No, and that’s the fucking point. Bush did NOT run the revolving door ad until the “independent” Willie Horton ad had already alerted every person in the nation that Dukakis had presided over a furlough system that released a scary black man who then killed a nice white suburban couple. He didn’t create the context, he just shamefully capitalized on it.
How many layers of naive disingenuousness are wrapped in this question?
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Had racism never existed-- indeed if polititians had never thought to use race to gain votes-- and the Bush supporters had run their Willie Horton ad, would the Willie Horton ad “play on race”?
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If so, why?
I mean honestly: an ad that shows a criminal raping a woman while on furlough doesn’t play on race. It suggests that your opponent enacted laws that your own party enacted, but it doesn’t play on race.
minty: Please. The “soft on crime” stick is one the Republicans have been using to whack Democrats (sometimes deservedly, sometimes not) for decades. That “revolving door” ad is a very effective ad, even without the prior Horton ad.
What you seem to be saying is, it’s shameful for a candidate to use an effective ad when some yahoo unconnected to his campaign has previously used a different offensive ad to promote his candidacy. Gee, interesting. By that standard, the Dems could run “pro-Republican” ads that are grossly offensive, then charge the Republicans with “capitalizing” on that offensiveness when they run ads that deal with the same issues.
Biggirl: You’re running off the reservation. I agree that the Horton ad was race-baiting. It was wrong of the group that ran it to do so.
But to suggest that the “revolving door” ad was racist is silly. How, exactly, can you say that? The Bush campaign wanted to paint Dukakis as soft on crime, and wanted to use the furlough program as an illustration. How would you suggest they go about doing that without tripping charges of race-baiting?
Like I said earlier, it may well have been silly on substantive grounds to make the furlough program an issue (as wring deftly points out). But it certainly wasn’t racist to make it an issue.
Dewey is talking about the “revolving door” ad. It is different from the Willie Horton ad. The “revolving door” ad does mention the furlough policy, but never shows or mentions Willie Horton, nor any other black person.
I don’t think it plays on race, but it does play on the Willie Horton ad. Anyone who saw the first ad would be reminded of it. Sort of like a lawyer who makes an outragous comment in court. It may be striken from the record but he can hint at it many times later, reminding the jury about what he said.
I know which ad he’s talking about. I was trying to point out that taking the context out of the ad does not remove the intent. If it plays on the Willie Horton ad, it is playing on race.
The lawyer who makes an outrages statement in court and then keep reminding the jury of the stricken statement is using that stricken statement over and over again while disingenuously following the judges orders.
Again, Biggirl, I’ll reiterate: you (hypothetically) are a media consultant on the Bush '88 campaign. You have been asked to craft a campaign ad to paint Dukakis as soft on crime, and to be sure the furlough program is included as a prominent example. What ad do you craft, post-Willie Horton, that (1) makes the point the campaign wishes to make, while (2) not exposing the campaign to charges of (in your view) race-baiting?
I don’t think you can do it, which shows how ridiculous the charge is. What you’re basically saying is that, solely because of the obnoxious ad run by an unaffiliated group, the Bush campaign must abandon the furlough issue or face being charged with race-baiting. And that is a ludicrous standard for any campaign.
The Dukakis administration’s decision to furlough a murderer serving a life sentence was incredibly stupid. It absolutely deserved to be a campaign issue, since it was a result of a particular Dukakis policy.
As I understand it, the supposed point of a furlough is to help a prisoner gradually adapt to life outside prison. There’s no point at all in furloughing someone who will never be released. And, there are major risks, as we unfortunately saw.
If Bush had furloughed one of James Byrd’s killers, and that killer had committed another murder, that would have been roughly comparable.
BTW the NAACP James Byrd ad was disingenuous on more than one level. It implied that Bush’s policy didn’t favor the highest level of punishment for the killers, which was a falsehood. That was a particularly awful misrepresentation, because it tended to promote racism.
On a level of pure logic, there was no sense at all to the NAACP ad. Texas’s hate crime law already covered race. Bush resisted extending it to sexual preference.
Also, the penalty for murder is already as great or greater than the penalty for hate crime.
Step 1: Tell the candidate to denounce the “independent” Willie Horton ad, in unequivocal terms.
Step 2: Tell the candidate to stop talking about Willie Horton–by name–in his campaign stump speech.
Step 3: Tell the candidate that when the media brings up the question of Willie Horton, he should strongly reiterate that race has nothing to do with the issue of [Republican-implemented] prison furloughs.
Step 4: Run the revolving door ad, confident that your repeated statements have established that you’re not sucking up to the quasi-racist scumbag vote.
Of course, the Bush campaign skipped straight to step #4, and omitted the dependent clause entirely.
Minty, basic fairness should dictate that no candidate should have to bend over backwards to “establish they aren’t sucking up to the quasi-racist scumbag vote.” There should be a presumption that any given candidate isn’t racist and doesn’t harbor racist sympathies, a presumption that only gives way on reasonable evidence to the contrary.
The Bush campaign asked that the Horton ad be pulled immediately after it was shown for the first time. It was not shown again. That’s a good indication that they didn’t want to be associated with that kind of thing.
