The Same Old Tune

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
-Jean-Baptist Alphonse Karr, Les Guepes, 1849

And so it goes with Democratic vice-presidential nominees.

As to 1988: In an article otherwise chock full of speculation and distortion, Karl Rove in today's Wall Street Journal points out:

Michael Dukakis spent the last months of the 1988 campaign calling his opponent's running mate, Dan Quayle, a risky choice and even ran a TV ad blasting Mr. Quayle. The Bush/Quayle ticket carried 40 states.

Aside from his memorable and biting comment about Quayle in the debate, where was Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Lloyd Bentsen? Running a positive campaign, enhancing his own reputation, and doing nothing to undermine the GOP presidential nominee.

And 2000:

A little friendly banter between Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Joe Lieberman and Halliburton's Dick Cheney, in which the Connecticut senator during debate declines to call Cheney on his self-serving modus operandi:

....I'm pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you're better off than you were eight years ago, too.
CHENEY: I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it. (LAUGHTER) (APPLAUSE)
MODERATOR: This question is to you.
LIEBERMAN: I can see my wife and I think she's saying, "I think he should go out into the private sector."
CHENEY: I'll help you do that, Joe.
LIEBERMAN: I think you've done so well there, I want to keep you there. (LAUGHTER)

The V.P. nominee did what he could to undermine the ticket's chances during the recount controversy. In a July, 2001 article in The New York Times about the Florida vote debacle and the issue of Americans living abroad, David Barstow and Don Van Natta Jr. explained:

The flawed votes included ballots without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without witness signatures, ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States and even ballots from voters who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state's election laws been strictly enforced.

Joe Lieberman's response on November 19, 2000 on Fox News Sunday to Repub efforts to have unlawful ballots from military personnel, contrary to law, counted? "In fact, we think that the ballots -- both the absentee ballots and the ones that are being hand counted in the three counties in South Florida now -- deserve the benefit of the doubt."

Then in 2004: Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards runs a listless campaign with little criticism of the Repub ticket, arguably an effort to maintain his reputation as a positive campaigner so as to enhance his bid for the 2008 presidential nomination, if Kerry were to lose.

And now in 2008: Joe Biden, appearing yesterday at a town hall meeting in Nashua, New Hampshire, gushing

Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight. She’s a truly close personal friend; she is qualified to be president of the United States of America. She’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States.

Predictably, the McCain camp promptly jumped on the statement, contending

It's very interesting that when it comes down to Barack Obama's biggest decision of the presidential election in choosing a vice president, the man that he selects says that he himself was the wrong choice, and that Hillary Clinton would have been a better fit.

Joe Biden is on the ballot this November for re-election to his Senate seat in Delaware, as Joe Lieberman was on the ballot (successfully) for re-election to the U.S. Senate as he was allegedly working to be elected Vice-President. Biden thus far has been reluctant to criticize the other V.P. nominee, Sarah Palin (who is constantly attacking Obama), though I am unaware whether this has been his choice or instead that of the campaign. Still, as Rove notes in his piece today, "the asssaults (or what the Republican operative implies are "assaults") diminish him- not her."

I admit that I thought the selection of Biden was wise- in part because he would not be reticent in going after whomever John McCain would select as his running-mate. Instead, or so it appears, "the more it changes, the more it's the same thing."

Standard Republican Fare

In Sarah Earmark's speech at the Republican Convention accepting her nomination for vice-president, she described John McCain as

A leader who's not looking for a fight, but is not afraid of one either.

She went on to criticize Harry Reid and the Senate he leads (to strengthen her credentials as a partisan and outside-of-the-Beltway figure), then contended

Clearly what the majority leader was driving at is that he can't stand up to John McCain. That is only one more reason to take the maverick of the Senate and put him in the White House. My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of "personal discovery." This world of threats and dangers is not just a community, and it doesn't just need an organizer.

Palin claims, in a somewhat disjointed manner: 1) McCain is not "afraid" of "a fight"; 2) McCain is "the maverick"; 3) Obama is on "a journey of 'personal discovery'; 4) she herself is a "pit bull."

What is the message? The Democratic candidate is not quite manly.

This concept was explored this concept on June 15, 2008 in an opinion piece published by The New York Times and written by Susan Faludi, who noted

The attacks are already under way, as is evident if one enters the words “Obama” and “effeminate” into a search engine. The effeminacy canard lurks in Mike Huckabee’s imaginings of Mr. Obama tripping off a chair and diving for the floor when confronted by a gunman, and in the words of Tucker Bounds, Mr. McCain’s campaign spokesman, who depicted Mr. Obama as “hysterical.”

