Word: sasso
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...HUNDREDS of articles on the passing of anti-Biden tapes to The New York Times, The DesMoines Register, and the NBC Nightly News by John Sasso, present one of two views of the former Dukakis campaign manager's actions. Either Sasso was right to have made an issue out of Biden's appropriation of a Neil Kinnock speech or he was wrong...
Both views depend on the same faulty premise: that Sasso made an issue out of Biden's actions. In reality, Sasso's revealing the Delaware Senator as a political Rich Little was intended to make a scandal...
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times, in extended news analyses, have come down squarely on Sasso's side. There are essentially two reasons offered for supporting Sasso: the first is that in political campaigns, like love and war, all is fair. The second is that Sasso was pointing out what Biden was indeed doing. Sasso was slinging truth...
What happened was that Campaign Manager John Sasso phoned Dukakis in Iowa Sept. 27 to warn him that a story in the forthcoming edition of TIME identified the Dukakis campaign as the source of the video. Dukakis somewhat cryptically told Sasso to "check out" the story. But the Governor, who likes to portray himself as a hands-on manager who pays close attention to detail, overlooked one rather salient question. By his own account, he never asked Sasso if the story was true...
...example, Dukakis has derided Ronald Reagan for being dangerously unaware of what the White House staff was doing during the Iran-contra affair, yet in the first crisis of his campaign, the Governor appeared ignorant of what his own campaign staff had been up to. If Dukakis had fired Sasso immediately, he might have looked decisive; if he had kept Sasso on, he might have got credit for gritty determination. Instead, he merely looked like a waverer who in the end bowed to pressure from political supporters and campaign contributors...