The GOP and Willie Horton: Together again

A question for Jeb Bush. And this one isn’t about his brother. It’s about his father.

Now that we know whether Jeb would have launched his brother’s invasion of Iraq — yes, I don’t know, I’m not saying, and no — I want to know if Jeb would have launched his father’s campaign against Willie Horton.


Some might consider that an unfair question. But I don’t think there are unfair questions for a presidential candidate, even an unannounced one.

Further, the 1988 presidential campaign pitting George H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis and the use of race to transform a losing campaign into a winning one is back in the news.

The Bush campaign was run by Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, a Good Cop/Bad Cop team — except nobody was the Good Cop. They were both tough as hell, political knife fighters and proud of it.

Atwater was the campaign manager, Ailes was the media wizard, and Bush was merely the candidate.

And the candidate wasn’t doing that great a job.

Dukakis had built up a 17-percentage-point lead during the summer, and Atwater was afraid the lead would become insurmountable.

So the Bush campaign went on the attack. It had all the usual stuff like taxes and defense, but it also had Willie Horton.

Horton was serving a life sentence without parole in Massachusetts for killing a man. He got a weekend furlough, fled and made his way to Maryland, where he broke into a home, tied a man to a joist in the basement, slashed his chest and stomach with a knife, then beat and raped the man’s fiancée.

Horton was black. The couple was white. And Michael Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts.

(Al Gore had first brought up the furlough issue in a Democratic primary debate in April 1988, though he didn’t use Horton’s name. But, contrary to what Atwater later claimed, the Bush campaign did not get the idea from Gore. It had an attack team gathering information on Horton well before Gore did.)

Atwater was an expert on Southern politics and knew just what he was doing when he unleashed the Horton attack.

So did the Dukakis campaign. As Susan Estrich, the Dukakis campaign manager, would write: “There is no stronger metaphor for racial hatred in our country than the black man raping the white woman. If you were going to run a campaign of fear and smear and appeal to racial hatred you could not have picked a better case to use than this one.”

But how could George H.W. Bush, a Yankee Brahmin, a patrician known for his courtly manners and good nature, be persuaded to go along with such an attack?

Atwater held a series of focus groups in an office in a shopping mall in Paramus, New Jersey, and then went to the Bush family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, with the results: Tell Dukakis voters about Willie Horton and they stopped being Dukakis voters.

Atwater told Bush: “We’re 17 points back and they’ll pick up 10 more points at their convention and we won’t win. Even with a good campaign, we won’t win. You can get so far behind that even a good campaign won’t win it for you.”

And Bush’s response?

“After that,” Atwater said, “it was an easy sell.”

A group supporting Bush ran a Willie Horton ad and then the Bush campaign put up its own ad, not using the face or name of Horton, but using footage of prisoners going through a revolving door.

The voice-over said that Dukakis had granted furloughs to prisoners who went on to kidnap and rape. “Now, Michael Dukakis says he wants do for America what he has done for Massachusetts,” the voice said ominously. “America can’t afford that risk.”

Ailes was asked how his ad made people feel about Dukakis. “They’re afraid of him,” Ailes said.

Bush also did his part. He used Willie Horton’s name in a speech in Louisville to the National Sheriffs’ Association. “Horton applied for a furlough,” Bush said. “He was given the furlough. He was released. And he fled — only to terrorize a family and repeatedly rape a woman!”

The media were complicit. They used a menacing photo of Horton over and over again. They said their hands were clean because they were merely reporting what Bush was saying.

Bush won by nearly 8 percentage points.

Today, 1988 is being revisited. Will Rabbe, a producer of MSNBC’s “Hardball,” has made a documentary called “Above the Fray: The Lessons of Dukakis ’88.” And last week, the Marshall Project, a nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice issues, published a lengthy piece on the 1988 campaign, pointing out how Willie Horton-style ads have been making a comeback in American politics.

In 2008, the Mitt Romney campaign shelved a Horton-style ad attacking Republican rival Mike Huckabee because the Romney people were worried it was too negative.

But will candidates shelve anything in 2016? Will there be such a thing as too negative in 2016?

So let’s pose this question to the current Republican field, announced and unannounced:

Knowing what you know now, would you have unleashed the Willie Horton attack as George H.W. Bush did?

OK, Jeb, let’s start with you. And then let’s move on to the media.

Roger Simon is chief political columnist for POLITICO.