Clinton’s ‘Willie Horton’ Campaign Against Obama

Jeff Gannon - A Voice of the New Media ^ | 3/21/2008 | Jeff Gannon

[ConservativeMajority]

Democrats have been playing the race card against Republicans for decades, so it should come as no surprise that race has become an issue in a contest with a black candidate running for president. However, Hillary Clinton’s “Willie Horton” campaign against Barack Obama has shocked most Americans and broken open a wide rift in the Democratic Party.

For those who might not remember, during the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican George H. W. Bush ran ads against Democrat Michael Dukakis that featured the face of Willie Horton, an African-American man. While Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, Horton, a convicted murderer, was given a weekend furlough from prison and went on a violent crime spree. The ads played on the fear that Obama recently ascribed to his grandmother, “a typical white woman.”

After losing in the South Carolina primary, Clinton launched the race campaign against Obama. Bill Clinton minimized Obama’s victory, suggesting that it was the result of blacks that make up half of Democratic voters casting ballots for the black candidate. He pointed out that Jesse Jackson, a rather divisive political figure, also won the South Carolina primary in 1984 and 1988.

Following Hillary Clinton’s strong showings in Ohio and Texas, the campaign pushed the videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the media. Wright’s incendiary sermons be the subject of lengthy analysis in the six weeks until the Pennsylvania primary and erode Obama’s message of hope, change and unity. Moreover, it would cast doubt on Obama’s electability among the party leadership and superdelegates.

Obama’s speech, while hailed by the Old Media as historic, did not put the issue of race to rest. The Clintons have several more weapons they have yet to deploy against Obama about race. Obama has relationships with radicals like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Weather Underground member William Ayers that have so far not been examined.

By the time the Clintons get done, Barack Obama will become Willie Horton.

[Wolverine]

 

"We can't trust the American people..." Hillary Clinton

"We can't trust the American people..." Hillary Clinton

"We can't trust the American people..." Hillary Clinton

"We can't trust the American people..." Hillary Clinton

"Bill, my co-president, doesn't trust the American people either..."

 

                                                                        Hillary Clinton

"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."

"We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.”

"It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, for the few, and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity."

"We can't just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people."

"We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own turf in order to create this common ground."

"I certainly think the free market has failed."

"I think it's time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector [oil] in the entire economy, that they are being watched."

"What I want to do is take those profits and apply them to alternative energy."

Karl Marx or Frederick Engels said none of these things; Hillary Clinton said them all.

[Thebaddog]

I never got the whole Horton thing. The dude did do the crimes that were highlighted while on a furlough. What was the white man’s sin?

[Pearls Before Swine]

What was the white man’s sin?

Being governor when there was a relaxed furlough program (Dukakis).

Obviously there was no criminal activity in the Obama/Wright blowup, but there is BHO's condoning of hate speech that no white would be allowed to make in public. The analogy is that in both cases whites are inflamed by what they perceive by boorish, racist black behavior. No one wants to give his vote to someone who doesn't care about them.

[mortal19440]

Those Willie Horton ads were originated by Al Gore in the Primary race, not by the Bush campaign. It gets real old hearing that the Republicans started that crap. It was typical liberal hypocrisy that the media has downplayed ever since it happened.

[ConservativeMajority]

Because liberals tell us we should not hold anyone but Republicans responsible for their behavior.

[Reaganesque]

...Republican George H. W. Bush ran ads against Democrat Michael Dukakis that featured the face of Willie Horton...

What the author fails to mention here is that it was in fact Al Gore brought the issue up during the Democrat primaries. Talk about Inconvenient Truths.

[ConservativeMajority]

Unfortunately, the author is the victim of the liberals’ revisionist history.

[Boston Blackie]

The Willie Horton Ad ... Click here to view

[PGalt]

Those Willie Horton ads were originated by Al Gore in the Primary race, not by the Bush campaign. It gets real old hearing that the Republicans started that crap.

Propagandists and revisionist historians (propagandists again) doing what they do best.

Run Hillaryous Run!

[PGalt]

Unfortunately, the author is the victim of the liberals’ revisionist history.

BUMP-TO-THE-TRUTH!

[Victor]

What about Hillary's early support and connections to the Weather Underground? Is there a trail there that Obama can get ahold of?

Or is that an urban legend...?

We do know about her pro bono work for the Black Panthers, but that probably isn't enough. The Weathermen, however, were a bunch of bad dudes....comparatively.

[dennisw]

Hill and Bill Clinton have been looking for a race card they could play against Obama but always came up dry. Plus it would bounce back and be traceable to Hillary and hurt her

Obviously Clintons finally stumbled across a race card they could use and that was Reverend Wright and his out of bounds congregation. It’s not just the preacher. It’s the congregation that is loving every word of his crazed diatribes.

Fact is black churches are always more raucous, more entertaining, have better music and more real preachifiying. That I used to see these so called gospel breakfasts at the local House of Blues. Black church singing while you eat your Sunday breakfast

What scared whites is the prospect of having this crazy stuff, this crazy attitude in the White House. Until Wright, Obama came across as sane, sharp and clean, very presentable, a “uniter”. Jeremiah Wright ruined this. His congregation was lapping up these resentments and his congregation is educated. The upper part of the Chicago Black community. Michelle exemplified this. Whitey says-— I want that as First Lady?

