Obama is Dukakis? Smack JSM's Campaign Manager Around!

In Massachusetts Miracle I wrote:

I found this fun fact about Dukakis on wikipedia- Soon after his loss in the 1988 Presidential election to George Herbert Walker Bush, the so-called 'Massachusetts Miracle' of prosperity also went bust, and Michael Dukakis was little more than a 'lame duck' Governor for his final two years in office. At the close of his tenure, Massachusetts was mired deeply in debt facing a budget shortfall of more than $1.5 billion.

Barack Obama is Micheal Dukakis.

From the Weekly Standard's Duking It Out: The Dukakis administration that never was:

As Barack Obama sees his ratings descend toward the high 30s, he is increasingly described as the second coming of James Earl Carter Jr., whose presidency, gone but hardly forgotten, lives on in masochists’ minds. The comparison is unkind and not quite on target: This is less Carter II than the lost presidency of Michael Dukakis, which seemed a sure thing at this date 22 years ago, and from which we were saved by the elder George Bush.

Of course, no one thought Dukakis could be the messiah, but in other ways the connections are strong: both creatures of the liberal Northeast and of Harvard, with no sense at all of most of the rest of the country; both rationalists who impose legalistic criteria on emotion-rich subjects; both with fixed ideas of who society’s victims are, which do not accord with the views of the public; and both with a tin ear for the culture and a genius for creating wedge issues that split their own party.

So what happened? If Obama is Dukakis, how did Obama win while Dukakis lost? It is time, boys and girls, for a little lesson in "How to Run a Campaign and How Not to Run a Campaign: Comparing HWB with JSM."

Let's take a look at one of my favorite websites, The Living Room Candidate. This website contains all the major campaign advertisements that were run on television from 1952 to today. They are sorted by year, theme, issue, etc. This is a great website because in watching it you learn one of the most important facts about being elected- it doesn't matter how good the candidate is, it only matters how good a campaign they run.

In 1988, Dukakis had a 17-point lead in mid-summer, lost to Bush by 8-points in the fall. What caused that 25 point swing? Probably some of the most brutal campaign advertisements you'll ever see (aside from LBJ). When I show these ads to my students, they gasp in shock at how utterly punishing those ads were, and when you're showing a crowd of high-school kids these ads for the first time in their life, they are a good judge of whether they are effective or not. When I ask them what they think about GWB's ads, they say "there is no coming back from those for Dukakis." What was so brutal and effective about GWB's campaign advertising? Back to the article...

It was a campaign that quite openly exploited primitive racial-sexual fears. More subtly .  .  . the Bush campaign exploited nativist prejudice. .  .  . Dukakis is not an American, Dukakis is different, this was the unwholesome subtheme that tied together the pledgehammer assault. .  .  .

That's right- GHWB capitalized on the fact that Dukakis wasn't 'American', didn't like saluting the flag, blamed America for everything (later on Dukakis blames America for 9/11), and didn't reflect the values that made America great. GWB hammered away at how Dukakis was simply an elitist, no-nothing, Harvard-educated liberal who was purely smoke-and-mirrors and who, if put in charge of our nation, would never make the hard tough choices that have to be made. If you don't believe me, watch some of the ads yourself- check out at the website the ads "Tank Ride," "Revolving Door," and "Willie Horton." There is no coming back from those body blows that GWB inflicted on Dukakis.

On the other hand, for some reason John McCain didn't run a brutal, hard-hitting campaign that called Obama's policies, judgement, and character into question. He didn't go after Obama for his church, he didn't attack him for his terrorist friends, he didn't call into question his 'Americanism', he didn't question his patriotism, he didn't attack his naive views, he steered away from questioning his lack of experience, and he didn't attack Obama for his elitist schooling. On every major important point that McCain could have capitalized on, he pulled back, and only gently batted Obama around a bit. Oh, he hints here and there about stuff, but nothing smacks you in the gut with the full brutal face of a real battle that Obama could have brought against Obama. If you don't believe me, watch the ads yourself, and lick at the kitty milk that JSM poured playfully on Obama- see the ads "Celeb," "Education," and "Storm" for examples of how weak and unfocused the attack on Obama by JSM was.

So, I guess we have whoever ran GWB's campaign in 1988 to thank from saving us from the mess that we find ourselves in today, and we have whoever ran JSM's campaign in 2008 to thank for us finding ourselves in the mess that we are in today (may that person be smacked around by milk jugs). Oh, of course if McCain was President we would have had a recession, and Democrats in Congress likely would have passed bloated budgets, but likely the national debt would have only exploded by a trillion or two a year, unlike what has happened now, and likely Iran would not be happily building a nuke to nuke Jews, and probably a mosque wouldn't be being built at Ground Zero, and likely we'd be emerging from the 'Bush recession' rather than already starting the 'Obama Depression.'