Lessons of '88

The summer of 1988 began with Michael Dukakis comfortably ahead of George H.W. Bush by seventeen percentage points in national polls.

It began for me when I drove into Garland, TX to begin my summer job. I was not paying enough attention as I made an unprotected left and a car plowed into me from the right at full speed.

I was at fault.

The summer of 1988 ended with the race between Dukakis and Bush tightened to a dead heat.

It ended for me at a backyard party in Houston, TX. I was just a few days from returning for my senior year at TCU in Fort Worth. At some point that night, I remember talking to Allen, a guy who lived in my dorm.

Allen was one of those cutting edge, looked like a member of an Eighties British band sort of guys. Wore earrings, colored his hair blue or purple, had those slightly over the ankle pointed toe boots, very open-minded.

He asked me who I was voting for. I answered “Dukakis”.

Even though I didn’t expect Houston, Bush’s home, to be a hotbed of support for the former Massachusetts governor, I did expect Allen to be an ally. Instead, he looked down at the ground and said something like, “I’m voting for Bush. Dukakis passed a law that made bestiality legal. I know I’m a pretty sick puppy but there’s no way I’m cool with that.”

The other, more conservatively dressed guys who were standing around us nodded in agreement. I suddenly realized that Mike had only one vote coming to him out of that entire backyard caucus. While attempting to make a left turn I was completely blindsided from the right.

And so the summer of ’88 came to a close. Dukakis was completely trounced in the election three months later. His loss was attributed to several things including the state he was from, a picture of him riding in a tank, popularity of Reagan years, Willie Horton, and, of course, his pro-bestiality agenda and much, much more.

I never quite knew where the bestiality thing came from until the other day. Twenty years ago, I asked a couple of friends and they said they thought it had something to do with a law he repealed while governor. The law mainly had to do with sodomy thus making homosexuality and certain heterosexual acts, which have become rather commonplace, illegal but it also mentioned bestiality. The sense was there were probably already animal cruelty laws on the books that made the out-of –date law redundant. It turns out we gave whoever started the story too much credit. It was pretty much a lie.

After googling many combinations of the words “Dukakis, bestiality, laws, 1988,” etc., I finally came upon two similar accounts of where this story came from. In 1970, when Dukakis was a young representative in the legislature, another more radical rep by the name of Baird introduced a series of laws legalizing, among other things, “sodomy and other acts against nature”. Due to procedure in the Massachusetts state house, legislators had to formally entertain debate on the bill before it was easily tabled. It wasn’t even voted on. According to another account it may not have even been debated. It may have only been introduced. At worst Michael Dukakis was involved in a debate on this bill. More likely, his only transgression was being in the same room as the bill. Regardless of the particulars, Michael Dukakis was never even remotely pro-bestiality. This didn’t stop Jerry Falwell from putting his account of the event in an attack on Michael Dukakis in comic book form and spreading it among the masses.

I am not claiming that this one ridiculous allegation lost the election for Dukakis. I am claiming that it was an overwhelming grapeshot of this ridiculous claim along with others like it that peeled away voters. These huge and small lies and fabrications had a cumulative effect. To paraphrase the Third Reich, “The more numerous the lies, big and small, the more chance people will believe in at least one of them.” I will attribute this adjustment to Lee Atwater.

Darth Vader had his Emperor. Karl Rove had Lee Atwater. All the swift boating, illegitimate black child, character assassination of a triple amputee vet tricks Karl Rove used in 2000 and 2004 he learned from Atwater who was H.W.’s main strategist.

If you think it’s odd that you might never have heard of him, there’s a reason, he died of a brain tumor within a few years of the election, but not before he apologized to all the people he had wronged during his years as a campaign strategist. Sadly he left an un-repentant Rove behind.

To argue whether Michael Dukakis would have been a better president than H.W. Bush at this point holds about as much point as arguing about whether Cleopatra or the little brother she had murdered would have been the better pharaoh. The point is that both victims were excluded from the opportunity in a reprehensible and criminal manner.

The reason I wrote all that I wrote above is to make past prologue. To prepare for what is coming. To point out what has already begun.

My main reason for supporting Barack Obama for president is not because of all the euphoria surrounding his campaign at the moment. It is a sober realization that his view of how this government should work is so in sync with mine that I would be lying to myself and betraying the personal principles and philosophies in which I have spent 41 years realizing and believing. In short, if the picture is the goals he is laying out for his administration and the method in which he plans to achieve them is the frame, I am buying his candidacy over Hillary Clinton’s mainly for the frame.

A wonderful by-product of my decision has been the wonderful feeling of tapping into the enthusiasm the younger generation both, college age as well as those in their twenties and early thirties are adding to this campaign.

