Posted on 08/22/2007 8:38:31 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Michael Dukakis has seen this script before: a Republican administration besieged by scandal and running out the clock on its second term, while wide-eyed Democrats confidently lick their chops, knowing there’s no way in hell voters will reward the G.O.P. with four more years in the White House.
It was around this very moment 20 years ago, the summer when Oliver North told Congress he was “authorized to do everything that I did” and Reagan fatigue took hold, that Mr. Dukakis, then the 53-year-old governor of Massachusetts, emerged at the head of a crowded Democratic presidential pack. By the time he was formally nominated in Atlanta the following July, he’d opened a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush.
“I can handle this guy,” Mr. Dukakis supposedly replied around that time when John Sasso, his consultant in exile, asked to return to the campaign. “You worry about the first 100 days.”
So you can understand why the numerous harbingers of a triumphant 2008 for Democrats—George W. Bush’s Nixonian approval ratings, polls that show voters favoring a Democratic White House candidate by double-digit margins, the electorate’s historical aversion to three-term rule by one party—haven’t prompted Mr. Dukakis to begin planning his trip to the 2009 inaugural celebration.
“We’re not going to outspend the other guys,” he said during an interview in his modest office in the political science department at Northeastern University, where he was the first to arrive (at 7:30 a.m.) on a recent midsummer morning. “We’re probably not going to outstrategize them. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we’ll be back in Bush-land again.”
Since his fall collapse was made official on Nov. 8, 1988—an eight-point, 426-to-112 electoral-vote loss to George H.W. Bush—Democrats have held up Mr. Dukakis’ general election campaign as a case study in the perils of not hitting back. In 1992, Bill Clinton, with his rapid response team and pitch-perfect shaming of Mr. Bush in their first debate, showed he’d learned the lesson; in 2004, John Kerry showed that he’d forgotten it.
But while Mr. Dukakis readily indicts himself for fatally ignoring the 1988 version of Swift-Boating—the G.O.P.’s success with Willie Horton, he said, “was my own damn fault; no one else’s”—he worries that his party has oversimplified the lesson of his defeat, and of Mr. Kerry’s and Al Gore’s, too. And if Democrats don’t learn the right lesson soon, he fears they’ll be locked out of the White House for a third straight time in 2008—no matter how rosy the electoral math now looks.
“We have to organize every damn precinct in the United States of America—all 185,000,” Mr. Dukakis said. “I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. I didn’t do it after the primary [in 1988]. Don’t ask me why, because that’s the way I got myself elected from the time I was running for town meeting in Brookline to the time I ran for governor.”
And when he talks about organizing, he doesn’t mean the legions of eager college students—think the orange-hat-clad “Perfect Storm” that Howard Dean sought to rain down on Iowa in 2004—who are shipped off to key states for crunch-time grunt work. He also doesn’t mean limiting the outreach to “likely” Democratic voters, because—especially after seven years of George W. Bush—“there are huge numbers of disaffected Republicans out there. Who says they won’t vote for us?”
“I’m talking about every precinct,” he said, “with a precinct captain and six block-captains that make personal contact with every single voting household. And I mean starting a year in advance. I’m not talking about parachuting in with two weeks to go. That’s baloney. And these people are people who’ve got to be from the precinct, of the precinct, look like the precinct and talk like the precinct.”
The way he tells it, this was the missing ingredient in his 1988 effort—a powerful and utterly economical tool that, if properly deployed, could have blunted the Bush campaign’s character-assassination-by-paid-media, and one that could spare Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama his ultimate fate.
True to his technocratic roots, Mr. Dukakis has the idea of replicating, on every street, avenue, and rural route in the country, the kind of personal relationships that once powered big-city political machines—with precinct captains calling on their neighbors every few weeks, asking them about their concerns, talking up their candidate and following up on any questions they might have. Mr. Dukakis’ vision is rooted in good government—making sure, for instance, that a neighbor’s concerns about school vouchers are satisfactorily addressed.
That kind of personalized operation early on, Mr. Dukakis believes, can keep voters from believing the worst when the Willie Horton and Swift Boat campaigns begin.
“There’s a chemistry there, which is hard to describe unless you’ve done it,” he said. “Otherwise, it permits your opponent to paint you as something you aren’t. It happened to me. It happened to Kerry. They tried to do it to Clinton. They’ll try to do it to anybody.”
Here’s how Mr. Dukakis broke down the struggle that Mr. Kerry—Mr. Dukakis’ lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1985—faced three years ago.
“You never had a sense that people felt personally connected to the guy, right? Had he had that kind of operation going nationally, there would have been a much stronger feeling of personal connection. Why? Because average folks in the neighborhood are out pushing him.”
Mr. Dukakis says he pleaded with Mr. Kerry to build a meaningful precinct-based organization in 2004, but couldn’t break through. Now he’s working informally with the Democratic National Committee, where Chairman Howard Dean—he of the 50-state strategy—is much more receptive to the concept. But so far, Mr. Dukakis said, none of the 2008 Democrats seem serious about his brand of organizing.
