Lott to Resign

What's worse is when someone creates a symbol or flag to represent their racist timeperiod and then other people wallow in the symbol to harken back on the racist timeperiod and then all of the rest of us criticize them for longing for that racist timeperiod.

how silly of us.

 

LOL, Achebe wants to hold politicians responsible for mistakes that they made in college. Of course, he says he is wrong about his decisions, denoting PERSONAL GROWTH.

He says he would vote differently today, denoting PERSONAL GROWTH.

Ok, I don't get the whole Jeff Davis thing either.

Gephardt met with the CCC, and asked for their votes. We don't seem to hear too much about this fact, do we? By the way, they are certainly not "klansmen in suits". Don't get hysterical please.

He said he was just trying to please an old man, and didn't mean that he still supported segregation, denoting PERSONAL GROWTH.

I wish that I could read minds, and see into men's hearts, just like you. You should charge money per session.

 

Wrong again. Denoting a WILD *SS LIE.

I have a great idea for you. Why don't you drape yourself in a Confederate flag and prance through the fourth ward. I am sure the locals would be very interested in your perspective. Let me know when you are ready to roll and I video tape the whole experience, so that you can cherish for years to come.

 

If Trent Lott did all this "personal growing" , then what exactly did he mean a couple of weeks ago? Or has he "grown" since then?

 

My deepest hope is the you do not rewrite history books for a living.

 

LOL

my 'narrow historical view' is nicely trumped by your ramblings. you're trying to obfuscate the fact that the republican rise in the South is indicative of little more than the South's biggest wart: bigotry.

I'm a native of South Carolina, by the way. You may remember us as "the sons a' b****es that started the Civil War". I have read SC's declaration of secession. You should too, rather than appealing to your rhetoric that 'sovereignty' and 'state-rights' explain the war. The state-rights in question were the rights to have slaves. It's the only thing she or any of the other states talk about when they declare that their constitutional rights were infringed upon (she also drops in a couple of points about Lincoln's intent w/ the slaves).

A previous poster nailed the notion that this 'state-rights' nonsense is just code. You guys play with those words as if they were written in the 10 commandments, but you completely dismiss them when it doesn't fit other portions of your platform.

You'll notice that in modern times this federal/state level bs is just based on the game being played. Where is it winnable, who am I trying to get donations from? etc. etc. pro-life groups fight federally, and they're getting the mat ripped out from up under them in state supreme courts. the mar1juana smokers are fighting for state initiatives and the conservatives wink to the federal government that will never let the law see the light of day.

 

NoWorries, I don't know why I even respond to you, because you never seem to have an educated opinion, and you are very rude.

I love taking the abuse of a good debate from many folks on this BBS on the other side of the political spectrum, but you just embarrass yourself.

From the recent BET interview-

Trent Lott- I have a high appreciation for him being a man of peace, a man that was for nonviolence, a man that did change this country. I've made a mistake. And I would vote now for a Martin Luther King holiday.

As for your suggestion that I wrap myself in a Confederate flag and go waltz through the 4th Ward, I would tell you to go screw yourself, but that is against the rules of the forum.

 

Achebe is absolutely correct here. This double standard is maddening, and it shows how "state's rights" is important to all kinds of people, depending on their personal agenda.

 

Puhlease!! The only reason Lott apologised is because he wanted to save his job. If the media had not latched onto the story you wouldn't have heard a squeek from Lott. Just like the first time he opened his big mouth.

Malcom X did not change his outlook in an attempt to save his job. He did not give a damn what people or the media thought. He became enlightened after a trip to Mecca NOT after the media lambasted him.

 

Giddyup, the New South denoted southerners who *rejected* the segregation and bigotry of their past. The Conferacy did not come into existence because of an arcane notion of the limits of federalism. The South thought Abraham Lincoln was going to take their "peculiar institution" away from them and they revolted. Simple as that. Read Shelby Foote sometime.

More pertinent to our discussion, the stars and bars of the confederacy was renewed on state flags in the South in the 1950's in response to the civil rights movement. You can't get around that, Giddyup. There is no historical continuity and meaning outside of rebellion and the maintainence of bigotry. Spin it all you like. Hitler gave us the autobhan and the VW, but the central focus of his regime wasn't public transportation, know what I mean? To remove the Confederacy and it's flag from the context of its reason for existence- the maintanence of slavery- is not only ashistorical it is willfully dishonest. Does the small percentage of white (and evidentally black) slaveowners change anything about the issue in 2002? I don't think so, Giddyup. If Trent Lott is suddenly a disgrace to Republicans, exploiting the issue of the Confederate Flag for political advantage six weeks ago should be as well.

