Michael Dukakis and 2004

Posted on February 7, 2004 in Accountability Campaign 2004 Folly Watch Liberals & Progressives

If the RNC attack machine has laid low so far on John Kerry, perhaps it’s because they have the candidate they want. National Review columnist Jim Geraghty considered the question of whether having been Massachusetts’ lieutenant governor under Dukakis would bring back the spectre of Willie Horton or not two years ago:

“The Dukakis connection is not nearly as much about the state as it is about being connected to a loser,” said political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. “You don’t ever want to be associated with a loser when you’re trying to talk about your ability to put together a winning coalition….”

The prison-furlough policy that released Willie Horton and let him rape a Maryland woman was put in place before Kerry became lieutenant governor — and Kerry was in the Senate when Horton was released.

The problem with Geraghty’s analysis is that he assumes that Dukakis lost because of the issue. In our contextual age, voters tend to focus more on how presidential a candidate appears. Kerry, Iowa voters said, looks good with his wife and walks in a presidential fashion. With his Vietnam War record, Kerry will easily outsuit George W. Bush who, at very best, hid out in a National Guard Unit for the duration. Kerry, the pundits think in their we-have-to have-a Democrat-who-looks-good-to-the-Republicans style of thinking that lost us the 2000 and 2004 elections is the man of the hour because “he can’t be put into a box” and “votes all over the political map”, a map based on political expediency rather than conscience.

The pundits say that Dukakis lost because he was a “liberal”. I think Mona Charen came closer when she wrote:

In 1988, Gov. Michael Dukakis, an opponent of capital punishment, was asked how he would respond if his wife Kitty were raped and murdered. Dukakis stuck to his principles, and wound up sounding cold and unfeeling.

That moment sticks out in my mind as the one where Dukakis failed, but not for sticking to his principles. That moment established Dukakis as essentially bloodless man-without-a-backbone — which was a pretty hard image to put across against that other man-with-no-backbone George Bush Senior.

Where was Dukakis’s rage? Why didn’t he tell the reporter off? “What kind of man are you? he should have demanded of the wire service hack. “Who has the imagination even to entertain such an idea? And why my wife? Why not Barbara Bush? Why are you fueling the public imagination like that? Why are you sensationalizing rape and terrorizing not only my wife, but every woman in America?”

But Michael Dukakis did not talk back, he did not put the reporter in his place. He just murmured that that didn’t change anything about his views about capital punishment and he murmured himself into defeat.

Geraghty points out that Dukakis got to be the candidate because he defeated all the other candidates in the field, including Gore and Gephardt. He rose to the top of the Democratic heap, a safe man who was certain to win the election. But when the moment came, he lost it because, as my Greeek-American father-in-law put it, he acted bloodlessly, “not like a Greek”.

If Kerry is the candidate, he may be able to surge to a modest victory based on the “anybody but Bush” sentiment that has shouldered him up so far. But what kind of president will he be? I predict that he will be a Dukakis, a man who won’t shout and press nearly hard enough to rescue Social Security, to reverse the tide of tax breaks, to establish health coverage for all Americans, to preserve the environment, to get us out of Iraq, to stop American jobs from going overseas, to curb internal terrorism movements such as the militias — in short to undo the Bush legacy. Kerry will not stand up for what Democrats believe in. When his moment comes, I predict that he will wimp out and give in to the special interests, that he will not talk back to reporters when he should. And this is why I say vote against him now. We don’t need a Clintonesque Dukakis now. We need a Roosevelt.