ASHINGTON — This is not the first time Senator John Kerry's advisers have heard the guns of August.Posted on 08/28/2004 1:51:06 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
ASHINGTON — This is not the first time Senator John Kerry's advisers have heard the guns of August.
Sixteen years ago, several of them were working for Michael S. Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, who began the month with a substantial lead in the polls, only to see it disappear under a steady onslaught from the campaign of Vice President Bush, an onslaught aided by rumors and third-party attacks. Democrats bitterly complained that these outside attacks - including a baseless charge that Kitty Dukakis had once burned an American flag - were guided by an "invisible hand," as the late Kirk O'Donnell, a senior adviser to Mr. Dukakis, put it. The Bush campaign denied any involvement.
It was a searing experience, which helped forge the rapid-response Clinton campaign of 1992 - and helps explain the Kerry campaign's furious reaction to the attacks of a group of Swift boat veterans. The memory "really added to the decision-making on how to engage these kinds of scurrilous attacks," said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry and a Dukakis veteran. Mr. Dukakis himself said, in an interview, "This time, having learned from '88, nobody is going to sit around and let it happen."
Republicans point out that they are not the sole practitioners of political hardball. In fact, Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, has spent much of the year denouncing what he calls "political hate speech" by the Democrats.
It is all part of the seemingly endless reaction to 1988 - in retrospect, the first take-no-prisoners presidential campaign of the modern era. And for the Democrats it was a humiliating mismatch.
"You had a bunch of policy operatives who wanted to debate policy differences against Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and the some of the toughest gunfighters we had on our side," said Ed Rollins, a veteran Republican strategist, describing the Dukakis campaign of 1988.
"Not this time," Mr. Rollins added. "Both sides are prepared to throw hand grenades and have been doing it for a long time."
As Mr. Dukakis has long acknowledged, he contributed to his August slide. Perhaps lulled by his 17-point edge in the polls after the Democratic convention, he spent much of the month in his home state and was slow to react when the charges started coming that he was soft on crime and insufficiently patriotic.
The Bush campaign portrayed Mr. Dukakis as a Massachusetts liberal who let criminals out on weekend furloughs and refused to require schoolchildren to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The Democrats campaign defended the policies - the furlough program had had bipartisan support, the policy on the pledge was the result of a Massachusetts court decision - but the legalistic responses were no match for the powerful imagery and rough attacks of the Republicans.
Charles Black, a senior Republican strategist who was close to Mr. Atwater, is one of many Republicans who argue that those issues were fair game, and that Mr. Dukakis was defeated not because of his tactical failures but because voters rejected his beliefs. "There's a big myth about the '88 election, that Dukakis was attacked and he did not respond," Mr. Black said.
"Lee figured out early on that Dukakis was what we used to call an honest liberal. That he would defend his positions on things like the death penalty. He did respond - but his answers put him outside the mainstream."
Mr. Bush recited the Pledge of Allegiance on the campaign trail and asked if Mr. Dukakis had a "problem" with it; Republicans constantly mocked the Massachusetts governor as a "card-carrying member of the A.C.L.U." An independent group ran television commercials showing a police photograph of Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who brutally attacked a Maryland couple after escaping while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.
At the same time, the Dukakis campaign was also scrambling to deal with a shadowy wave of rumors that seemed intended to raise doubts about a candidate who was still largely unknown. "You're fighting an invisible enemy as much as anything," said Susan Estrich, the Dukakis campaign manager, now a law professor at the University of Southern California.
One damaging rumor, that Mr. Dukakis had undergone psychiatric treatment, was pushed onto the front page when President Ronald Reagan was asked about it and joked that he didn't want to pick on "an invalid." Mr. Dukakis's advisers said later that he dropped 8 points in the polls after that report.
The campaign held a news conference with the candidate's doctor and released his medical records, all knocking down the story, but Ms. Estrich recalls, "The problem with rumors is the more you answer them, the more play they get."
