Posted on 11/19/2013 12:35:32 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
Matt Bennett can still hear the reporters laughing, all 90 of them. He can still picture Sam Donaldson doubled over, guffawing, on a riser that looked out over a dusty field in suburban Detroit. Bennett was a 23-year-old political rookie in 1988 when he was sent to a General Dynamics facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., to organize a campaign stop for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis: a ride in a 68-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. The visit, meant to bolster the candidates credibility as a future commander-in-chief, would go down as one of the worst campaign backfires in history.
Following the event, after the reporters laughter subsided and Dukakiss entourage was preparing to leave, one of the candidates traveling aides approached Bennett. Nice event, Matt he deadpanned. It may have cost us the election. But beside that, it was great.
Dukakis and the tank. The image of the diminutive Massachusetts governor pretending to be something he wasnt and, in the process, making a fool of himself on Sept. 13, 1988, has haunted me, as it has every other advance person who has been entrustedfor a few hours or even a few minuteswith a candidates fate.
Like Bennett, I too worked on the Dukakis campaign, and we went on to serve together in the Clinton White House. I sat in countless meetings in which some smartass warned that a stop on the presidents schedule had the makings of a Dukakis in the tank moment. The caution usually came when some type of costume was involved, and the tank ride is still to this day invoked anytime politicians decline to put hats on their headsas President Obama did earlier this year when he was handed a Navy football helmet but refused to try it on. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Well; that's all it takes these days...
His big problem is the chin strap. Its all crooked and looks stupid. I was in the Army, and the chin strap on the steel pot and Kevlar helmets were always, always used.
But it was different on the tank. That helmet is called a CVC, and the earpieces hug your head...its a lot like wearing a set of headphones with a fiberglass helmet attached. We never, and I mean never, wore the chin strap. Not even in training at FT Knox, where most things were ‘by the book’. It just wasn’t necessary.
I remember back in the early '80s how the MSM assured us that the only reason Teddy Kennedy wasn't President was Chappaquiddick. I remember calling a talk show with Elizabeth Drew on it, to remind her of the liberal blood baths in '78 and '80 and how they couldn't all be due to Chappaquiddick. But, she just ignored my point. Too difficult to contemplate, I guess.
Note how clean his ALICE is. The crispness of his BDUs. Wonder how he did that?
You know how he did it.
Because people who pronounce Gengis Khan, “Jenjis Kjhan” and people who put Swiss cheese on a Philly cheese steak...don’t fight wars...they observe them.
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