart in Hartford $3,673, in Philadelphia $6,672, and in Los Angeles $7,880. The difference is picked up by residents of Marblehead, Gloucester, and Waltham. This rate redistribution is a reflection of Dukakis's sack-the-middlc-class philosophy.

If auto-insurance rates are high, real-estate prices are unconscionable. Preening on the campaign trail, Dukakis avows: "We gotta decide whether or not we believe decent affordable housing for the people of this country as [sic] the birthright of every American citizen. I believe it is." Yet in the governor's hometown, the cost of habitation is positively indecent.

According to a recent survey by the Boston Redevelopment Authority, only 6 per cent of the city's residents can afford to buy a median-priced house. Over the past decade, the cost of the average single-family home statewide has increased 77.9 per cent, to $147,800 ($175,800 in the Boston area). Of 63 cities surveyed by the National Association of Realtors last year, Boston had the second-highest costs for an existing single-family home.

Rental housing has followed this trend. Only San Francisco, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., posted higher rents in 1987.

Unreasonable zoning laws, which the state has fostered, are one factor in the high cost of housing. Rent control is another. Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline (the governor's hometown) all have stringent controls. In the past two decades, artificially low rents have discouraged construction of new rental units. (The latter currently are outside controls, but developers reasonably fear they might be included at a later date.)

The result is soaring rentals on the few new units that are built, as well as on older, decontrolled apartments. Rent control also has spurred condominium conversion, taking many units off the rental market. Once again, the young Duke had a hand in molding the monstrosity. Brookline's rent control was adopted at the town meeting in 1969. A long-time resident of the community recalls town-meeting member (and state representative) Michael Dukakis rising and making an impassioned plea for tenant socialism. It was a ten-minute oration that swayed the gathering, If affordable habitation is indeed a birthright, Mike Dukakis has helped to rob Bostonians of theirs.

Rent control is not the only example of Dukakis's statism, and auto insurers are not the only fugitives. Dr. James J. Siragusa, president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, reports that whereas five years ago 90 per cent of Massachusetts-born doctors who did their residencies in the state remained to practice medicine there, today half are leaving. Established physicians are joining the exodus, or taking early retirement, resulting in, for example, the loss of 20 per cent of the state's orthopedic surgeons since 1983. There is only one neurosurgeon for the entire Connecticut Valley.

The Massachusetts Medical Association has declared the state "an undesirable location in which to practice." At its December 8, 1987, meeting the AMA House of Delegates unanimously passed a resolution calling for "a moment of silence in memory of the loss of freedom in what was once referred to as the cradle of liberty, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts." To such complaints, Catherine Dunham, director of Dukakis's Office of Human Resources, contemptuously replies: "We are not going to roll the clock back. We couldn't if we wanted. The doctors are going to have to grapple with the realities."

Among the realities physicians confront in Massachusetts are two unique laws. In 1984, the state legislature passed a measure, with the governor's blessing, prohibiting doctors from trying to recover the difference between Blue Shield allowable rates and their customary fees, a practice known as balanced billing. The following year, a similar prohibition was passed for Medicare payments-which generally are 30 per cent lower than physicians' standard feesregardless of the patient's ability to pay. Massachusetts is the only state with such strictures. And if that wasn't enough, the state legislature periodically threatens to make acceptance of Medicaid patients a condition of licensure, to close off the last avenue of escape. In consequence, doctors in Massachusetts earn substantially less than their colleagues elsewhere-$17,000 a year less, in the case of internists.

The medical community also complains of what Dr. Barry Manuel, associate dean of the Boston University School of Medicine, calls "undue scrutinization" by the state's Board of Registration. Doctors doing hospital rounds are accustomed to giving informal assessments of patients' conditions. A requirement that such observations be recorded has inhibited the evaluations, for fear of malpractice suits. Lack of candor by examining physicians works to the detriment of both patients and doctors.

Doctors who continue to practice in the state are dejected. "I've never seen such a group of dispirited people in any field as I see in the medical profession [in Massachusetts]," says Dr. John C. Molloy, an orthopedic surgeon in Boston. Consumers will eventually feel the impact of this bureaucratic war on medicine, in the form of declining quality and availability of health-care services.

ANOTHER INCIPIENT Massachusetts crisis involves energy. This summer, New England was hit with a series of brown-outs, power reductions of 5 per cent. To cope with the cutbacks, one Friday in August, Boston's City Hall was closed and workers at four downtown office towers were sent home before noon. Summer peak power requirements rose 1,600 megawatts over the same period in 1987. Since 1975, the region has experienced a 30-per-cent increase in consumption of electricity. For the past four years, demand has grown at 4.5 per cent, compounded annually.

