Word: horton
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...lines, the Dukakis camp, nomination assured, worried about Jesse Jackson's reaction and the Veep selection. Distracted by these pressing events, campaign manager Susan Estrich, an intense Harvard law professor, failed to concoct a coordinated offensive and defensive plan for the fall. "Everybody knew what was coming on Willie Horton and the Pledge," said a consultant who provided advice at the time. But Dukakis and Estrich insisted on ignoring the mounting attacks. Instead of taking the fight to Bush, Dukakis spent precious days in distant corners of Massachusetts playing Governor. He announced a $200,000 local grant, visited an apple...
When Bush finally started firing away on Horton and on Dukakis' veto of a 1977 bill requiring teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance each day, Dukakis' "strategy of shrugging off attacks suddenly stopped looking presidential and started looking weak," says a top aide. Estrich dismissed the potency of patriotism as an issue. "If Bush thinks he's going to get anywhere with this Pledge stuff, he's crazy," she told an adviser. "We've got this Supreme Court decision." That was the problem. Months after Bush first raised the issue, Dukakis finally responded: "If the Vice President is saying...
...meanness of George Bush's attacks coupled with the ineptitude of Michael Dukakis' campaign tends to obscure an important truth for the Democrats: the party is still doing penance for the 1960s. The code words like Willie Horton, the Pledge of Allegiance and the A.C.L.U., which the Republicans used to fuel the politics of resentment, all come out of Richard Nixon's playbook. In the minds of too many voters, the Democrats are still the party of militant blacks, meddlesome social workers, uppity feminists and draft-card-burning protesters. Such images not only are unfair but also reflect some...
Roger Ailes, Bush's media adviser, is credited with (or blamed for) inventing the Pledge of Allegiance issue, the Willie Horton scare, the A.C.L.U. attacks. All were leftovers from the Robertson campaign. Bush had been criticized as a "lapdog" early in 1987 when he courted the religious right, calling himself a "born again" Christian. It was assumed that he had to undergo these rituals, but that he would move to the center after surviving the Kemp challenge. What Ailes and his campaign allies did was take the Robertson base and build on it, incorporating all its major themes...
...convincing Bush went, was the fact that Dukakis was being deceptive about his past, trying to deny his liberalism, to mask the menace to the nation presented by his softness on crime and defense. If Ailes could make that case to Bush, then the Pledge issue, the Horton horror stories, the A.C.L.U. membership (clashing with Dukakis' nonideological pose), would make sense to Bush as defensive actions against the broad assault of Dukakis...