Sure, O'Connor. We were all gaga over some wimp who looked and sounded ridiculous even without climbing in that tank.
Tell you what, O'Connor. If you give up the Kool-Aid, maybe the toxin will wear off given a little time.
Posted on 10/19/2003 6:38:10 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
It was a time long ago, when people watched TV shows like "L.A. Law'' and "thirtysomething'' and they first started having Power Lunches, and being told you had "80s hair'' was still a compliment.
It was 1988, and Michael Dukakis could have been president.
The brainy governor of a rebounded Rust Belt state, a man "who appealed to the best instincts of the American people'' and a candidate with a photogenic wife, he was still defeated -- in large part by a TV ad from his opponent.
So the former Massachusetts governor could speak from experience when he said -- as he did to Lancaster County Democrats on Friday -- to expect the big Republican guns to start firing on the Democratic presidential nominee next year.
So whether it's John Kerry or Howard Dean or someone else, "the attacks will begin.''
And winning in 2004 will only come by being ready, Dukakis said, and by "taking the important bread-and-butter issues to the vast majority of Americans who are getting little or no benefit from ... a rich man's government'' now under Republican President Bush.
Dukakis was the keynote speaker at Friday's Lancaster County Democratic fall banquet, speaking at the Eden Resort Inn & Conference Center before 175 people, possibly the banquet's largest crowd yet.
Getting the one-time presidential nominee was quite a coup for Democrats in this largely Republican county, and their leaders said today it's just one sign that things are looking up for the party both here and nationally.
As Dukakis pointed out, then-Vice President Al Gore won Pennsylvania in losing to Bush in 2000, and Democrat Ed Rendell last year became governor.
So Democrats can do it, he exhorted the local troops, by "doing what you're doing, and get back to the grass-roots level, and putting a face on American politics.''
In his half-hour talk Friday, he touched on a wide range of issues -- what he called President Bush's "utterly incomprehensible'' foreign policy, the need for a good high-speed rail system in the United States, and health care.
Plus, why the Red Sox stayed with Pedro too long.
For you non-baseball fans, that reference from Dukakis, a lifelong Boston Red Sox fan, was to the latest heartbreaking loss the team (and star pitcher Pedro Martinez) suffered Thursday to the hated New York Yankees.
Bruce Beardsley, the Lancaster County Democratic chairman -- and a Yankees fan -- said today having Dukakis here and Friday's "very good, very enthusiastic crowd'' are just two encouraging signs for the party.
Beardsley said county Democrats have had 80 new contributors in just the last two months: "I think what it means is that people are disappointed and upset with the Bush administration, and they want to do something.''
That was the theme echoed by Dukakis -- who criticized the president for conducting a foreign policy without the help of other nations, and claimed he's running a government too much for the benefit of rich people.
Having won the Democratic nomination back in 1988, Dukakis was in the lead versus then-Vice President George Bush, the father of the current president.
Dukakis then ran into Bush's "Willie Horton'' TV ads, which turned the presidential race upside down by raising concerns among voters that Dukakis was soft on crime.
Democrats said the ads were cheap shots and played on white voters' racial fears. Republicans said they raised legitimate concerns that Dukakis was a liberal who was too soft on crime.
Dukakis also lost ground when, hoping to look tough to voters, he was photographed in a tank. The move backfired when it only made him look silly.
No one asked him about the tank Friday, but they did ask, "Where's Kitty?''
His wife and he had come down to the Keystone State so Kitty Dukakis "go reunioning,'' as the former governor put it, with friends in State College -- she's a Penn State graduate.
In his appearance Friday, Dukakis looked barely a day older than in 1988, but in fact he turns 70 in two weeks.
In the 2004 presidential race, Dukakis is supporting fellow Bay Stater John Kerry, the senator who also served as lieutenant governor under Gov. Dukakis.
"I have a bias,'' Dukakis said, but called Kerry "someone who's absolutely solid on the issues of foreign policy and national security, because they're going to be absolutely critical.''
Dukakis was introduced Friday by his friend, veteran area Democrat John Pittenger, who was a few years ahead of Dukakis at Harvard Law School.
Dukakis back in 1988 "conducted a campaign based on the best instincts of the American people,'' Pittenger said, but "he was defeated by a man who appealed to their worst.''
Along with the 175 people who attended the $50-per person dinner, another 30 came to a private $150-a-person reception beforehand with the former presidential nominee, Beardsley added.
It's stories like this that make me want to drink that same rubbing alcohol that Kitty used to imbibe. How many damn times do we have to go thru this? It was AL GORE who first ran those Willie Horton Ads during the 1988 Demmycrat primaries. CAN YOU HEAR ME, MIKEY???? IT WAS AL GORE WHO FIRST RAN THE WILLIE HORTON ADS!!!
This writer is from some alternative universe where Michael Dukakis looked like a winner.
Sure, O'Connor. We were all gaga over some wimp who looked and sounded ridiculous even without climbing in that tank.
Tell you what, O'Connor. If you give up the Kool-Aid, maybe the toxin will wear off given a little time.
Willie Horton murdered a 17 year old gas station attendant during a robbery and then cut off the boy's tesiticles put them in the boy's mouth and threw the boy into a dumpster while he was still alive but dying. How Dukakis could think such a monster should be eligible for a weekend pass outside of prison and personally sign his pass is incomprehensible. Remember that the next time you read another media hit piece about the Willie Horton ads.