New England is the most energy-poor region in the country, having neither coal, on-shore oil, natural gas, nor significant hydro-electric power. Charles Gray, chief counsel of the National Association of Utility Regulators, observes: "The accepted wisdom here in Washington is that New England is the region likely to have a capacity crisis before anywhere else. New England more than any other region of the nation needs new energy sources."

The only possible new energy source is nuclear power, but Michael Dukakis is a dedicated nuclear-phobe who is doing everything short of dynamiting reactors to sabotage nuclear plants in the region. In an effort to rationalize his prejudice, the governor declares the Chernobyl disaster convinced him of the inherent instability of energy from the atom, which is akin to saying that the sinking of the Titanic had proved one of the intrinsic hazards of cruise ships.

For the past several years, Dukakis has successfully blocked operation of New Hampshire's Seabrook plant by simply refusing to submit evacuation plans for the six Massachusetts communities within a 15-minute radius of the facility. (The NRC planning regulation was intended to give states and localities input into drawing up evacuation plans, not a veto over operation of nuclear plants.) Because of this Naderite obstructionism, a $3.2-billion facility with a 1,100-megawatt reactor sits idle. Dukakis also opposes restart of Massachusetts's own Pilgrim plant, closed since 1986, with the capacity to generate 670 megawatts annually. In mid October the governor announced the state would sue to block restart of the facility, should federal regulators move in that direction.

Dukakis further favors a moratorium on offshore oil drilling on the Georges Bank in the North Atlantic, and has sued the Department of the Interior on a number of occasions to prevent energy development in the area. Just how the governor thinks his state should meet its future energy needs is anyone's guess. As businesses begin relocating to areas with more reliable power sources, the "Massachusetts Miracle" will erode yet further.

The governor's environmental concern seems to swing from absurd overcaution, in the case of nuclear power, to sublime indifference, in the case of the polluted Boston Harbor. Last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rated the harbor the most contaminated in America. Each day, 450 million gallons of sewage and fresh water are pumped into the ocean off the Massachusetts coast. Whenever it rains, untreated human waste drains into the harbor from overflow pipes in more than one hundred locations, leaving a sickening trail of brown slime in the water.

POLITICIANS AND THE PUBLIC have been aware of the problem since the Sixties. In his first campaign for governor (1974), Dukakis engaged in the smug stump rhetoric that has (deservedly) come back to haunt him: "Massachusetts has shamefully neglected its great harbor for decades." In keeping with that tradition of laxity, Dukakis continued, as governor, to ignore the troublesome situation. In 1972, the administration of Frank Sargent, his Republican predecessor, signed an agreement with the EPA, committing the commonwealth to build a new secondarytreatment plant for sewage, to be operational by December 31, 1980.

In 1977, Congress amended the Clean Water Act to allow waivers from the mandate to move forward with secondary treatment, for areas that could demonstrate that their sewage discharge does not "interfere with the attainment or maintenance of that water quality which assures protection of the public water supplies. . . . " The provision was intended for West Coast cities that discharge into deep Pacific waters, rather than those disgorging waste into the shallow waters of the East Coast. Nonetheless, Dukakis filed for such a waiver in 1978. In 1983, the EPA at last rejected the application. Now it appears that Boston may have a secondary treatment plant by 1999.

Why the procrastination? Ken Bruno, local toxic-waste coordinator for Greenpeace, discloses: "I have heard him [Dukakis] claim that we simply didn't have the money at the time." Didn't have the money? But Dukakis did find the funds to build his own political empire-an amorphous bureaucracy worthy of a people's republic. During his second term alone he hired ten thousand new state workers. And the numb"consultants" employed by the statemostly recruited from Massachusetts's countless academies -has burgeoned beyond reckoning. "The cost to taxpayers," the state auditor (a Democrat, by the way) reported in 1987, "has increased 300 per cent in ten years, from $126 million in 1975 to $384 million last year [19861. And ridiculous as it may sound, no one knows how many consultants are on the state payroll." Meanwhile, Boston Harbor was filling with human and industrial waste.

Boston householders will pay the price for this neglect. It is estimated that in eight years the average homeowner, who now pays $300 a year for water and sewer services, will see his annual bill soar to $1,200. The candidate who touts his record as a problem-solver par excellence truly proved his administrative abilities with the handling of this fiasco.

Massachusetts citizens often wonder what their taxes purchase in terms of government services. Combined state taxes are the fourth highest in the United States, 43 per cent above the national average. Personal income levies are the second highest, 141 per cent above the national average. Dukakis has proposed and signed increases in almost every major state tax: personal income, sales, corporate, excise, new-business income, banking, estate, meals, room occupancy, hotel, tobacco, alcohol, and gasoline. He favored an amendment to the state constitution to permit a graduated income tax. He opposed Proposition 2 1/2 (which cut property taxes) as well as a cap on state taxes. And he has increased state spending by 79 per cent since 1983.