You've worn me out...keep going on this thread without me.

 

giddyup and t4:

I hate to be the one to tell you, but you're out of step with your own party on all this. You're making yesterday's excuses and arguments, while your party's trying to move beyond them. Check your inbox. You may not have gotten the memo. These cutesy kinds of deflections will not fly anymore effective pretty much immediately, which is why Lott lost his job. He hadn't read the memos either. He believed, as most Democrats did and many still do, that this new language about inclusion was a dodge with a nod and wink. He was right in 2000. That's why McCain felt he had to disgrace himself on Bob Jones and the Confederate flag. His conscience won out in the end and he expressed regret for pandering to the old South. And he apologized for the cynicism with which he put forth the old sorts of arguments you're putting forth here.

The Republican Party has a dark recent history with regard to race. The Democrats have a dark earlier history. Nightline focused on this tonight. It was pretty good. Look. Almost all of us white folks come from racists. It's a drag, but we move past it by admitting the mistakes of the past, not by attempting to excuse them or dress them up with rhetoric about honoring Civil War soldiers or states rights. Bush knows this now. I'd encourage you to follow his lead.

Nightline featured a former member of the RNC. She's black. She left the party in 2000 over the Confederate flag stuff. She could no longer serve a party that was blatantly race baiting. And unless things change, more will follow. Regardless of the question of sincerity on race issues (I won't speculate), Bush knows this now. Most imporantly, Karl Rove knows it, so you won't hear any more arguments like the ones you've posted in this thread from prominent Republicans. They know the time for cuteness has passed. They know that to be a viable party in the future, they will have to appeal to minorities. The minority base is growing and, thankfully, the Southern racist vote is shrinking. Lott misjudged and when the music stopped all the chairs were full of former friends and colleagues singing "shame on you."

The Republicans know too not to get cute about Lott's "personal growth." They know he made the apologies grudgingly and only in order to maintain power. Further they resent him for compromising on affirmative action, a clearly cynical move, in order to appear reformed. But that's minor. Mostly they are ashamed that a person who so clearly supported causes antithetical to civil rights and hurtful to minorities, and so unabashed in his support of these wrongheaded people and causes as to believe his remarks were no big deal, was actually their Senate leader. While they were talking about inclusion, one of their leaders was musing about segregation. For the ninetieth time. And they were embarassed. Badly. You should be too.

They want to stop the bleeding. And they know they have work to do. And they know the old, cute deflections won't cut it anymore.

Lee Atwater had a near deathbed conversion and was efusive in his remorse over the Willie Horton thing, which he agreed was a blatant case of race baiting.

Both our major parties have a dark history. I think it's really great that the Republicans are joining the left in openly disdaining racism and policies which impede equal, civil rights for all Americans. It is not only okay to admit that the policies of the past, even carried out by our own respective parties, even recently, were both immoral and unpatriotic -- it is incumbent upon all of us to do so in order to move away from that dark past. And as long as you hang on to the deflections of the past, that can't happen. Bush gets this. You should too. That's all.

p.s. Happy 1,000th post to me.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15306-2002Dec19.html

Thurmond's GOP

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, December 20, 2002; Page A43


In all the denunciations of Sen. Trent Lott's after-the-fact endorsement of Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign, almost no one is talking about the principle on which Thurmond based his defense of segregation. The principle was states' rights.

And so it's not surprising that many Republicans are eager to shove Lott out of his job before this debate goes too deep. For all their attacks on Lott, most contemporary Republicans are just as committed as Lott is to states' rights doctrines.

This creates a problem. Most Republicans -- to their credit -- now embrace the civil rights laws of the 1960s. These laws, after all, were passed with significant support from such important Republican figures as Senate leader Everett McKinley Dirksen and Rep. Bill McCulloch.

But Dirksen, McCulloch and their allies were standing up for the old Republican tradition that defended the power of national government to promote equal rights. That tradition came under attack in 1964 when Republican nominee Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act in the name of states' rights, and also because he thought some of its anti-discrimination provisions violated property rights. As Republican Jack Kemp put it recently in a column: "The GOP went wrong in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, no racist, tragically voted against the Civil Rights Act out of misguided ideological purity." That phrase, "'ideological purity," is both accurate and instructive.

