George H.W. Bush was in trouble. It was July 1988 and Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate for president, was on a roll after his party’s convention in Atlanta. A Gallup poll showed Mr. Bush trailing by 17 points.
But he had a road map to victory.
One month earlier, Mr. Bush’s top aides had gathered to review a thick binder of polling and focus group data, finding that Mr. Dukakis’s record was not well-known and that some of his liberal positions, in particular supporting prison furloughs and opposing the death penalty, could swamp him in a general election.
The Bush campaign proceeded, as Lee Atwater, the campaign manager, put it, “to strip the bark off the little bastard,” beginning in force with Mr. Bush’s hammer of a speech at the Republican National Convention.
Mr. Bush not only overcame Mr. Dukakis’ summer polling advantage, but defeated him handily: by a margin of 53 percent to 46 percent.
In many ways, the Bush campaign of 1988 marked the birth of the modern-day negative campaign. Most memorably, Republicans plastered Mr. Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, with the case of Willie Horton, an African-American man who raped a white Maryland woman and stabbed her boyfriend while on a Massachusetts prison furlough program.
As President Trump faces similarly daunting poll deficits in his contest with Joseph R. Biden Jr., he is increasingly running one of the harshest campaigns since 1988, and Republicans preparing for their convention next week are looking back at that race as a beacon of hope in a bleak political landscape.
Mr. Trump and his political and media allies have torn into Mr. Biden and particularly his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, using racist and sexist attacks. There is a direct line between the hard-edge campaign Mr. Bush ran portraying Mr. Dukakis as a far-left liberal — and the racial undertones personified by seizing on Mr. Horton — and the Trump campaign that is emerging today.
“The problem for Trump is he has yet to find his Willie Horton, as it were,” said Susan Estrich, who was Mr. Dukakis’s campaign manager. “But he’s looking.”
(The New York Times)