The attacks never let up. The night before the election, as Mr. Dukakis flew back to Boston to await what was then a certain defeat, he stopped in Des Moines to refuel and speak to a sad crowd of Democrats. Even then, young Bush supporters turned out to chant the Pledge of Allegiance and shout, "Liberal! Liberal! Liberal!" Mr. Dukakis lost 40 states.
The rough lessons of 1988 took hold: Respond, hit back, leave no charge unanswered. Another lesson, which often gets lost, is that the way a campaign is conducted makes a difference. The senior Mr. Bush took office in January 1989 and immediately tried to strike a bipartisan, conciliatory tone. But the Democratic bitterness endured, and made the task of governing all the harder.
The Kerry campaign's way of fighting against the Swifties is to keep trying to blame it on Bush. If we let them keep that up, it will take hold with some of the sheeple.
We can't let that happen. We've got to continually fight this.
You sir, are a loser. You will go down in history as the man who made Dukakis look good.
ROFLMAO
Democrats bitterly complained that these outside attacks - including a baseless charge that Kitty Dukakis had once burned an American flag - were guided by an "invisible hand...."
"You're fighting an invisible enemy as much as anything," said Susan Estrich, the Dukakis campaign manager, now a law professor at the University of Southern California.
I see dead programs and tax cuts a growing economy and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and the evil Newt and invisible enemies and free countries ... Help me I'm melting!
There's that word again ....
Don't forget the Walsh indictments RIGHT before the 1992 election. Of course the NYT "forgot" this.
I couldn't believe they didn't mention the "I'm a dork in a tank" picture. That picture, and the famous question of the death penalty for someone who murdered his wife, are what sealed Dukakis' fate. Period.
Did Gore Hatch Horton?
Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, Nov. 1, 1999, at 8:06 AM PT
snip......
Gore did ask Dukakis, in a debate right before the 1988 New York primary, about "weekend passes for convicted criminals." Here is how Sidney Blumenthal, now a Clinton White House aide but then a reporter for the Washington Post, wrote it up a few months later:
An uncomfortable Dukakis, after dispassionately reciting statistics, conceded that the Massachusetts furlough program for murderers sentenced to life imprisonment had been canceled.
The issue did not take for Gore, but the exchange attracted the interest of Jim Pinkerton, the research director for the then flailing Bush campaign. "That's the first time I paid attention," said Pinkerton. "I thought to myself, 'This is incredible' ...It totally fell into our lap."
In reviewing this history, it's important to make some crucial distinctions. Gore never mentioned that Horton was black; indeed, he never mentioned Horton by name. He merely drew attention, correctly, to the damaging fact that Dukakis had tolerated a furlough program for especially violent criminals in his state even after a horrific incident strongly suggested this was a bad policy. It's conceivable, of course, that Gore was warming up for more explicit and racially tinged use of Horton's story later in the primary fight. But that would have been uncharacteristic of him. In any event, Gore dropped out of the race shortly after the debate.
Thanks for the reply
What they don't mention is that one of the things that doomed Dukakis was his answer to Bernard Shaw's question about how Dukakis would react if his wife were raped and murdered. That was the very first question at that debate, and it sealed his fate.
One other thing -- if Dukakis was so unfairly attacked, then why did the Kerry campaign not allow him to participate in the DNC in his own hometown?
I was quite young, but I seem to recall the campaigns of 1960 and 1964 being pretty brutal--the first with wholesale voter fraud (if Nixon would have been Algore, he'd have had no qualms about suing); the second painting Goldwater as a maniac just itching to pull the nuclear trigger.
Democratic candidate John Kerry, who, by the way, was Dukakis' Lieutenant
Governor in liberal Massachusetts issued this statement today:
"Bush made a statement, and I'm supposed to respond? Can't you see I'm too busy
playing with my windsurf? Sure, they'll say I take too much vacation for a serious
candidate, but get Edwards to deliver a sound bite for me? What's he done recently?"
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