I lived in Michael Dukakis' Massachusetts, in Cambridge, in 1977-78. There were NO jobs. A roommate of mine, a grad student at Harvard, was the son of a Massachusetts state welfare official, who told me to my face that there were "no jobs in Massachusetts", and my personal experience cofirmed that truth.
George H. W. Bush was a profoundly mediocre President. Michael Dukakis would have been infinitely worse.
Those were the good old days, when a liberal Dem could really feel good about himself, having power lunches and dethroning the ruling classes.
Who are the people that's constantly attacking and bitching about Bush and his policies since he took office? DemocRats, DemocRats, DemocRats.
The Willie Horton case
http://www.forerunner.com/forerunner/X0158_Dukakis__Willie_Hort.html
In Massachusetts, first-degree murderers used to get out of prison for the weekend ...
Governor Michael Dukakis believed that it was "rehabilitative" for prisoners to be allowed to roam the streets unsupervised in what was known as the Prison Furlough Program.
That practice was finally outlawed by state legislators on April 28, 1988, after an enormous grassroots petition drive brought the issue before the people.
Here are the cold hard facts about Governor Dukakis' "experiment in justice," which has received little coverage on campaign news broadcasts:
* On June 6, 1986, convicted murderer Willie Horton was released from the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord. Under state law, he had become eligible for an unguarded, 48-hour furlough. He never came back.
* Horton showed up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on April 3, 1987. Clifford Barnes, 28, heard footsteps in his house and thought his fiancée had returned early from a wedding party. Suddenly Willie Horton stepped out of the shadows with a gun. For the next seven hours, Horton punched, pistol-whipped, and kicked Barnes - and also cut him 22 times across his midsection.
* When Barnes' fiancée Angela returned that evening, Horton gagged her and savagely raped her twice. Horton then stole Barnes' car, and was later chased by police until captured.
* On October 20, 1987, Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The sentencing judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, saying, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again."
* Variations of this story were repeated on several occasions in Massachusetts. Confessed rapist John Zukoski, who had brutally beaten and murdered a 44 year-old woman in 1970, became eligible for furloughs and was eventually paroled in 1986. A few months later he was arrested and indicted yet again for beating and raping a woman.
* The Massachusetts inmate furlough program actually began under Governor Francis Sargent in 1972. But in 1976 Governor Dukakis vetoed a bill to ban furloughs for first-degree murderers. It would, he said, "Cut the heart out of inmate rehabilitation."
* The program, in essence, released killers on an "honor system" to see if they would stay out of trouble. On the average, convicts who had been sentenced to "life without parole" spent fewer than 19 years in prison. By March 1987, Dukakis had commuted the sentences of 28 first-degree murderers.
* Of over 80 Massachusetts convicts listed as escaped and still at large, only four had actually "escaped." The rest simply walked away from furloughs, prerelease centers and other minimum-security programs. These convicts included murderers, rapists, armed robbers and drug dealers.
* First-degree murderer Armand Therrien was transferred from a medium security prison to a minimum-security one, which made him eligible for a work-release program. He walked off and vanished in December 1987.
* When citizens began to protest, Dukakis and his aides defended the program relentlessly. One commissioner stated that furloughs were a "management tool" to help the prisons. Unless a convict had hope of parole, he argued, "we would have a very dangerous population in an already dangerous system." But, critics wondered, if armed guards can't control dangerous killers inside locked cells, how are unarmed citizens supposed to deal with them?
* It was through the efforts of a grassroots organization, Citizens Against Unsafe Society, that the issue was finally brought before the people. With mounting pressure from his own aides to sign a bill ending the program - for fear that it would hurt his presidential campaign - Dukakis signed the legislation in April of this year.
America ... do we want a president in office who would try the same "experiment in justice" on a national level?
The majority of this material was taken from the article "Getting Away with Murder," by Robert James Bidinotto, which appeared in Reader's Digest, July 1988.
DUKAKIS: No, I don't, Bernard. And I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. We've done so in my own state. And it's one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America; why we have the lowest murder rate of any industrial state in America. But we have work to do in this nation. We have work to do to fight a real war, not a phony war, against drugs. And that's something I want to lead, something we haven't had over the course of the past many years, even though the Vice President has been at least allegedly in charge of that war. We have much to do to step up that war, to double the number of drug enforcement agents, to fight both here and abroad, to work with our neighbors in this hemisphere. And I want to call a hemispheric summit just as soon after the 20th of January as possible to fight that war. But we also have to deal with drug education prevention here at home. And that's one of the things that I hope I can lead personally as the President of the United States. We've had great success in my own state. And we've reached out to young people and their families and been able to help them by beginning drug education and prevention in the early elementary grades. So we can fight this war, and we can win this war. And we can do so in a way that marshals our forces, that provides real support for state and local law enforcement officers who have not been getting that support, and do it in a way which will bring down violence in this nation, will help our youngsters to stay away from drugs, will stop this avalanche of drugs that's pouring into the country, and will make it possible for our kids and our families to grow up in safe and secure and decent neighborhoods.
Again a reminder to everybody. AL GORE was the FIRST ONE to run the Willie Horton ads! Liberals try to pretend that this FACT doesn't exist.
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