Yet for all Dukakis's taxing and spending, everything in the state seems to be either broken, understaffed, in short supply, or below standard quality. It throws a weird light on Dukakis's carefully cultivated image as a competent manager.

To cite but two examples, the state's prisons and mental hospitals are a head-hanging disgrace. In March 1986, the Public Citizen Research Group released a study ("Care of the Seriously Mentally Ill") that ranks Massachusetts 41st in the quality of care afforded thc insane. None of the state's seven mental hospitals is federally accredited. In the past year, patient advocacy groups have questioned the circumstances of nine deaths at the Worcester State Hospital and seven at the Danvers State Hospital. In 1985, with the looming threat of a federal-court takeover of the system, the state approved a renovation plan. But to help offset anticipated deficits in his 1988 and 1989 budgets, Dukakis withdrew some $17 million the legislature had allocated for this purpose.

At the Dorchester-Mattapan Community Health Center in Boston, a visitor this summer saw clogged toilets, bathroom sinks stinking with stagnant water, and patients sleeping on bare mattresses on the floors. In the Waltham State Hospital, as many as twenty patients sleep in each dormitory room, sharing a single shower. These rooms lack airconditioning, and many have sealed windows. During this past July and August, inside temperatures soared to 93 degrees. Says Edward M. Murphy, commissioner of the state Department of Mental Health and a Dukakis appointee: "If the private psychiatric hospitals we license did this, we'd close them down."

The state's low rating in mental-health care is all the more strange considering that since 1975 the budget for the Department of Mental Health has risen from $198 million to $878 million. But this record hasn't stopped Dukakis from bewailing the Reagan Administration's "lack of compassion."

Massachusetts prisons are no better. A riot in the Essex County House of Corrections this August, in which eight inmates were injured and one wing of the 144-year-old structure destroyed, underscored the problem. Little wonder Dukakis released so many murderers on furlough: there's no place to put them. The state's prison system consistently ranks among the three most overcrowded in the nation. Of the state's 13 prisons, three arc twenty to 49 years old, eight were built from fifty to 99 years ago, and two structures have seen their centennials.

The governor's token effort to improve prison conditions seems as much a means of rewarding his supporters. In 1986, Dukakis decided to build a prison in the rural community of New Braintree, over the objections of the Massachusetts inspector general, and requested a $10-million appropriation to purchase the site. Six months earlier, two Dukakis cronies (one of whom later "maxed out" in campaign contributions) had acquired the property for $3 million.

DUKAKIS DOESN'T CLAIM infallibility. He probably feels he would be the first to acknowledge a mistake, in the unlikely event that he ever made one, But to those who think he has already made quite a few, his attitude seems insufferably arrogant, not to say disastrously rigid, His conviction of his supreme "competence" is of a piece with his elitism and his liberal ideology. He fancies himself an expert who doesn't need the opinions of lesser mortals, such as voters. He takes a punitive attitude toward taxpayers and the private sector. Ruling in conjunction with his fellow experts-his supreme court, his hand-picked cronies, his myriad of "consultants"-he has created a sort of New Class political machine.

The waste and inefficiency of this machine are glaringly visible to ordinary citizens, yet the "Massachusetts Miracle" is touted by its public-sector beneficiaries, to whom a swell share of the state's wealth is routinely funneled. "Waste" is often in the eye of the beholder. Protected against the stern judgment of the marketplace, state employees who share Dukakis's collectivist ideology don't feel that money going into their pockets is wasted at all. His arrogance is also theirs. Their "competence" too is self-validated, immune to any test but their own expert judgment.

One of Dukakis's serious faults, says Michael Barone of the Washington Post, is "an over-reliance on supposed experts." Barone continues: "Dukakis is in trouble politicalIy-trouble he didn't anticipate-because he relied on expert criminologists who assured him it was progressive to give weekend furloughs to murderers sentenced to life-without-parole and on expert legal scholars and judges who argued that he had to veto the law requiring teachers to lead, students in the Pledge of Allegiance. Sometimes the experts are wrong and ordinary people are right-particuarly when you're running in an election in which ordinary people cast 99 per cent of the votes."

Only within- the closed circle of ideology can Dukakis be called "competent." This probably explains the high rating he awards himself when he's clearly a failure in terms of ordinary experience. The Americans for Democratic Action may generally approve of the way he has governed, but when he promises to do for America what he's done for Massachusetts, America should recoil at the prospect.