About the only semi-legit criticism you list above is that Bush used the name “Willie Horton” in some of his stump speeches. But the Horton case was well-known even before the infamous ad – Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen had written about it in July 1988 – and it illustrated the “soft on crime” point that the Bush campaign was trying to make. Why is it race-baiting to use an anecdote just because some yahoos have put that anecdote to nefarious ends? If the infamous TV spot had never run, would it still be race-baiting if Bush used the Horton story in his stump speeches (Bush didn’t mention Horton’s race in those speeches, after all)? Why should the tail wag the dog?
And, I might note, you don’t require this kind of self-flagellation from the Democrats. Should the Dems have to loudly repudiate the NAACP ad or the church burning ad to demonstrate they aren’t “sucking up to the quasi-racist scumbag vote”? Or is that kind of sucking up OK if the quasi-racists happen to be black?
:smack:
What part of “it was a policy that was implemented by Dukakis’s predecessor” do you not fucking understand???
When your anecdote has been co-opted by bigots, you look like a bigot–and appeal to the bigots–by continuing to use the anecdote.
That is, to put it mildly, a crock.
First of all, it’s just wrong. Your standard gives an awful lot of power to bigots: they can, simply by making a public statement, apparently take arguments or even whole issues off the table.
Second, Willie Horton had hardly been “co-opted” in a significant way. The ad ran once. ONCE. The ads later noteriety resulted from media hysterics, not repeated public viewings of the ad. And again, the Willie Horton case was hardly unknown prior to the infamous ad; as noted, Richard Cohen and others had written about it.
The real problem with the Willie Horton ad isn’t that it talks about the Horton case. That’s a legitimate anecdote to illustrate a campaign issue. The problem with the ad is the picture of Horton that accompanied it: the photo was clearly included to touch emotional buttons regarding race.
The Bush campaign didn’t rely on Horton’s race when they used that case to make a point about the Dukakis furlough program. They never mentioned it, much less used the photo in the NSPAC ad. It is incredibly unfair to saddle them with responsibility for the misconduct of an unrelated third party.
And it’s telling that you consider Bush’s mere utterance of the name “Willie Horton” in some speeches makes him “look bigoted,” but consider the NAACP ad (and, I’d guess, the “church burning” ads as well) to be merely “crude and stupid.” The latter two can at least be judged strictly on their own content, while the former requires some connect-the-dots ridiculousness. Nice double standard.
Just because a predecessor implemented the program doesn’t excuse Dukakis for continuing it. As Governor, he had the power to end it. He (or his administration) made a bad decision to continue it. His administrators also had the power to choose not to furlough this particular prisoner. They made a bad decision and deserved to get dinged for it.
While I could well be mistaken (it has been known to happen), I think that the Willie Horton ad ran for several weeks in Iowa. When the “revolving door” ad showed up there was no doubt in my mind what the reference was. It was a scurrilous ad. It was made all the worse by the Bush campaign staff’s feeble attempt to distance them selves from Willy Horton while at the same time embracing it with the follow up “revolving door” ad.
As far as ** December’s** insistence that Willy was Dukakis’s problem and that the ad was fair–the same line of thinking makes the President responsible for the September 11 catastrophe because it was, in hindsight, foreseeable, and facilitated by long standing policies which, although implemented by low level government employees, could have been changed by the President. I don’t know of anyone who is making that argument, but I think that the analogy is fair. I both situations, no system is fool proof. Sooner or later something will fall through the crack. It was unfair to jump Gov. Dukakis with a flaw in a system that had been in place for some time, had worked reasonably well and was widely used in other States. It was unfair to imply that Dukakis had personal knowledge of Horton and personally approved his furlough. I am sure however that having overlooked these minor points, the people putting the ad together did not go out hunting for the scariest looking Black guy they could find who had done as reprehensible a crime as could be imagined. Surely the PAC that thought up the Willy Horton ad and financed it (without the documented knowledge of the Bush Campaign) had no intention of scaring all the little old ladies of Iowa out of their wits. It was, I am sure, a gentle reminder that they better check under their beds if Dukakis became President, and no more.
Spavined Gelding: According to the site provided by Minty on page 1 of this thread, the ad only ran once:
(my emphasis)
Also, I agree that your analogy to September 11 is apt, but disagree with your conclusion. I think it would be perfectly legitimate and within the ordinary scope of hardball political campaigning to try to saddle the Bush administration with intelligence failures for September 11. I don’t think any candidate worth his salt would actually do it, though – I think such an ad would probably offend more prospective voters than it would win over. But if a campaign thinks that would be an effective tactic, I have no problem with them taking that gamble. Caveat candidator.
(N.B.: I’m not saying that such an ad would represent a fair criticism of Bush, and above I’m not saying that the furlough ads represent a fair criticism of Dukakis. I’m just saying it’s legitimate campaigning. Electioneering is not the realm of rigorous logical argument, after all. If we expected every ad to be 100% fair in some cosmic sense, we’d be stuck with really boring campaigns. :))
May I take a moment to suggest that really boring campaigns, those coducted with all the flash and sizzle of a 6 month job interview, devoid of television campaigns and debate analysis from airheads…
Sounds really good to me, tell you the truth.