It’s been a while since we heard from Dukakis, the embodiment of the old impotent liberalism, soon to be plowed under by Bill Clinton’s leftism disguised as Third Way politics and Obama’s leftism disguised as racial grievance.
Dukakis’ campaign went down like the Titanic over a few very public moments. One of them was the tank photo, another was Willie Horton.
These days, Dukakis has a warning for Democrats. Don’t be like me.
A generation ago, Michael Dukakis saw his chances of winning the presidency crushed after Republicans cast him as soft on crime.
Now he is warning his party not to make the same mistake.
The “defund the police” movement is “nuts,” Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, told this column.
“I’m saying to myself, my God, what the hell is going on here?” Dukakis added during a 40-minute phone interview from his home in Brookline, Mass., late last week.
“On one hand, you have folks screaming and yelling about getting rid of policing, which makes no sense at all. And then on the other hand, you have some people totally misinterpreting what community policing is, just as we were really making huge progress,” he said.
How much sense did giving a murderer a furlough so he could rape make?
The column makes the usual false claim that the Willie Horton ad was racist. It wasn’t. But letting Horton out was as insane as defunding the police.
But it’s refreshing to see Dukakis make a comeback.
Low crime rates due to successful policing and incarceration got the country to the point of insanity where even Republicans ran as soft on crime and boasted of how many criminals they were freeing from prison.
The pendulum looks to be swinging the other way where even Democrats will have to run as tough on crime or be another Dukakis.
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