George H W Bush vs Michael Dukakis - 4 November 1988

Well, it’s all over, or nearly so, to the vast relief of everybody. That is not a happy thing to say at the end of a presidential campaign, it usually rouses the best, and the worst, instincts of the voters but also galvanises their beliefs about what government is and ought to do.

This time there is little evidence that the voters have felt much passion about the enormous issues that face the country. It’s been recorded in scores of polls and surveys that the prevailing popular emotion, if there can be such a thing, is anger. Or disgust, with the way both candidates have let themselves be imprisoned by advertising men, who dictate what the two men ought to feel and allow these mostly chiding infantile feelings to be dramatised, crudefied in 15 or 30-second television commercials.

What Mr Bush has successfully done more than Governor Dukakis is to pick on some political position of his opponent, simplify it to the point of absurdity and then slam the point home in a half-truth, an evasion a downright lie. They have both done it but Mr Bush's men have been more glib, conscienceless and effective.

I will give you just one or two examples and then we move on to what I believe are the real reasons for what appears this weekend to be an inevitably Bush victory. It’s a fact that, for some time, Mr Dukakis as governor of Massachusetts has run a prison furlough system. It’s been highly successful and it's only one of the measures that has helped Massachusetts to boast the lowest crime rate of an industrial state.

And, to have the annual conference of the 50 governors choose Mr Dukakis as the most effective governor in the country, now this, you might say, is a pretty powerful credential for any man starting the presidential campaign. Yet I doubt that one voter in ten knows about it.

What every voter who watches television must know by now is the name and the face in a police photograph of one Willy Horton, a convicted murderer in Massachusetts who on a weekend furlough, raped a woman and stabbed her boyfriend. The case of Willy Horton is a gruesome exception, to an otherwise successful experiment, but the whole country knows about it because the producers of the Bush TV commercials have plastered the Horton face all over our screens with brief brutal sentences warning the people that, in Massachusetts, rapists and murderers go free.

In one shot, they are moving through a revolving door, on their way out to the streets and a crime spree. In another, Mr Bush says that the governor's last words to a prisoner going off on furlough is "Have a nice weekend".This scary message has been slammed at us without hesitation and without apology or reservation.

It has, in the chill lingo of television producers, worked. For if there is one social emotion that unites most city dwellers and suburbanites, from New York to Los Angeles, it is the nagging fear of random crime on the streets by day, and stealthy crime on the empty streets by night.

Mr Dukakis’s team has not, to its credit, come up with anything so callous or devious. It has, equally, simplified issues but not at the expense of Mr Bush, rather as a way of suggesting that the Republican positions on crime, drugs, abortion are not solutions.

In one commercial, Mr Dukakis gave a properstrously high percentage of people who live exclusively on welfare. On drugs, Mr Dukakis again, does to dramatise the success of his Boston experience, he just keeps raging at Mr Bush for having done nothing to enforce economic sanctions against General Noriega, the dictator of Panama who is, without doubt, one of the main suppliers of illegal drugs to the United States.

Failed economic sanctions is not so rousing a campaign slogan, as Mr Bush’s all-out war to smash the drug lords. On other matters, Mr Dukakis has hedged his broadcast messages according to which states they are being played in. In Maryland, which has a gun control law, Mr Dukakis has a short, sharp message supporting gun control in principal but in Texas – one of the four or five big electoral prizes – a state which has as many weekend sportsmen as any state in the nation, the Dukakis message conveys that there is nothing un-American about deer hunting with guns.

Even when Mr Dukakis’s commercials are positive, revealing to us a manly side of the governor we had not known about, they frequently misfire. We had one memorable, faintly ludicrous, shot of the governor, a small figure almost unrecognisable in full military gear, peeping out a huge lumbering tank.

This was meant to show that Mr Dukakis too, is strong on defence, but the Bush team snapped it up, used the same picture, with its own menacing voiceover line, "Now he wants to be commander and chief, can America take the risk?"

In all the campaign speeches they have, so-called debates, Mr Bush, his wimp image long obliterated, has come over as downright, pungent and unfair. Mr Dukakis has been reasonable, complaisant and lacklustre. And because of the power of television to overwhelm rational argument, and replace it with memorable emotion, I am afraid the debates will be remembered for single moments of passion, or embarrassment.

