A piece of this is that the ad is quite weak as a political argument, but very strong as a piece of racist demagoguery. It is not rational to reject a furlough program based on the conduct of a single individual. It’s like saying that having an Army is a bad idea because of Abu Ghraib. 45 states and the federal government had furlough programs, so if Willie Horton was the sole similarly severe consequence of furlough–as **Bricker **posits–then that would be quite an endorsement of the program.
So the choice to demagogue this particular issue and this particular person was made for a reason, and Lee Atwater has basically explained what that reason was.
They chose the crime of a black man who raped a white woman, calling him “Willie” (not his actual nickname). There were a number of ads about the furlough program, but the only one that broke through was the one featuring Mr. Horton’s mug shot.
Notably, at the time that ad was so controversial that Bush eventually had to distance himself from it and claim (correctly) that his campaign had nothing to do with it. The fact that the modern GOP would now defend it says a lot about the drift of the Grand 'Ol Party.
In another state a few years earlier, a prisoner murdered someone while out on furlough. The pinko liberal governor responded that “more than 20,000 already have these passes and this was the only case of this kind.” He noted that his state was “leading the nation in rehabilitation” but that “obviously you can’t be perfect.” And, indeed, that governor became the only one in modern times in his state to have the prison population decline during his tenure.
Showing a photo of the bad guy is pretty common and unremarkable. Tim McVeigh, Charles Manson, basically any sensationalist story shows a photo of the perpetrator. That they used a mug shot to me is also unremarkable. It portrays him as a criminal because all criminals will have mugshots.
I’m sure the architects of the ad thought the photo and story were scary. It was meant to be an evocative ad. And yes, I’m sure it hit a nerve with those who had racist beliefs. But so what? I tend to think racist actions are those that are motivated by false ideas about race - persons of race xyz have abc characteristic when in fact that’s not true. If it is a true statement about a person that overlaps with racial implications that should be okay.
If Jesse Jackson was running against Dukakis and ran the exact same ad criticizing the furlough program, would that also be racist? Because it seems like the problem is not the ad, but the authors of it. The ad was a pretty effective criticism of the furlough program.
I actually don’t remember the sentiment at the time. I was not yet a teenager.
I don’t know nor do I care if the makers of the ad have racist beliefs. But they were political professionals working for the party that had been banking on support from racist white people since the civil rights movement. It’s not credible to me that part of their motivation for making this ad and using that photo wasn’t to appeal to the fears of racist white people.
To me, deliberately trying to appeal to racist fears (a la George Wallace) is as bad as ideological racism. You may feel differently.
It’s not his literal mug shot. It is a photo taken of him after he got out of a stint in solitary.
As for whether it would be racist if someone else made it: yes, for the reasons I gave. You would only make those selections if your intention was to make an ad that played on race-related fears.
As it happens, I don’t think the guy who made the ad is particularly racist. He just wanted to win.
I also heard that guy started the destruction of traditional marriage in America by signing the first no-fault divorce law. Whatever happened to that liberal freak, anyway? I’d’a thought by now there’d be t-shirts everywhere with his face next to Che Guevara’s.
You were not alone! Hendrik Hertzberg (then at the New Republic) did a column at the time titled “And What If…?” where he imagines Dukakis having a better debate all-round (it begins with the rape-murder question and goes on from there).
Can’t find it online except behind paywalls, but it’s in Hertzberg’s excellent essay collection titled Politics. Excerpt:
IIRC he was a burglar, but there were lots of other furlough murders. I think even Reagan had others. The idea is that while some people will commit crimes on furlough, fewer people getting out of prison will recidivate because they will be better prepared to re-enter society. It’s a good theory, and was probably true. But obviously crime hysteria ended that. In 2016, recidivism rates are worse than ever.
Do you think the Horton ad would have been less effective if he had been in prison for burglary instead?
To be clear, I’m not arguing that the ad was made by racists. I’m happy to stipulate that they had no motive beyond, “Make sure Dukakis loses.” But here we are, thirty years later, and Republicans are still having to explain why the ad wasn’t racist. Meanwhile, African-American support for Republican presidential candidates hasn’t broken 10% in almost two decades.