News media blatherers and bloggers are taking up the theme. On MSNBC, Tucker Carlson called Mr. Obama “kind of a wuss”; Joe Scarborough, the morning TV talk show host, dubbed Mr. Obama’s bowling style “prissy” and declared, “Americans want their president, if it’s a man, to be a real man”; and Don Imus, the radio host, never one to be outdone in the sexual slur department, dubbed Mr. Obama a “sissy boy.”

Obama is only one in a long line of Democratic presidential candidates to be characterized as effeminate. Glenn Greenwald wrote on July 17, 2007

For some time now, it has been commonplace for Democratic candidates to be depicted as gender-confused freaks -- Al Gore, emasculated with earth colors at the hands of the controlling Naomi Wolf; John Kerry, the wife-dominated, French windsurfer; Hillary Clinton, the domineering, emasculating, pants-wearing dyke; and John Edwards, the pretty, womanly faggot obsessed with his hair. One can make a strong argument, as some have, that those personality-attack themes have played a far larger role in the outcome of the last two presidential election than any substantive issues, and liberals simply have nothing close to the potency of the right-wing filth machine in advancing these gender themes.

I could whine about this being the real "sexism," as compared to the other, mythical, sexism claimed by the Repub Party and legitimized by the mainstream media. But the GOP has cornered the market on victimhood.

Willie Horton And The Republican Slime Machine

"Al Gore is the one who first brought up Willie Horton." So sayeth Bruce Bartlett, now an author but described by Wilkipedia as an economist associated with supply-side economics. He was a domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and was a treasury official under President George H.W. Bush." Yes, that supply-side theory, which has helped bring us an increasing trade deficit, increasing budget deficit, gas and food prices rapidly spiraling upward, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Bartlett, spinning his web of right-wing, highly partisan paranoia, was on the Friday, 4/25/08 edition of Laura Ingraham's syndicated talk show and has written "Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past." (It's not me saying conservatives always live in the past; Repubs apparently say it about themselves.)

Was Al Gore really the first to bring up "Willie Horton" (reason for quote marks to come up eventually)? In the article, entitled "Did Gore Hatch Horton?" posted 11/1/99 in slate.com and reprinted here, Timothy Noah points out that this notion had, apparently, already been spreading.


Conservative commentators have taken to repeating the mantra that Al Gore introduced Willie Horton, the inflammatory racial symbol who enlivened the 1988 presidential race, to political debate in America. On Oct. 24, William Kristol, editor and publisher of the Weekly Standard, said on ABC's This Week:

Gore's a mean, tough political fighter. Gore is the one who introduced Willie Horton to American politics in the 1988 primary against Mike Dukakis.

Kristol repeated this, almost verbatim, in a "Memo to Bill Bradley" that appeared in the issue of Newsweek that hit newsstands the following day:

Big Al can be a tough, mean player. After all, he's the guy who introduced Willie Horton to the American public in his primary campaign against Michael Dukakis.

Four days after that, Paul Gigot wrote in his Oct. 29 Wall Street Journal column:

Recall that the candidate who first raised the prison furlough (Willie Horton) issue against Mike Dukakis in 1988 wasn't George Bush. It was Al Gore.

Horton, you may recall, is a black man who, while doing prison time in Massachusetts for murder, escaped from a weekend furlough and committed a particularly brutal assault and rape. Dukakis hadn't started the state program that allowed prisoners like Horton, who were serving life sentences without parole, to take furloughs--that would have been Dukakis' Republican predecessor as governor of Massachusetts, Francis Sargent. But Dukakis, even after hearing what Horton did on his furlough, was resistant to ending the program, which the state legislature finally did after much crusading by a local newspaper. Horton's story was subsequently offered up by Vice President George Bush's campaign as evidence of Dukakis' softness on crime, and--less directly--of the Democratic party's excessive fondness for black people. (It was an ugly election.) Introducing Willie Horton to American political discourse would not seem to be something to be proud of. Is it true that Gore did so? And if it is true, was Gore's 1988 campaign guilty of injecting cryptic racist messages into the debate? The answers to these questions are, respectively, yes and no.

