Duked

It was twenty-five years ago today that George Herbert Walker Bush was elected the forty-first President of the United States, and although in he was a decent President in some respects, specifically with regard to foreign policy  (though I will never forgive him for bestowing upon the nation Clarence Thomas), his single term was disastrous for the long run.  Ronald Reagan's conservative "reforms," from deregulation to privatization, might not have survived his own Presidency had a Democrat been elected to succeed him in 1988. Bush's election allowed the Republicans to lock in Reagan's domestic accomplishments, and Bush did such a good job of it that we continue to suffer under the weight of government disinvestment and assaults on women's and minority rights a quarter century later.

The villain in all this, of course, is Michael Dukakis.  The then-governor of Massachusetts, who just turned eighty this past week, was the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, and he had proven to be a competent and able administrator as the Bay State's chief executive.  I supported a lot of what he wanted to do as President, like restore balance in favor of the middle class, protect abortion rights, work for universal health care and, yes, modernize Amtrak, which was his pet issue.  So why am I angry at him now?

Because he ran the worst presidential campaign in my lifetime.  

Dukakis showed no emotion or passion for the people that he wanted to lead, and he didn't fight back hard enough, if at all, against the Bush campaign's smear tactics aimed at his character.  Among the smears were letting convicted murderer Willie Horton out on furlough and raping a woman (the furlough program in Massachusetts had been instituted by a Republican governor and abolished under Dukakis) or the fact that Boston Harbor was really polluted (which Massachusetts was trying to clean up without help from the same federal government Bush had been a part of for eight years).  Dukakis - or the "Duke," as he was known in the Bay State - failed to understand how symbols resonated with voters, and he spoke only in the language of policy positions.  When asked if, in the case of his own wife's hypothetical rape and murder, support the death penalty for the killer by journalist Bernard Shaw during a presidential debate, he responded with a rote recital of his opposition to capital punishment that was so bloodless, he made his wife sound like an afterthought.  Dukakis had good ideas, good policies, and good objectives.  But none of that matters if you have bad messaging.  Dukakis could have pulled it off - he was sharp in Democratic presidential primary debates with knowledgeable, well-thought answers, and he even had some clever lines (like when he called Reagan's Attorney General, Ed Meese, an Attorney General who spent more time in federal court as a defendant than as a prosecutor) - but none of that showed up in the general election campaign.  He chose to play it safe by only telling us what Michael Dukakis supported and never telling us who Michael Dukakis was.

And his TV ads really sucked.

Yeah, I voted for him.  But he lost.  As President, he could have ended the Reagan Revolution.  Instead, he killed his own chances for getting elected to the nation's highest office.  And by the time the Democrats produced a winning presidential candidate in Bill Clinton in 1992, it was too late to reverse the Reagan Revolution; Reagan's idea of government as a problem and not as a solution won the day.  The thrill of seeing a Democratic President elected in 1992 was replaced by the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.  Similarly, Barack Obama's election in 2008 brought a realm of possibilities for government activism, only to lead to the Tea Party's anti-activism of 2009 and 2010 and the subsequent Tea Party's takeover of the House and its suppression of the progressive movement in Washington.  Because Bush the Elder locked in Reagan's policies so well that the Reagan attitude toward government endures.

And I can never forgive Dukakis for letting all this happen by blowing it in 1988.

I'm glad he's supported bullet trains for Amtrak, the board of which he's served on.  But he shouldn't speak out for it.  Because just knowing Dukakis supports something is an invitation for people to ridicule it.