I have to admit I never saw the Willie Horton ad — but I heard it on the radio. It seemed like a pretty fair criticism at the time — as I recall the issue, Dukakis was giving weekend passes to murderers. Was that not something we should have known about his administration? I don’t remember the story about the Dukakis flag-burning — sounds juicy.

But, look, the real innovation of Billy Jeff Clinton was the permanent ‘war room’ mentality. Once Bush 41 was elected in 1988, the campaign was over. He went back to work devising bipartisan legislative strategies, as Republican Presidents from Eisenhower on had had to do. He even worked with the Democrats on the disastrous tax increase that doomed his Presidency — and he got bipartisan support to kick Hussein out of Kuwait. I don’t recall a lot of vituperation and mischievous ruination of people’s careers — although perhaps I am being naive about the machinations that resulted in the fall of John Tower and Jim Wright.

But Clinton saw Bush’s failure to continue campaigning as the reason it was so easy to pick him off in ‘92. (At least, that’s the charitable explanation. The conventional wisdom in the Mid-South is that Billy Jeff is a real SOB and a cutthroat pol — which is fine if you’re his buddy and not so fine if you’re not.) Clinton was in permanent search-and-destroy mode even before he took office and is still in that mode today (as I recall, he tried to tie Obama to Jesse Jackson during the primaries and whined about the race card being payed on him). The wins in ‘92 and ‘96 didn’t change that fact, and after ‘98 it probably saved his bacon. (Though, ironically, had Clinton stepped down it is likely Al Gore would be President today. Providence works in mysterious ways.)

So, yeah, I blame Clinton.

BBB

You mean like in 1988 with the Willie Horton ad, President Reagan’s joke that Michael Dukakis was an “invalid”, and the made-up story that Dukakis’s wife had burned a flag?