re: #332 Iron Fist

I was a kid when the Willie Horton issue came up, and had other things on my mind at the time, but wasn’t that originally brought up by Al Gore in the primaries?

Now, also as I recall it, Dukakis did support the furlough program that Horton was released under. Is there really anything controversial there? I fail to see it.

In the ads over James Byrd, the Democrats explicitly implicated George Bush as an accessory after the fact because he didn’t support special hate crimes legislation. This despite the fact that Texas put two of the three men involved to death. As Bush raised in one of the debates, they killed the men who dragged Byrd to death (with the exception of life in prison for the one who turned state’s evidence). What more could they do?

I’ll ask you that question. What more could they do?

The controversey was Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton commercial where Horton, a black man, was made to look darker. Whether or not blaming Dukakis for Horton was fair, using the darkened image of Horton was done for a purpose, and it wasn’t to enlighten people as to the details of Massachusetts furlough program. As I recall in Ed Rollins (the Reagan and then Bush operative) book, Atwater apologized to Dukakis on his deathbed for some of his attacks during that campaign. I can’t remember if he was specifically apologizing for the Horton ad.