It was Goldwater's campaign, of course, that began the era of the Republican South. Post-Goldwater Republicanism swept in millions of States' Rights Democrats, as Thurmond's supporters called themselves, including an ambitious young Mississippian named Trent Lott. Goldwater carried only six states in 1964: South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Arizona. The first four of these had been the only states to vote for Thurmond in 1948. Apropos of some of Lott's comments, the overlap did not occur because Goldwater and Thurmond shared some views on national defense. At issue were civil rights -- and states' rights.

One can now hear Republicans groaning: "But that's ancient history and Lott is a problem because he's letting all our opponents dredge it up."

That sentence is true except for the part about ancient history. While most Republicans now support the old civil rights measures, they continue to cast themselves as the party of states' rights, and proudly so. Republican court appointees, from the Supreme Court on down, are busily fashioning a new jurisprudence that uses states' rights as grounds for overturning progressive national legislation. Already, for example, the courts have used states' rights to limit the reach of federal laws on behalf of the disabled and the environment. Where states' rights don't work to eviscerate national legislation, property rights are called in. Sound familiar?

Until Lott reminded us, here's what we had forgotten: States' rights doctrines were invoked in our history for purposes other than preserving the sanctity of state laws. As Grant McConnell put it in his classic book "Private Power and American Democracy," states' rights provided "the classic defense of the privileges enjoyed by local and other elites."

African Americans in the South are among the best-known victims of states' rights claims, but they were not alone in having to turn to the federal government to seek vindication for their rights. It also took federal power to advance the rights of workers (through the Wagner Act and wages and hours laws), to protect consumers and to guarantee the rights of small investors. Federal law protects the rights of women, the disabled and members of religious minorities.

Yes, it's good that many Republicans have come out against what Lott said. But it's significant that many of his earliest and most forceful critics were neoconservative former Democrats (Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol come to mind) who never shared the old states' rights faith. The first Republican senator to issue an outright call on Lott to quit was Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee, who, as his first name suggests, speaks from his party's oldest tradition of support for federal power.

But Lott's Republican critics who share his states' rights views on many contemporary matters need to explain why states' rights doctrines that were so wrong as a general proposition in 1948 are right today. If the federal government was right to overturn states' rights in defense of African Americans, why is it wrong now to view states' rights with a degree of suspicion and to continue to see the federal government as a bulwark for individual rights? Even if Lott is hustled off the stage, the question will still haunt his party.

 

Wrong! This is one of the great Gore myths the Right has spun since the 2000 election. (Another being that he claimed to have invented the Internet.) In one of 45 Dem debates that year, Gore challenged Dukakis to defend a Massachusetts furlough program under which convicts serving life sentences without hope of parole were released on weekend passes. In particular, Gore noted that two furloughed prisoners had committed new murders while on weekend leave. Willie Horton was not one of these convicts, as he committed rape on his furlough and not murder... do you think it's an accident that the GOP strategists picked rape by a black man rather than murder to highlight the Massachusetts program and slam Dukakis? (And yes, I think the program was wrong and indefensible... but that is a completely different topic and has nothing to do with the way the GOP made use of the issue.)

Gore never brought up the program again, never mentioned Willie Horton in discussions, speeches, or ads. Never created any visuals with Horton or any other criminal, and certainly never mentioned or implied race in the one criticism of the program. Gore did not bring up Willie Horton, only the general issue, which was a legitimate topic for an opponent to mention.

Bush campaign director Lee Atwater apologized for his own conduct in pushing the racial button through the Horton ads before he died. (A real deathbed conversion as opposed to Lott's.)

