Dukakis Gives Advice to Obama: Obama Gets it?

Bizarro world strikes again! From the Boston Globe, via memeorandum:

Former Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, the failed 1988 presidential nominee, recently visited the White House and delivered his strategy for the midterm elections: pound key precincts across the country with the message that Republicans want to implement the same policies that led to the Great Recession.


Asked if the White House aides were receptive, he said, "I think they certainly get it." He declined to name the aides he met at the White House.

Nope, this isn't a story pulled from the Onion- this is an honest case of a clear loser telling another soon-to-be loser how to run a losing campaign. Oh, and Obama gets it- the Democrats in general are now all running on the 'blame Bush' strategy, even though they've controlled Congress for 4 years and the White House for 2. I'm rather optimistic that voters won't fall for this sort of garbage in the coming elections, and the result for Obama and the Democrats will be similar to what it was back in 1988.

Time-travel back to 1988 by going to The Living Room Candidate. If you haven't checked out this website before, it is an excellent repository of all of the campaign commercials the major candidates ran on television during their campaigns for the President. As you can see by clicking on the 'Election Year' and '1988' tabs, Dukakis ran one of the worst campaigns ever, by sounding a message that was both negative and boring. Not sure if you have been paying attention to old BoBo the Clown, but that's what he increasingly sounds like too.

Many people foget about Micheal Dukakis when discussing politics, but he was the nominee for President for the Democratic Party in 1988 and as such he shouldn't just be dismissed. His record as Governor and his campaign for President both are enlightening, and I've written about them before on this blog. As a curiously, 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.

But then as I thought about it further, I realized that Barack Obama is Micheal Dukakis, which I elaborated on in my post Obama is Dukakis? Smack JSM's Campaign Manager Around!

Both Obama and Dukakis are 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? George H.W. Bush 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.

Yup, back then GHWB knew how to hammer away at a candidate like Obama running a negative 'blame the guy before me' campaign. Hopefully the next GOP candidate for President will learn that lesson too.

UPDATE: The code of conduct on Bizarro world is "Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!". In one episode of the comics, for example, a salesman is doing a brisk trade selling Bizarro bonds: "Guaranteed to lose money for you". Yup, sounds like Dukakis advising Obama on how to run the United States of America.