Word: hortons
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...political discourse has been empty, but not for a lack of "issues." There are always issues and we had them, ephemeral and inflated though they might have been. Lest we forget, we had the "Pledge issue," the "National Guard issue," a national debate over who was worse, Willie Horton or General Noriega, and other earth-shaking questions. All of them were centered around the nominees, rather than the views and policies they represented, and every one was hatched and nurtured in a TV studio...
...Bush stressed throughout his campaign that America was separated by a "Great Divide." His cries for a mainstream mandate are in many ways similar to Nixon's own faith in a silent majority. Nixon won on a "law-and-order" platform, and George Bush did the same. The Willie Horton case, brought to you courtesy of Roger Ailes, did matter. Fully three times as many Americans said they voted based on fears of crime than anxiety over relations between the superpowers...
...fear of crime is, to be sure, deeply implanted among Americans of all races. No group is more victimized by street thugs than the law-abiding citizens of the ghetto. Doubtless the G.O.P. would have exploited Dukakis' furlough policy if Horton were white. Yet the glee with which Bush's campaign team leaped upon the Horton affair belies its denials that it intended to tweak white prejudices. In Horton, Bush's staff found a potent symbolic twofer: a means by which to appeal to the legitimate issue of crime while simultaneously stirring racial fears...
More troubling was the fact that both the print and broadcast press frequently failed to point out the distortions in how the candidates painted each other's records. For instance, while many news organizations reported ! Bush's charge that Massachusetts furloughed a first-degree murderer named Willie Horton, who proceeded to rape a woman while on leave, few pointed out that the program had been instituted under a previous Republican Governor and that many states, including California under Governor Ronald Reagan, had similar furlough programs. Says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, author of a history of campaign advertising, of the Bush spots...
...substance what cold pizza is to a balanced breakfast. Think of the words and phrases that 18 months of nonstop electioneering have underlined in the political lexicon: Monkey Business, the character issue, attack videos, plagiarism, wimp, handlers, sound bites, flag factories, tank ride, negative spots, the A.C.L.U., Willie Horton and likability. Match them with all the pressing national concerns that were never seriously discussed: from the Japanese economic challenge to the plight of the underclass. As the voters trudge off to the polls with all the enthusiasm of dental patients, one can almost hear their collective lament: "What has America...