Gore did ask Dukakis, in a debate right before the 1988 New York primary, about "weekend passes for convicted criminals." Here is how Sidney Blumenthal, now a Clinton White House aide but then a reporter for the Washington Post, wrote it up a few months later:

An uncomfortable Dukakis, after dispassionately reciting statistics, conceded that the Massachusetts furlough program for murderers sentenced to life imprisonment had been canceled.

The issue did not take for Gore, but the exchange attracted the interest of Jim Pinkerton, the research director for the then flailing Bush campaign. "That's the first time I paid attention," said Pinkerton. "I thought to myself, 'This is incredible' ...It totally fell into our lap."

In reviewing this history, it's important to make some crucial distinctions. Gore never mentioned that Horton was black; indeed, he never mentioned Horton by name. He merely drew attention, correctly, to the damaging fact that Dukakis had tolerated a furlough program for especially violent criminals in his state even after a horrific incident strongly suggested this was a bad policy. It's conceivable, of course, that Gore was warming up for more explicit and racially tinged use of Horton's story later in the primary fight. But that would have been uncharacteristic of him. In any event, Gore dropped out of the race shortly after the debate.

Now recall what the Republicans did with Horton's story: An "independent expenditure" group aired an ad for Bush showing a picture of Horton. A Republican fund-raising letter in Maryland showed pictures of Dukakis and Horton alongside the following text: "Is this your pro-family team for 1988?" Horton told Playboy magazine in 1989 that a woman who identified herself as working for "an organization affiliated with the Bush campaign" phoned him and wrote letters to him up in prison trying to get him to endorse Dukakis. The official Bush campaign, of course, kept its distance from such efforts, and claimed to use Horton only in race-neutral ways. But there is plenty of evidence that it was heartily appreciative of the racial subtext. In his book about the 1988 campaign, Pledging Allegiance, Blumenthal quotes an anonymous member of the Bush campaign team as saying, "Willie Horton has star quality. Willie's going to be politically furloughed to terrorize again. It's a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist." Although Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, always insisted publicly that for the Bush campaign Horton was never a racial symbol, Atwater slipped in a speech he gave to southern Republicans right before that year's Democratic convention:

There is a story about a fellow named Willie Horton who for all I know may end up to be Dukakis' running mate. Dukakis is making Hamlet look like the rock of Gibraltar in the way he's acted on this. [This was a reference to Dukakis' search for a vice-presidential candidate.] The guy was on TV about a month ago and he said you'll never see me standing in the driveway of my house talking to these candidates. And guess what, on Monday, I saw in the driveway of his house? Jesse Jackson. So anyway, maybe he'll put this Willie Horton guy on the ticket after all is said and done.

As was noted at the time by Thomas Edsall of the Washington Post and others, Atwater was pretty clearly equating Jesse Jackson with Willie Horton because both happened to be black. Gore never did that. He never did anything close to that.

The major point seems to be this: Gore never mentioned Horton by name, never mentioned that Horton was black, and dropped out of the race shortly thereafter. But to the evident pleasure of the Repub Party, an "independent expenditure" group acting on behalf of the GOP ticket ran an ad featuring a frightening-looking black rapist and associating him with Michael Dukakis. In this, as in so many things, the GOP has at best a tenuous grip on reality, and on the truth.

Likeability In Presidential Politics

Roger Simon of Politico is a sane, sober political analyst, and usually right.

Not today. On NBC's Meet the Press, Simon today stated "The calculation in the Clinton campaign is that after eight years of George Bush, the American people want competence this time, not likability. And competence and strength is what's going to win in 2008, not who you want to go to the bar and have a beer with." Yet in 1988 a Democratic governor of Massachusetts declared in his acceptance speech (see "A New Era is About to Begin") "But this election isn't about ideology. It's about competence."

But when the vote came in, Michael Dukakis had lost to George Herbert Walker Bush. And the latter's son in 2000 defeated Al Gore (though not in the national popular vote) and, more importantly, in 2004 defeated John Kerry, when evidence of the incompetence of George W. Bush already was evident. The American people want a President whom they like, and with whom they are comfortable. Witness the recent Sopranos-like commercial rolling out the H. Clinton campaign song, an ad hailed everywhere for presenting a likeable "small-town girl." The Clinton campaign advisers realize that their candidate's weakness remains the "ick" factor- just not someone you're comfortable seeing on the 6:00 news (or cable news, or youtube, or anywhere) every day for the next four years.