The Oprah aura is gone and replaced by Wright’s dark cloud

[ConservativeMajority]

It seems that Obama is a rank amateur when it comes to this kind of politics.

[Help!]

Bradley’s 1996 best-seller, Time Present, Time Past, included a chapter on race in politics. Here was the passage in question:

BRADLEY (Time Present, Time Past): In 1988, the race card was played more subtly.... the first politician to mention Horton (but without racializing it) was not Bush but Senator Al Gore. In the New York Democratic primary that spring, he attacked Dukakis for his prison-furlough program.

Dukakis & Willie Horton
The Willie Horton case
10/88
http://forerunner.com/forerunner/X0158_Dukakis__Willie_Hort.html

In Massachusetts, first-degree murderers used to get out of prison for the weekend ...

Governor Michael Dukakis believed that it was “rehabilitative” for prisoners to be allowed to roam the streets unsupervised in what was known as the Prison Furlough Program.

That practice was finally outlawed by state legislators on April 28, 1988, after an enormous grassroots petition drive brought the issue before the people.

Here are the cold hard facts about Governor Dukakis’ “experiment in justice,” which has received little coverage on campaign news broadcasts:

* On June 6, 1986, convicted murderer Willie Horton was released from the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord. Under state law, he had become eligible for an unguarded, 48-hour furlough. He never came back.

* Horton showed up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on April 3, 1987. Clifford Barnes, 28, heard footsteps in his house and thought his fiancée had returned early from a wedding party. Suddenly Willie Horton stepped out of the shadows with a gun. For the next seven hours, Horton punched, pistol-whipped, and kicked Barnes - and also cut him 22 times across his midsection.

* When Barnes’ fiancée Angela returned that evening, Horton gagged her and savagely raped her twice. Horton then stole Barnes’ car, and was later chased by police until captured.

* On October 20, 1987, Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The sentencing judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, saying, “I’m not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again.”

* Variations of this story were repeated on several occasions in Massachusetts. Confessed rapist John Zukoski, who had brutally beaten and murdered a 44 year-old woman in 1970, became eligible for furloughs and was eventually paroled in 1986. A few months later he was arrested and indicted yet again for beating and raping a woman.

* The Massachusetts inmate furlough program actually began under Governor Francis Sargent in 1972. But in 1976 Governor Dukakis vetoed a bill to ban furloughs for first-degree murderers. It would, he said, “Cut the heart out of inmate rehabilitation.”

* The program, in essence, released killers on an “honor system” to see if they would stay out of trouble. On the average, convicts who had been sentenced to “life without parole” spent fewer than 19 years in prison. By March 1987, Dukakis had commuted the sentences of 28 first-degree murderers.

* Of over 80 Massachusetts convicts listed as escaped and still at large, only four had actually “escaped.” The rest simply walked away from furloughs, prerelease centers and other minimum-security programs. These convicts included murderers, rapists, armed robbers and drug dealers.

* First-degree murderer Armand Therrien was transferred from a medium security prison to a minimum-security one, which made him eligible for a work-release program. He walked off and vanished in December 1987.

* When citizens began to protest, Dukakis and his aides defended the program relentlessly. One commissioner stated that furloughs were a “management tool” to help the prisons. Unless a convict had hope of parole, he argued, “we would have a very dangerous population in an already dangerous system.” But, critics wondered, if armed guards can’t control dangerous killers inside locked cells, how are unarmed citizens supposed to deal with them?

* It was through the efforts of a grassroots organization, Citizens Against Unsafe Society, that the issue was finally brought before the people. With mounting pressure from his own aides to sign a bill ending the program - for fear that it would hurt his presidential campaign - Dukakis signed the legislation in April of this year.

America ... do we want a president in office who would try the same “experiment in justice” on a national level?

The majority of this material was taken from the article “Getting Away with Murder,” by Robert James Bidinotto, which appeared in Reader’s Digest, July 1988.

---

Book about this issue
http://www.1988election.com/excerpts.html

[shaft29]

I love it that Geraldine Ferarro is so angry being called a racist for just stating the obvious. It’s about time she walked in republican moccasins.

[ConservativeMajority]

As Rev. Wright said, “The chickens have come home to roost.”

[freespirited]

I never got the whole Horton thing. The dude did do the crimes that were highlighted while on a furlough

I didn't get it either. Was the RAT position that no one should talk about Horton (or show his picture) because he was black?

Don't these same people yell racism if you use race to decide whether a person can be discussed in polite company or his picture displayed?

[AngelesCrestHighway]

The Clintons have several more weapons they have yet to deploy against Obama about race. Obama has relationships with radicals like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Weather Underground member William Ayers that have so far not been examined.

I’ve got that Obama ear to ear grin now!!...

[NewHampshireDuo]

Willie Horton just happened to be black. The issue was that Dukakis had just furloughed him when he did the murders. And, yes, Gore did it to Dukakis.