Here's one article of many out there talking about the outright denial of the right to vote based on directions from Republican office holders. (The company that the Florida secretary of state contracted with in 1998 to help purge the state rolls of ineligible voters is well connected to GOP circles. The chairman of the board of Database Technologies, now the DBT Online unit of ChoicePoint Inc. of Atlanta, was former astronaut and prominent Republican Frank Borman. Also on the board were billionaire Ken Langone, who was co-chairman of the fundraising committee for New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's US Senate race, and GOP funder Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot. Vin Weber is the company's lobbyist. The company says that it favors no party. )

___________

THE GREAT FLORIDA EX-CON GAME
How the “felon” voter-purge was itself felonious
Harper's Magazine
Friday, March 1, 2002
by Greg Palast

Between May 1999 and Election Day 2000, two Florida secretaries of state - Sandra Mortham and Katherine Harris, both protégées of Governor Jeb Bush- ordered 57,700 "ex-felons," who are prohibited from voting by state law, to be removed from voter rolls. (In the thirty-five states where former felons can vote, roughly 90 percent vote Democratic.) A portion of the list, which was compiled for Florida by DBT Online, can be seen for the first time here; DBT, a company now owned by ChoicePoint of Atlanta, was paid $4.3 million for its work, replacing a firm that charged $5,700 per year for the same service. If the hope was that DBT would enable Florida to exclude more voters, then the state appears to have spent its money wisely.

Two of these "scrub lists," as officials called them, were distributed to counties in the months before the election with orders to remove the voters named. Together the lists comprised nearly 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its African-American voters. Most of the voters (such as "David Butler,"; a name that appears 77 times in Florida phone books) were selected because their name, gender, birthdate and race matched - or nearly matched - one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States. Neither DBT nor the state conducted any further research to verify the matches. DBT, which frequently is hired by the F.B.I. to conduct manhunts, originally proposed using address histories and financial records to confirm the names, but the state declined the cross-checks. In Harris’s elections office files, next to DBT’s sophisticated verification plan, there is a hand-written note: “DON’T NEED.”

(More examples from the lists.)

Thomas Alvin Cooper, twenty-eight, was flagged because of a crime for which he will be convicted in the year 2007. According to Florida’s elections division, this intrepid time-traveler will cover his tracks by moving to Ohio, adding a middle name, and changing his race. Harper's found 325 names on the list with conviction dates in the future, a fact that did not escape Department of Elections workers, who, in June 2000 emails headed, “Future Conviction Dates," termed the discovery, "bad news.” Rather than release this whacky data to skeptical counties, Janet Mudrow, state liaison to DBT, suggested that “blanks would be preferable in these cases." (Harper's counted 4,917 blank conviction dates.) The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Some counties defied Harris' directives; Madison County's elections supervisor Linda Howell refused the purge list after she found her own name on it.

Rev. Willie Dixon, seventy, was guilty of a crime in his youth; but one phone call would have told the state that it had already pardoned Dixon and restored his right to vote. On behalf of Dixon and other excluded voters, the NAACP in January 2001 sued Florida and Harris, after finding that African-Americans—who account for 13 percent of Florida's electorate and 46 percent of U.S. felony convictions —were four times as likely as whites to be incorrectly singled out under the state's methodology. After the election, Harris and her elections chief Clay Roberts, testified under oath that verifying the lists was solely the work of county supervisors. But the Florida-DBT contract (marked "Secret" and “Confidential”) holds DBT responsible for “manual verification using telephone calls.” in fact, with the state’s blessing, DBT did not call a single felon. When I asked Roberts about the contract during an interview for BBC television, Roberts ripped off his microphone, ran into his office, locked the door, and called in state troopers to remove us.

Johnny Jackson Jr., thirty-two, has never been to Texas, and his mother swears he never had the middle name “Fitzgerald.” Neither is there evidence that John Fitzgerald Jackson, felon of Texas, has ever left the Lone Star State. But even if they were the same man, removing him from Florida’s voter rolls is an unconstitutional act. Texas is among the thirty five states where ex-felons are permitted to vote, and the "full faith and credit" clause of the U.S. Constitution forbids states to revoke any civil rights that a citizen has been granted by another state; in fact, the Florida Supreme Court had twice ordered the state not to do so, just nine months before the voter purge. Nevertheless, at least 2,873 voters were wrongly removed, a purge authorized by a September 18, 2000 letter to counties from Governor Bush's clemency office. On February 23, 2001, days after the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights began investigating the matters, Bush's office issued a new letter allowing these persons to vote; no copies of the earlier letter could be found in the clemency office or on its computers.

