In an otherwise observant Politico article, “The Death of Clintonism,” Todd Purdum unwittingly reminded conservative readers why they distrust the major media.
For the article, Purdum interviewed Elaine Kamarck, a senior domestic policy adviser under Bill Clinton whose White House Purdum covered as a reporter. Having been around long enough to remember George W. H. Bush’s 1988 campaign against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, Purdum and Kamarck have no excuse for misrepresenting the campaign’s most decisive ad.
The subject of the ad was Dukakis’s support of his state’s insane furlough program for convicted killers as a form of criminal rehabilitation. The most notorious example of this insanity was the furlough of a thug named Willie Horton.
To merit his life in prison, Horton robbed a 17-year-old gas station attendant, fatally stabbed him 19 times, and dumped him in a trash can to die. Twelve years later, despite a life term without parole, Horton received a weekend furlough, during which he knifed, blinded, and gagged a man in Maryland, raped his fiancée, and stole their car. Dukakis supported the furlough program even after this incident. So perversely liberal was the idea that Al Gore cited the Horton incident in his primary campaign against Dukakis.
Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion
The Bush campaign did not show or name Willie Horton in the ad it produced on this subject. The ad showed prisoners passing through a revolving door while telling how liberal Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis had supported this program. Of the thirty prisoners shown in the Bush ad, only three were black. In fact, during the general campaign Horton’s name rarely, if ever, came up. In November 1988, the great majority of voters had no idea who Horton was.
That changed soon after the election. Anxious to explain their defeat, Democrat leaders laid it off to the implicit racism of the Bush campaign. Sound familiar? To prove their point, Democratic operatives unearthed an ad featuring the mug shot of Horton, an African American, that an independent group had run in New England for two weeks. In the subsequent months and years, in order to paint the new president and his cronies as racist dirty tricksters, a bitter punditry would repeatedly show the Horton mug shot ad and attribute it to Bush.
