I just finished reading Ann Coulter's book from last year
Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama, and she has a good section about the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 presidential campaign. The candidates were VP HW Bush and Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis . It's been a full 25 years ago, but I still see the ad referenced on a regular basis. The usual claim from Democrats was that the ad was intended as a racist dog-whistle.
Willie Horton was a convicted murderer who had robbed a gas station, stabbed the teen cashier 19 times, and stuffed the body into a garbage can. The Mass. state supreme court had ruled that prison furloughs had to be given to first-degree murderers, a policy that no other state had. The state legislature "realized that the court's ruling was insane, and quickly passed a law prohibiting first-degree murderers from being furloughed." (p190)
Gov. Michael Dukakis vetoed the law. Because of the veto, Willie Horton was released for a furlough in 1987. While out, he broke into the home of a Maryland couple. He beat, stabbed, bound, gagged & blindfolded the man, and then proceeded to rape the man's girlfriend through the night. The man managed to escape early the next morning. Horton fled in the couple's car, and was captured by police after a shootout.
According to Coulter, the ad "destroyed Dukakis."
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ann Coulter
As one Dukakis aide saide to a reporter: "OK, you write our response to Willie Horton. You write the catchy phrase...What are we supposed to say? That Horton wasn't let out of prison, and that he didn't rape that woman?
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There were actually two versions of the ad. One was done by the Bush campaign. It didn't show Horton's photo, but showed a bunch of prisoners, mostly white, going in and out of a revolving door. Another ad produced by an independent group showed a photo of Horton. According to Coulter, it ran only on cable, which meant that in 1988, not very many people actually saw it. (both can be viewed on Youtube).
The Horton ad(s) are now generally regarded as classic racial demagoguery. I didn't know all these details, and had always assumed that maybe it was. Clearly it wasn't. It was a valid criticism of an insane policy that had disastrous consequences. Coulter calls it "the greatest ad in political history, a one sentence explanation of why people like Michael Dukakis should never be allowed to run any part of government."