Advertising is about perception, not reality. The reality was that Willie Horton by himself didn’t prove that there was anything really wrong with the furlough program, but it created the perception that it was. The reality may have been that the Republican party wasn’t racist in 1988 - but that ad helped create the perception that it was. At a certain point, the Republican party is going to need to realize that a thirty second ad that you spend thirty years defending as “not racist,” isn’t actually a good allocation of resources, or a viable long-term plan for political relevancy.
Unfortunately, it looks like that point was back in 2008.
The charge that Republicans are racist is an easy one to make, and indeed what you’ve written shows that: an ad you stipulate was not made with racist motives is nonetheless criticized as racist.
So it seems to me that the only reason a non-racist does not make the ad is that reasoning: “The best possible person to show to make our point happens to be a black man; if we use his face we will open ourselves to baseless charges of racism. WE will therefore not use his case.”
They didn’t have to use his face, or they didn’t have to use the scariest photo they could find – the one the creator of the ad said made him look like “an animal”. Those were choices they made. I’m not certain they made those choices to appeal to racist fears, but I think that’s the most likely explanation.
You’re a political strategist for the Republican party. One of your guys makes this ad, and you show this ad to two focus groups. One focus group says, “That furlough program sounds like a bad idea!” The other group says, “That ads really playing up the idea that black people are scary criminals.” Remember, as a political strategist, your job is not to decide which group has the strongest argument. Your job is to decide which of these groups you want your political party to cater to. Do you:
Rework the ad until you’ve got one that both groups respond positively to, even if this might mean giving up on the whole project as unworkable.
Disregard the second group’s concern and run the ad as-is?
If you go with option 2, do you expect the people in the second group to be more or less likely to vote for you? And if, over the course of many, many election cycles, in many similar match ups, you routinely choose to disregard the second focus group’s concerns, do you think it’s unfair that your political group gain a reputation as, at best, being disinterested in the concerns and well-being of the people in that group?
Missed the edit window. According to wikipedia, Horton was serving a life sentence w/o the possibility of parole. In that case, there is no concern about what he might or might not do when he gets out of prison.
I’m pretty torn on this one actually. It’s difficult to overcome my pragmatic view that there are sufficient race neutral factors in choosing this ad that lead me to believe it’s not racist, and so those accusations are not very persuasive.
At the same time, I think Miller’s point is a good one. if the outcome is undesirable, then it is incumbent on the creators of the ad to take that into account. The criticism wouldn’t be racism per se, but bad optics?
Overall I don’t think it’s nearly as good an example as many of the others in the film. The overlay with Trump talking about roughing up people at his rallies juxtaposed with the footage from the civil rights movement of people turning the other cheek while enduring what Trump was talking about was brilliant. The parts about Bill Clinton were a strong indictment. It’s just this one part about the Horton ad that rang hollow.
And why did so many of the interviews use a side angle camera view? That took me out of it a bit, not sure what the filmmaker was going for there. The parts that did not resonate with me as much as others were when the film seemed to try and excuse actual unlawful behavior. I’m completely against mass incarceration, I want drug laws eliminated, and much few things to carry prison sentences. But I simultaneously want serious and actual crimes to be punished extremely harshly. That view isn’t represented well in the film so anytime it veered towards excusing actual crime I would second guess the motives. But like I said, overall I think it was a great documentary and would hope it would be seen very widely.
Some facts on the matter: Willie Horton committed a heinous murder and was sentenced to life without parole. He should have spent the rest of his imprisoned.
He walked away from the work release program. When on the run,s Willie Horton broke into a couple’s house, beat the man, raped the woman, beat the man again and told him he was going to kill him after he finished raping the woman again. The man escaped, and Horton stole his gun and car, ready to find and kill the man.
Dukakis has refused several times to meet with the couple Horton terrorized and would have killed.
Would these facts have been different if Horton were white?