D2 - the point is that if Kerry had jurisdiction over this case, Smith would receive the same treatment as Willie Horton did while Kerry was Lt. Governor:<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR> Willie Horton redux
Townhall ^ | 2.1.04 | Jay Bryant
Posted on 02/01/2004 12:37:12 PM PST by ambrose
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Willie Horton redux
Jay Bryant (back to web version) | Send
February 1, 2004
To the best of my knowledge, the Bush for President campaign is not short of cash, but if they are, I have a suggestion as to how they can save some money if John Kerry gets the Democratic nomination.
Instead of paying big bucks for fancy new commercials, they could just pull the old Willie Horton ad out of the 1988 archives and run it.
For those of you too young to remember that long-ago campaign, it featured Bush the Elder against Massachusetts Governor Michael "Tank Commander" Dukakis.
As Governor, Dukakis had instituted a prisoner work-release program whereby violent criminals were allowed to spend part of their sentence under sub-minimum security conditions. This was supposed to help the inmates get ready to go back into society, but what it mainly helped them do was escape. This did indeed put them back into society, but unfortunately, a number of them proved to be just a teensy-weensy bit short of fully adjusted. One guy, named Willie Horton, raped a woman in Maryland, and he became the poster boy for what a bad idea the program was.
Now Horton was a black man, so Dukakis and the Democrats screamed "racism" until they were blue in the face, conveniently ignoring the fact that the issue had first been raised by Dukakis' primary opponents, who were all Democrats.
In the primary, it wasn't racist, you understand. Democrats don't do racism, ever, ever. Not even former Klansman Senator Robert Byrd. Anyway, the voters saw through the Democrats' protestations, as well as the idiocy of the work release program, and decided Dukakis should do his societal adjustment somewhere other than in the White House.
John Kerry was Dukakis' Lieutenant Governor. And according to all available reports, he backed the work release program lock, stock and barrel. Except of course there weren't any locks ? that was the problem. There weren't any stocks, either, although that old time New England punishment might have been appropriate for some of the convicts, or perhaps even the politicians, like Dukakis and Kerry, who dreamed up the silly work release idea.
The barrel thing is what Kerry could be over as his party's nominee for President.
What Dukakis should have said in 1988 was this: "The work release program was a noble experiment, but it failed. I am asking the state legislature to repeal it, and I pledge never to institute such a program at the federal level if I am elected. My heart goes out to all the victims of the crimes committed and I want you to know that I have learned my lesson."
In politics, that's called the Third Defense, but Dukakis didn't offer it and to the best of my knowledge Kerry has never disowned the program either.
Their response was simply to cry "racism," which didn't work at all in 1988, but it did spook the 1992 Bush campaign, which was managed by an entirely different, and vastly inferior, cast of characters. They failed to run any effective negative commercials against Bill Clinton (Bill Clinton!) and got their hats handed to them as a consequence.
In the wake of Bob Dole's ineffective 1996 campaign, the joke around Republican circles was that he had run the worst presidential campaign in American history since 1992.
It has been widely reported that Bush the Younger was disgusted by the campaign run by the second-stringers in 1992 and vowed never to let it happen in his political career, a vow he has, to date, kept.
Nobody "likes" negative advertising, but there is a technical political term for a general election candidate who abjures it when his opponent does not: the term is "loser."
In mid-July of 1988, I remember attending a small Capitol Hill dinner party with some Republican members of Congress and a few of my fellow consultants. As we sat around the table, we were all required to predict the winner in November. At the time, Dukakis had a double-digit lead over Bush. (People forget that Bush's election that year was no cakewalk, although he ended up with a decisive victory due to the fabulous campaign engineered by Jim Baker, Lee Atwater, media guru Roger Ailes and others.)
As it happened, I was next-to-last to give my prediction. Up to that point, everyone had predicted that Dukakis would win. I said Bush.
Why? the group wanted to know.
I answered that while I hadn't seen any research, it was my belief that no one could rise to the top in Massachusetts Democratic politics without having done things that ? in the hands of Roger Ailes ? would disqualify them for election to high office in the rest of the country.
The last person to respond was Ailes, who I presume had seen the research, and who smiled and said that Bush would win.
Like Dukakis, Kerry has risen to the top in Massachusetts Democratic politics. Karl Rove's team resembles the 1988 group far more than that of 1992, and his boss regards 1992 as his anti-role model.
Given that the utterly unelectable Howard Dean appears to have descended to the Kucinich-Sharpton level of seriousness as a candidate, Republicans should now root for Kerry.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>FOUR MORE YEARS!