Remembering Michael Dukakis
July 5, 1999
Sometimes it's useful to go over old ground. There are lessons to be learned from the familiar.
In 1988, Al Gore -- engaged in a cut-throat race against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis for the Democratic presidential nomination -- made major political hay out of a nasty scandal involving a prisoner named Willie Horton and Massachusetts' controversial "Prison Furlough Program."
Dukakis was genuinely committed to the program, and had worked hard to bolster it, despite serious public concerns. In 1976, he'd actually vetoed legislation that would have banned furloughs for first-degree murderers, defending the practice as an essential "management tool."
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Thus, a decade later, in June of 1986, there was nothing in the law to deny convicted murderer Horton what was supposed to be a routine 48-hour leave.
As everyone knows, Horton didn't play by the rules. He fled, eventually arriving in Maryland, where, in April of 1987, he viciously assaulted a young couple who had probably never heard of the statute. When the story of the furlough became known, Horton's brutality created a public uproar.
The Maryland judge who subsequently sentenced Horton to two consecutive life terms refused to extradite him to Massachusetts. "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed . . . This man should never draw a breath of free air again," said the judge.
The scandal heated to a rolling boil. In April of 1988, embattled Massachusetts legislators finally killed the 16-year-old program -- without further resistance from Dukakis.
Mr Gore did not succeed in wresting the Democratic presidential nomination from his rival (his own campaign had come unglued), but he did succeed in poisoning the political well, and mortally wounding Dukakis. Willie Horton dominated the 1988 general election, especially after a GOP operative hatched a devastating television ad complete with a mug-shot of the killer.
It was great advertising, and brilliant politics. However, when the ad exposed Horton's race (he was black), fuming Democrats charged the Bush campaign (Bush the Elder, that is) with "playing the race card."
Whether or not the criticism was justified -- both parties play whole decks of "race cards" when it suits them -- what really angered Democrats was the ad's effectiveness. It captured the public imagination, a vivid parable of the unintended consequences of liberal social policies. Dukakis's lame efforts to defend the program (which had not been without its success stories) fell on deaf ears.
As it became apparent that the flap was helping Republicans, the ladies and gentlemen of the press fell into one of those curious, dreamlike fits of amnesia that overwhelm them now and again. They ignored the underlying facts, including Dukakis's icily detached defense of the program until public opinion forced him to back down.
Critically, they "forgot" that Al Gore had been the first to dredge up the story for use against his fellow-Democrat. Instead, they reinvented Willie Horton as a paradigm of dirty Republican politics, flailing at GOP strategists for sensationalizing a crime and putting a killer's pigmentation on public display.
In the end, though, it was Dukakis -- Gore's original target -- who was destroyed, neatly and completely.
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