I should guess that Mr Dukakis lost legions of votes in the moment that he answered one ghastly question put to him in the second and final debate with Mr Bush. He was asked what he would do by way of forgoing the death penalty if tomorrow night his wife, Kitty, were raped and murdered.

I assumed he would at once rise with anger, and say something like, "I refuse to answer such an appalling tasteless question. Ask me about why I am again the death penalty, as public policy but I will not speculate on what my private feelings might be in the agony of the ordeal you have so kindly proposed." No, he stood there like a mechanical doll with his head on springs, smiling inexplicably, and went on to talk about drugs. And appropriate penalties.

In the final weekend the Dukakis team, the managers, regional advisors, television and radio producers, are asking each other what went wrong by which they mean, what different line of commercials might have worked – should the governor have matched Bush's slanders with equally vivid slanders?

They are talking about technique; there are even Dukakis campaign advisors who whine that the governor is unknown to the people. Unknown? He has been up and down the country and on television for over 20 months.

The truth is, he is known and he comes across now, as he did in the beginning as a fair, decent, thoughtful man. With all the inspirational gift of a golf club treasurer. But mainly, a man caught between his real beliefs and his private knowledge that those beliefs, the old strong liberal convictions of the Democratic party, will not go over in a nation that is more solidly conservative than at any time, since the 1920.

This split between what he would like to say and dare now is, I believe, at the route of his ordeal. There is nothing peculiar or personal about this split, it affected three of the four previous Democratic candidates, George McGovern, Walter Mondale and, yes, Jimmy Carter. They were, for good or ill, the chosen democratic leaders at a time when the country was slowly losing its faith, in the Roosevelt liberal revolution, in the tax-and-spend policies of the New Deal and Truman’s Fair Deal.

The Reagan revolution turned the country round, as forcibly as Franklin Roosevelt turned it round after the complacent years of the Coolidge prosperity. Throughout the 1930s it was the Republican party that fought the idea of social security, that fought the right of trades unions to bargain collectively, that fought every social programme of the New Deal.

By the mid-40s they had given up their attack. The Republicans said, "Of course we are all for these fine things, but we would manage them better". They had become the me-too party. Today, the Democrats have no energising policy of little threats; they are now the me-too party.

So Mr Dukakis has to say, of course, I am for a strong defence and low tax rates, but I manage them more competently. And when he is accused by Mr Bush of being a liberal, instead of saying "Of course I am a liberal in the great civilising Western tradition of 200 years, in the mould of Wilson and both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman," he spent two months ducking the word, and then, embarrassingly, confessed as if a liberal were a secret drinker.

It was not Ronald Reagan alone who turned the country round, it was starting way back when Richard Nixon broke the Democrats firm grip on the south. Carter saved a state or two but in 1980, the whole south 97 electoral votes went for Reagan, and again in 1984. The old solid south is now the Republican solid south. It’s an immense hurdle for any Democrat to leap on his way to 270 votes.

There are two other things which I take to be the decisive factors in determining the outcome. They are not deep secrets filched from political proposals they are there, they have been there for all to see, for two months. I carry them around with me on two slips of paper, one is the latest table on income taxes, jobs, revenue, put out by the bureau of labour statistics.

The other is a late survey, by the national journal of statistics, of voter registration in five of the biggest states, which reveals that in New York, Texas, Pennsylvania and less surely in California and Illinois, the registration of Democrats has slumped drastically since 1984, when, you recall, Mr Mondale captured only one state and the district of Columbia.

As for the seemingly dry-as-dust tables of the bureau of labour statistics, they show that Reaganomics did work in one powerful way – never mind the deficit, which to most people is a vague abstraction – lowering tax rates did bring in millions of new jobs, and therefore millions of new tax payers and produced $250billion, more revenue, since 1983. And, that unemployment is lower than in any country of western Europe. That more adults are at work, in proportion to the total population, than at any time in 200 years. And, that this administration has created 18 million more jobs, more than Europe and Japan combined.

In short, in a brutal short sentence, the test in any general election is how many voters are quietly saying, "I am all right, Jack". I suspect there are many. Many more millions than the Democrats care to count.

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