Justified or not I feel a great deal of responsibility to support and defend these younger activists in their passion for this process. It humbles me how after all they have seen and been through throughout their collective adolescence that they could ever be so hopeful and trusting in anyone. Looking back now, I realize that I began to lose touch with that enthusiasm in a backyard when I saw the darkest side of politics.

I have been assured by a friend of mine, who is about ten years my junior, that this is a different time and that young people are very adept at checking their facts. But even if all that I write on this blog has little more effect than one blade of dry grass in a massive bonfire, I guess I still want to do what I can to guard against the blindside.

I would have been much happier waiting to write this until June or July but it seems that the grapeshot is coming from two places already: the Clinton campaign as well as McCain’s.

I would consider this understandable and even respectable from the Clintons. After all, one of the reasons I was so glad to vote for them in ’92 was because they were Democrats who were willing to throw dirt back in the eyes of the progeny of the Atwater doctrine.

The only problem is I know full well what the strategy is behind it. I’ve worked in marketing and have known enough politicos to know that the conversation behind closed doors in the Clinton campaign is to crush the enthusiasm. They could care less if the voter turn-out in the remaining primaries was the lowest ever just so long as she won the nomination. They could care less if this entire generation that has come along with such passion lost its interest in the political process so long as the Clintons got their White House back.

That’s despicable.

All of this is also true of the McCain campaign.

That’s expected, but equally despicable.

Rather than trying to win over these new voters, they’re trying to make them go away. Their intentions make it quite clear to me that their time is past.

The Clintons are actually taking a page out of Rove’s manifesto: attack your opponent’s strenghth. For Kerry in 2004, it was his Viet Nam war record. Rove made secret deals with private organizations and the “Swift Boat” character assassination was born.

For Obama, the Clintons point out that he makes beautiful speeches. He must be trying to trick you. I’ll only write this about that. God forbid we should have a president who has a brilliant command of the English language and can get across his ideas and intentions with clarity as well as beauty. In other words, the Gettysburg Address was great but Lincoln was otherwise a moron.

Second is more annoying. I have heard the word “naïve” uttered several times on the news shows today.

I’ve been hearing the word creep up more and more. An individual I spoke with today used it in relation to Obama’s plan to get the troops out in 16 months. Even after I pointed out and offered evidence that some would argue that it was naïve to think that we were viewed as anything more than the next round of western European crusaders in that region and that even if we did stay there for a hundred years we would have about as much effect as all who came and attempted to stay before us.

Still the individual, a life-long Republican would not waiver from labeling Barack Obama as naïve. I was incredibly annoyed with this person until I realized that within the same conversation they had made the comment that Bush had every intention of reforming education until the war on terror sidetracked him.

Bush’s comments about reading Newspapers and what his favorite book was during the 2000 campaign were anything but pro-education. On one hand he supports education, on the other hand, he mocks it and under funds it.

He then puts almost every signer of the Neo Conservative document, “Project for a New American Century”, specifically the 1998 letter to Clinton, in his cabinet or makes them a trusted adviser.

I’m sure the plan for invading Iraq was a completely unseen diversion. I’m sure it came out of the blue.

But I digress…

Such flawed logic about my candidate being naïve coming from such a source would make me laugh except that that person has a vote. That person is more intelligent than my friend from 1988 yet just as susceptible to the grapeshot campaigns.

While false accusations of perversion were Allen's obstacle, condescension and false charges of naïveté were this individual’s.

American Government works best when it is a constant tug of war between what should be and what is. In my lifetime, what is has been on quite a winning streak. It’s time for what should be to get some. I began to lose touch with that in a backyard in Houston in 1988.

****

In the days since I started this entry, new attacks have been lobbed; plagiarism, emptiness of substance, and lack of patriotism. I can’t believe it’s only February. There was a time, not long ago, that primaries didn’t even start until now. When I think about how long it is until the general election and how much more of this there will be to slog through I start feeling a little bit of regret that I got involved in the first place.

Then I realize that’s the effect all of these attacks are meant to have and I can only imagine how they might affect all of these young people who have gotten so excited.

I can only come to one conclusion; if so much resistance is already building up against so much excitement, then what I am witnessing is one of those revolutions that Thomas Paine dreamed of. It is a revolution to be fought with ballots rather bullets. And the debt I owe to all those soldiers in the first revolution is that such a thing can be so and that my suffering is not the suffering of bloody footprints in diseased winter camps or of the horrors of the battlefield. The only sacrifice asked of me is the trivial one of standing up to lies and maintaining my enthusiasm for less than nine months and then making the commitment which is required of the vote I cast.


J.A.L.