Free Republic

During a call-in to the nationally renowned Least Dangerous Podcast with JC King, Former Presidential Candidate and Governor Michael Dukakis cautioned Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about her prospects of becoming the Democratic Nominee for President, “Believe me, neither she, nor anyone else can take that for granted.” Using his own experience as a barometer he continued, “I was 40 points ahead with 5 weeks to go when I ran for reelection in 1978 and I got beaten.” He did praise her saying her experience in the Obama administration has made her a primary choice for the party, “She...

Matt Bennett can still hear the reporters laughing, all 90 of them. He can still picture Sam Donaldson doubled over, guffawing, on a riser that looked out over a dusty field in suburban Detroit. Bennett was a 23-year-old political rookie in 1988 when he was sent to a General Dynamics facility in Sterling Heights, Mich., to organize a campaign stop for Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis: a ride in a 68-ton M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tank. The visit, meant to bolster the candidate’s credibility as a future commander-in-chief, would go down as one of the worst campaign backfires in history....

The last wretched and pathetic week of the Obama campaign reminds me of the final wimpy gasps of the campaign of Michael Dukakis back in 2008 when dwindling numbers of left-wing Democrats gathered around Hollywood actors. In a sort of be-in experience, they could be heard moaning about how "frightened" they were for the future. Now we have Obama's top 1%er friends over at the mega Ad Agency Goodby Silverstein creating a commercial in which they employ children to sing a "We are the World" type ditty asking us to: "Imagine an America Where strip mines are fun and free....

William Bennett, a onetime student of Dr. Silber’s who served as US secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, praised his mentor’s pedagogic style in a 1986 Globe interview. “It wasn’t intimidating; it was quickening,” Bennett said. “Silber is frank and manly and direct. There isn’t enough of that these days. He believes human beings should be spoken to as if they were human beings, not as if they were flowers.”

Please click link to see newspaper article. "Democrat Michael Dukakis, riding a wave of positive publicity from the convention that nominated him for president last week, led Vice-President Bush by 17 points in a Gallup poll released last Tuesday".

I’ve argued many times that the politician Mitt Romney most closely resembles is John Kerry, primarily due to the Mittster’s legendary penchant for flip-flopping, a trait Kerry is also known for. I stand by my Kerry comparison, but Jonah Goldberg has an excellent point when he compares Romney to another Massachusetts politician: Michael Dukakis. Meanwhile, the Republicans seem to have become Dukakified. It was Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, who insisted that the election should be entirely about “competence, not ideology.” Romney has avoided saying that in so many words, but it’s certainly how he’s campaigning. After running to the right in...

The media are gushing and fawning over new poll numbers showing Barack Obama getting a bounce from the just ended Democratic National Convention putting him four points ahead of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Before they get too cocky, they might want to recall that after his convention ended in 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by seventeen points. The New York Times reported July 26, 1988: Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/09/09/flashback-dukakis-led-bush-17-points-after-1988-dnc#ixzz262LPEcZS

Michael Dukakis fanatics at this year’s Democratic National Convention should start getting psyched: The 1988 Democratic presidential nominee is coming to town Tuesday. “We will be flying down [to Charlotte] tomorrow morning and will be there for the balance of the convention talking about [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney’s pathetic economic record as governor of Massachusetts,” Dukakis emailed The Daily Caller on Monday. “Under Romney we were fourth from the bottom in job creation — 47th out of 50,” he continued. “If anybody thinks Romney knows how to turn the economy around, he is kidding himself. And when he left...

Today, on Fox News Sunday: Video at Site

MIAMI — Facing the unthinkable here just seven days ago — a second loss in a row to Newt Gingrich — Mitt Romney’s campaign team hatched a two-part plan to win in Florida: make Newt mad and Mitt meaner. [snip] If Mr. Romney does win here on Tuesday, it will have been through a blistering and unrelenting series of attacks. His campaign has pressed everything at its disposal into service to eviscerate Mr. Gingrich, painting him as an erratic, unreliable Washington insider in mailings and television advertisements, at two critical debates here (where his team made sure Mr. Romney had...

