I’ve been reading a book on the 1988 election and can’t help noticing the contrast between that election and more recent elections. 1988 was an election in which the media coverage of the election was at its worst.
Here were the “issues” in that election:
Michael Dukakis vetoed a bill requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Michael Dukakis gave weekend passes to convicted felons. A black man named Willie Horton used this time to murder a white woman.
What would Dukakis do if his wife were raped and murdered?
George Bush said, “Read my lips, NO NEW TAXES.”
In the pre WWW world of the late 80’s, could the media have done a better job of covering this election? Was the Dukakis campaign really so inept as to allow the first three “issues” to dominate? Is there any way Dukakis could have won?
IMO, Dukakis wouldn’t have won anyway for two very good reasons.
First of all, the country had turned rightward a great deal in just the few short years of the Reagan Administration, especially in terms of economic and foreign policy. Voters as a whole were pretty suspicious of liberal Democrats in general, especially given their experiences under Carter a few short years before.
Proof of this can be found in Walter Mondale’s pathetic run in 1984, where he came close to losing his home state, and carried no others at all.
So Dukakis had an uphill climb, to say the least. He didn’t help matters either by running a rather weak campaign, having to defend himself and his positions constantly and completely unable to go on the offensive. Furthermore, this technocrat couldn’t charm anyone to vote for him, like Clinton could. The man was a personality black hole.
So no, Dukakis didn’t have a prayer. And changes in the media wouldn’t change this. If anything, it would be even harder for Dukakis today, because of blogs and newsgroups. His wife’s alcoholism and substance abuse might not have been hidden for as long as it was today, for instance.
You missed the most important issue in that campaign: Dukakis looked funny riding in that tank. Or he did to some people; I think all politicians look funny doing things like that.
All that demonstrates is that George H.W. Bush’s campaign was not an exciting thing either. But the more voters saw of both, the more Dukakis slipped. In the end, the election wasn’t really close.
Liberals have big problems winning the presidency, at least since 1964. Dukakis was just one more data point in an overwhelming trend.
Heck, Carter only eked out a narrow win after the Republican Party’s attempted suicide in the early 1970’s, and lost just four years later after a presidency marked by stunning incompetence. Clinton could only win by running as a moderate, and with a strong third party effort stripping votes from his opponents. And without opening the whole Gore-Kerry can of worms, it’s clear that the country has shifted so that a liberal Democrat can only win narrowly, if he wins at all, in a two-candidate race.
That’s true, although even Mondale was very close to Reagan in some polls taken immediately after the Democratic Convention. In the “limited media” era before near-universal cable and the Web, huge convention bounces were common. One saw such absurd results as Carter leading Ford 63% to 29% after his party’s convention. Dukakis’s “lead” over Bush was such an aberration.
Regarding the OP, one must regard statements as to what an election was “about” with caution. The losing side invariably asserts that the media and the public wallowed in worthless trivia, while the winning side holds that Great and Profound Issues were at stake and their candidate stood on the Historically Correct Side.
In this case, the media completely ignored Iran-Contra , (a real scandal as opposed to a fake one like Blow Job Gate) and focused instead on Dukakis in the stupid tank (a pitcure which made me cringe the first time I saw it. It was so embarrassing it actually made me considering voting Libertarian) or whether he should have faked an emotional reaction to the dead Kitty question ( a question he had known wa coming for weeks. If he had shown an emotional reaction to it, it would have seemed phony and canned and he would have been ripped for that. It was a no win situation).
After Poppy got indignant with Dan Rather, the media completely pussed out on Iran-Contra. Frigging gutless liberal media.
Dukakis had vowed to run a clean campaign. When he was smeared, he did not strike back. When he finally decided to toughen his stance, Bush closed the door with his “kinder, gentler America” speech. After that, any attacks by Dukakis would have seemed uncivilized. The damage to Dukakis had been done, and he could not retaliate.
Let’sjust assume that that’s true, even though it would be far more a failing of Dukakis than Bush. I’d call it deliberately running a weak campaign.
If Dukakis had come out swinging, do you really think he had a chance of winning?
I think the race might have been closer had things gone differently. But I don’t see any suggestion that, with a good economy and a strong foreign policy, Americans were willing to return to a Democratic administration at that time.