“The guy who ought to be doing it, above any of them, is Obama, because he’s probably got 300,000 contributors,” he notes. “Every one of those people, as soon as the contribution comes in: ‘Thank you and will you be a precinct captain?’ Or, ‘Thank you, this guy is your precinct captain—will you be one of his block captains?’”
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
We are that organized in San Diego—for a true conservative, there would be a force quite strong.
You may be right. I have been trying to figure the numbers out for a while. Certainly puts to rest (for a while) that the country had swung to the left again. That doesn’t mean they will not swing back again.
The Democratic campaign committee has probably not missed that either. That is the reason the squeaky voices have dropped in the last couple of months. Even the press has started to run some subtle pieces not entirely favorable of the other dem presidential candidates.
So we will probably see a couple of things between now and the election. First will be an attempt to really tar a high level Republican. They will try to pull a Tom Delay move and try to make the Republican will step down whether guilt or not (just like Delay). The Clinton slime machine will be the center of that. With the full support of the MSM.
Additionally they will reign in all the loud mouths, and look to see Hillary looking and sounding more centrist. She has started already with her hedging support of the yet to be released report from Petraeus.
The other dems are not playing in the same league with the Clinton's. The Republicans must consider that heavily. Hillary will have all their records and her investigators will have all the dirt.
The Clinton machine is sneaky and their timing is usually pretty good. The Repubs need to be ready for the attack because it will come. The Clinton machine has already quashed the Gore and Kerry feints. The others will be handled easily .
The 17% approval for the Dems is not much better for the Republicans... and actually favors the Republicans... after all the Dems "were put there to change thins" The Republicans can just propose bill after logical bill and force the dems to shoot them down. On the other side they can defeat as many bills as possible that are outside of the wishes of the mainstream..
The Republicans should get heavily on the anti-Illegal immigration band wagon. The support of firmness on those measures crosses party line and it could make Republicans the party most Americans agree with..
Then the dems will either need to fight them and look bad doing it, or side with them and then the Republicans will claim the high ground for being right on the issue there by creating a perception they are the party of the common people and running the issues that are important to ma and pa joe six-pack.
Thanks for the tip!
Just finding a solid worker in 185,000 precincts by the national candidate would require more than 10 bucks per precinct. So you’ve just spent 2 million bucks to get names.
I don’t think that’s the way for a national campaign to go.
A republican national candidate would do better to tie into state legislative campaigns. The precinct level is very important to this level of candidate.
The candidate needs to be chosen first, otherwise too many resourse would be expended. The question then becomes...Will it be a candidate of the RNC’s liking or one of the RLC’s liking.
Winning those states will require satisfying the wants of the economic populists...the we’ll all be worse off for it.
I'm glad dims are so stupid. They sound like they really beleive their idiocy. Whats to hit back about? Dukakis WAS giving violent felons weekend passes! How is telling the truth about someone an attack?
Once people knew about Willie Horton, they knew they couldn't trust a liberal like Dukakis with even the most fundemental level of their personal security. It's not rocket science, but the dims ignore it and make it about something else. Just like they report that John McCain's lousy poll numbers are about his stance on the war and not his shamnesty proposal. We all know the real story, but the dims/msm have their agenda to sell, and sell it they'll try.
As far as J F'n K is concerned, he didn't hit back either because the more poking around people did, the more they came to know that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth were right. There were too many of them saying the same thing for their story to be wrong. Kerry had everything to lose and nothing to gain by setting that record straight.
So instead, he counted on the MSM for cover, and he got it (and a lot more according to the favorable/unfavorable Kerry/Bush ratio), but it wasn't enough to keep the blogs quiet about the real J F'n K.
I have a wacky theory that I certainly cannot prove. But I will lay it out, as you mention Clinton and her FBI files. It looks to me as if the R’s have two powerful linebackers on the field both of whom have the goods on
Clinton and crime fighting expertise. They are Thompson and
Giulani. Either one could put her away for the rest of her life. You know that they have the goods on her, but Bush has not wanted to prosecute. In this analogy the linebackers are runnng interferance for Romney, the brainy quarterback.
Sorry, but I predict Hillary loses 98 states with her replay of the losing platforms of McGovern and Mondale landslides. Throw in Hillarycare for retaking Congress, too.
Mickey The Duke wants everybody to forget that it was his primary opponent, Al Gore, who introduced Willy Horton into the game.
Back then, I lived in Norfolk, VA ... one of the local radio stations did its news reporting on election day "live from Downtown Norfolk at the corner of Duke and Bousch streets".
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Dukakis was the worst candidate ever. That rape question should have been so easy top knock out of the park.
Do you remember SNL did a skit called Dukakis After Dark? It was after he lost the election and he was throwing a party with the left over campaign money. Its fantastic.
Does anyone really think Rove is going to sit out this election?
yitbos
Do you cry over spilled milk too?
Since you appear to be the only one on this thread acting like a misbehaved four-year-old, I’d say that crying and spilling milk are much more up your alley than mine.
All politics is local - grassroots wins elections.
Still delusional. The fact is the Dems could be unbeatable if they combined a tax-the-rich-for-handouts with a strong security message. Thank heaven for their moonbats.
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