Now rolling out for the voters of New Hampshire:

In a stinging comparison that is sure to leave a mark, on Sunday’s This Week With Christiane Amanpour, George Will said the rise of Herman Cain had a lot to do with Republicans coming to the realization that Mitt Romney is their Michael Dukakis. “A technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology,” Will observed.

Boston radio talk show host Howie Carr brought up on his Monday's show that Onyango Obama, President Obama's long lost half uncle ("Uncle Omar") who was arrested by Framingham, Massachusetts police last week, charged with DUI, and found to have a warrant out on him by immigration authorities at ICE, has a valid social security number and a Massachusetts driver's license.SNIP...A number of commentators are mentioning that President Obama's uncle may have benefited from a policy from the days that go back to former Massachusetts Democratic Governor Michael Dukakis, whereby illegal immigrants were assigned identification numbers that looked similar to...

Why isn’t Tim Pawlenty pulling away from the GOP field? That’s the biggest mystery in GOP nomination politics right now. After all, the current field includes only Pawlenty and Mitt Romney as plausible nominees, and Romney remains highly suspect among many important Republican groups because of his past positions on a wide range of issues — most seriously, in my view, on abortion-related policy. And that’s on top of concerns that his religion will cause problems with some voters. Pawlenty, however, has no major liabilities. Oh, he used to accept scientific facts on climate change and market-based plans to deal...

"This is another fine mess you've gotten us into," Barack Obama may be telling Nicolas Sarkozy as he reads the latest reports from Libya: "Hundreds of rebels fled Ras Lanuf Wednesday morning as pro-Kadhafi soldiers used tanks and heavy artillery to seize the port city. Some of them called on France to bomb their opponents and called on foreign powers to send them arms...." In response to the faltering fortunes of their rebel allies, the West has to consider supplying arms to them, as this ragtag group still wields clubs and rocks against the much better supplied government forces of...

It turns out that one of the first people to figure out that George H.W. Bush's famous "Read my lips: no new taxes" declaration would come back to haunt him in 1992 was Michael Dukakis -- who came to the realization in December 1988, just a month after losing the presidential election to Bush. "He really didn't believe it," he recalls. "He and I met in early December (after the election), at the vice president's house. He was nice enough to invite me down." During their campaign, Dukakis had brought up a contentious issue -- more vigorous enforcement by the...

Kitty Dukakis's visits to Hingham polls annoy some residents E-mail | Print | Comments () Posted by Jessica Bartlett November 2, 2010 05:17 PM By Jessica Bartlett, Town Correspondent Kitty Dukakis, the wife of former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, showed up to the Hingham polls today, but not to vote. Dukakis stood near the voting area of all three of the town's polling stations, greeting voters on their way in, a tactic that angered many sign holders and voters.

How desperate is Barney Frank in his battle with Sean Bielat? This desperate. Not only does Frank now have Michael Dukakis stumping for him in the district, he’s literally doubling down on Bush-blaming. Dukakis isn’t content to just blame W, he also goes after Poppy in this attempt to fire up the base. He even gets in a dig at the 2000 election, just to complete the picture of undying resentment, caught by Franklin & Hayes (which seems to be down, probably due to the traffic hit from our earlier headline link):

The National Security Advisor of the President of the United States is a really important job – for NATO and the West, not just for America. Whoever holds it has to ensure (among many other responsibilities) that the efforts of the the Pentagon and the State Department are coordinated towards a strategic end. Of all the posts in government, this one is supposed to be apolitical. Until last week, General Jim Jones, a retired marine with an extensive strategic resume, held the post for Obama. Now he has been replaced by a pure political hack: Thomas E Donilon. As my...

Though his party is ailing as we enter the home stretch of the election, President Obama and his supporters can take heart, knowing that he's getting new strategies for electoral success from a fresh crop of advisers. For example: former vice president and failed presidential candidate Walter Mondale. You can't read the news these days without finding pearls of wisdom the Minnesota Democrat has dropped. Mondale is 82 and last won a major election under his own name in a 1970 Senate race. After a term as vice president, he ran for president in 1984 and lost every state save...