The 1988 campaign was the nadir of Democratic presidential politics. Dukakis was the guy we wanted as our science teacher or accountant, he simply did not look presidential. If you can’t look presidential, you cannot win. The campaign was monumentally incompetent- Dukakis failed to articulate exactly why he wanted to be president and what he wanted to do. If you can’t do that, you cannot win. Bush’s campaign smeared him royally over Willie Horton, then climbed out of the mud and pretended to take the high road toward the end of the campaign. Dukakis did not defend himself and he did not counterattack. If you bring a knife to a gun fight, you cannot win. Amazingly, Gore and Kerry failed to learn a thing from this campaign. If they had, we wouldn’t be in the Iraqi disaster now.
I’m not so sure that Willie Horton was a “smear.” Weekend furloughs for convicted murderers is a stupid thing. Making an issue out of a Governor who allowed this to continue during his term in office is perfectly legitimate. I recognize the racial aspect of it, but I also recognize that Republicans weren’t making stuff up – Willie Horton did indeed get a furlough and then kill again while on furlough.
Sargent and King were both Republicans, btw. Note that Dukakis’ action was to *refuse * to change a GOP-created program.
An attempt to illustrate the hypocrisy of the charge, but too little, too late. The federal prison furlough program was, btw, a Reagan Administration effort to reduce recidivism, and was copied in many states.
Atwater, to his credit, literally repented on his deathbed for his conduct in, as he had put it “Strip(ping) the bark off that little bastard”.
Oh, yes, Roger Ailes is the head of Fox News now. Speculation about whether or not he really changed jobs at all would be superfluous, of course.
Actually, come to think of it, King, though a hard-core conservative, was still nominally a Democrat. My apologies. My clearest memory of him is the manager of his successful campaign to unseat Dukakis in the primary later saying “We put all the hate groups into a pot and let it boil.”
Typical Democrat response, of course. You guys can’t ever just lose an election. There always has to be a sinister figure you can pin the blame on.
Before Rove there was Ailes and Atwater. Before them you were blaming George Will and a missing campaign book.
My thesis is that there was no way Dukakis could have won in 1988, just as Mondale and McGovern similarly had no chance. Does anyone really think he had any kind of shot at all? I’d love to hear the reasons why.
Typical *Republican * response, of course. You can’t ever admit to engaging in slime, much less enjoying it. :rolleyes: There’s certainly no point in asking you to acknowledge any responsibility for its effects on delegitimizing even the resulting Republican administrations.
Now what about Atwater’s admission and request for forgiveness? Can you explain that, or incorporate it into your bilateral worldview, at all? Do the ends justify *any * means at all?
Shodan, fyi, Gore never mentioned Horton’s name or race. But it’s perhaps a positive sign that you’re not (this time) accusing him of playing the race card, the way Ailes and Atwater most clearly did.
Actually I think Bush was riding on Ronnie’s coattails. That helped Bush as much as the Horton thing did.
But the Horton thing does illustrate the Republican strategy for elections. A focus group of undecided voters were shown ads. The ads weren’t swaying them. Then they were shown the WH ad and that swayed quite a few of the voters. So they chose to focus on this one thing. Something that really wasn’t important nor would it effect how he would be as a president. Winning was the only thing that mattered. Not having the best ideas to run the country, or even talking about your ideas to run the country.
Well, Lee Atwater had a good bit to atone for, by all accounts. Staring death in the face might make him embrace the religion he was raised in, and whose ideals he often didn’t come close to meeting.
I wish the issue had been explored in a less inflammatory way, myself.
Neverless, this doesn’t change my thesis one bit. Dukakis simply wasn’t going to win in 1988, because Americans were living in prosperity, felt secure on the international front, and remembered well a Democratic administration when these two large things were not attended to well.
Again I have to ask, do you have any indications that Americans and voters felt differently than this, then?
Well, Dukakis had a lot better chance than either Mondale or McGovern. Could he have won? I don’t know. Bush was in a good position, but Dukakis did make a bunch of mistakes. He could have hit Bush harder on Iran-Contra and the shaky economy. His big problem, though, was that he didn’t really have much in the way of charisma, I don’t think. He wasn’t inspiring, and while Bush wasn’t all that inspiring either, he at least could bask in the reflection of Reagan.