For anyone who suggests conservatives are wild obsessives who still want answers about Benghazi, let’s turn to liberals who still obsess over....the Willie Horton ads of 1988. Twenty-seven years later, Politico chief political columnist Roger Simon is demanding that Jeb Bush apologize or somehow explain his father’s alleged use of race-baiting against Michael Dukakis:
Now that we know whether Jeb would have launched his brother’s invasion of Iraq — yes, I don’t know, I’m not saying, and no — I want to know if Jeb would have launched his father’s campaign against Willie Horton.
Some might consider that an unfair question. But I don’t think there are unfair questions for a presidential candidate, even an unannounced one.
The mysterious headline was “The GOP and Willie Horton: Together again.” It reads like a repeat of the 30 whiny pages or so Simon devoted to Horton in his 1988 campaign book Road Show...except he was much less specific now about Horton's crimes:
Horton was serving a life sentence without parole in Massachusetts for killing a man. He got a weekend furlough, fled and made his way to Maryland, where he broke into a home, tied a man to a joist in the basement, slashed his chest and stomach with a knife, then beat and raped the man’s fiancée.
Horton was black. The couple was white.
Simon didn't mention Horton was jailed for a gas-station robbery where a 17-year-old attendant begged for his life after emptying out the cash drawer and was stabbed 19 times instead. Simon didn't mention the white couple that was assaulted never got an apology from Dukakis -- something they never forgot.
It’s a little silly for Roger Simon to decry negative campaigning. After all, this is the same Roger Simon who tweet-slapped Texas Governor Rick Perry in a July 21, 2014 post: “Rick Perry sending 1,000 National Guard troops to border to shoot small children. Could make good headlines — in Russia.”
Simon tried to revisit all the sore liberal feelings from 1988:
The Bush campaign was run by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, a Good Cop/Bad Cop team — except nobody was the Good Cop. They were both tough as hell, political knife fighters and proud of it. Atwater was the campaign manager, Ailes was the media wizard, and Bush was merely the candidate. And the candidate wasn’t doing that great a job.
Atwater was an expert on Southern politics and knew just what he was doing when he unleashed the Horton attack.
So did the Dukakis campaign. As Susan Estrich, the Dukakis campaign manager, would write: There is no stronger metaphor for racial hatred in our country than the black man raping the white woman. If you were going to run a campaign of fear and smear and appeal to racial hatred you could not have picked a better case to use than this one.”
Simon was pretty sneaky about claiming the Bush campaign exploited Willie Horton ad, noting now what reporters used to mangle: that the Bush campaign never made a “Willie Horton” ad in 1988, but just an ad with a revolving door of prisoners going in and coming out. (Other conservative PACs made ads with Horton's name and face.)
So why must be revisit this? Liberals are making movies about this.
Today, 1988 is being revisited. Will Rabbe, a producer of MSNBC’s Hardball, has made a documentary called Above the Fray: The Lessons of Dukakis ’88. And last week, the Marshall Project, a nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice issues, published a lengthy piece on the 1988 campaign, pointing out how Willie Horton-style ads have been making a comeback in American politics.
Liberal journalists like Simon never have this memory for liberal outrages like the LBJ "Daisy" ad suggesting Goldwater would incinerate the country with a nuclear bomb, or the NAACP implying in 2000 that George W. Bush was somehow re-committing the crime of black James Byrd being dragged to death behind a pickup truck for failing to sign a hate-crimes law. No, they've always suggested that Bush only won that race because of Horton, and ignore every other reason Dukakis was a loser.