Wallace McDonald, sixty-four, lost his right to vote in 2000, though his sole run-in with the law was a misdemeanor in 1959. (He fell asleep on a bus-stop bench.) Of the "matches' on these lists, the civil-rights commission estimated that at least 14 percent - or 8,000 voters, nearly 15 times Bush's official margin of victory - were false. DBT claims it warned officials "a significant number of people who were not a felon would be included on the list"; but the state, the company now says, "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified." Last May, Florida's legislature barred Harris from using outside firms to build the purge list and ordered her to seek guidance from county elections officials. In defiance, Harris has rebuffed the counties and hired another firm, just in time for Jeb Bush's reelection fight this fall.

 

I want to go back to South Carolina.

I was there earlier this week, and SC has changed quite a bit. SC has almost entered the twentieth century (thanks Hodges, sorry they burned you for it).

ps, I forgot about this quote from Dukakis (re: the Willie Horton or Will he not get elected argument):

ooh buuuurrn!! court addddjourned!!


phaser burn.

 

From ABC News-

Bill Bradley’s latest attack on Al Gore accuses the vice president of playing the race card in his 1988 bid for the presidency, unwittingly giving Republicans the idea to use Willie Horton, a convicted murderer, as a divisive tool to defeat Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis.
“Gore introduced him into the lexicon,” Bradley insisted in an interview with the Boston Herald. “It bothers me a great deal … It proved in the course of the campaign to be a poster child for insensitivity.”
Horton is a black man who, after being convicted of murder, committed rape while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. Bradley contends that Gore’s primary campaign introduced Horton in an attempt to portray Massachusetts governor Dukakis, the eventual Democratic nominee, as soft on crime. George Bush, who defeated the governor in the general election, followed Gore’s lead and used Horton in controversial campaign ads against Dukakis.
How He Became a Household Name
Gore aides said Bradley was “off his rocker” and “coming unglued” to accuse the vice president of raising the Horton issue. The Gore campaign contends that he merely mentioned the general issue of prison furloughs at a New York debate and never uttered Horton’s name. But a Bradley spokeswoman responded that, given that Horton had been on the front page of so many New England newspapers in the weeks leading up to the debate, merely raising the issue was tantamount to mentioning him.
Dukakis himself told the Associated Press, “It’s unfair to attack Gore in this way because it just isn’t true.”
But Susan Estrich, who managed the Dukakis campaign, told AP that it didn’t matter whether Gore used Horton’s name because “he had become the symbol of the furlough problem well in advance” of the April 1988 debate.
“In political terms, it’s fair to say the Willie Horton issue was the furlough issue and the furlough issue was the Willie Horton issue. And, it had such racial overtones and was so divisive, frankly we were surprised when he raised it in the debate.”

 

Bradley was in a fight to stay as a credible candidate. Here's what he said away from the political environment in his 1996 book, Time Present, Time Past:

In 1988, the race card was played more subtly. The Bush presidential campaign skillfully linked the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, with a black man named Willie Horton, who had raped a woman and stabbed a man while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, where he had been serving time for murder. Oddly, the first politician to mention Horton (but without racializing it) was not Bush but Senator Al Gore. In the New York Democratic primary that spring, he attacked Dukakis for his prison-furlough program. The Republicans, though, emphasized Horton’s blackness.

Bradley is wrong on his facts--Gore never mentioned Horton--but his analysis is correct. This piece of writing, of course contradicts his statements about Gore made just before the NH primary.

Facts are, Gore raised the general issue once and never mentioned Horton or implied race. The GOP turned it into an attack with racist overtones and then tried to blame Gore for their actions.
_______________
From CNN.com:

... The exchanges over negative ads grew considerably more testy when Gore mentioned the Bradley campaign's involvement in the production of a flyer that documented Gore's criticism during a 1988 campaign appearance of a Massachusetts prison furlough program that resulted in the temporary release of the infamous felon Willie Horton, who committed rape and murder while on leave.

Gore, who never mentioned Horton by name during that appearance, was criticizing then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who was also running for the 1988 Democratic nomination. Dukakis was destroyed by Vice President George Bush in the general election. Bush had seized upon the Horton story, and used it to great effect against Dukakis.

The Bradley flyer was withdrawn quickly, and this campaign issued an apology.

"Sen. Bradley was the only one forced to offer an apology during this campaign. He brought Willie Horton into this campaign," Gore said.
______________
Commentary by Alan Simpson, Michael Dukakis, Chris Matthews
Decision 2000, MSNBC, 10/17/00

SIMPSON: Look at some of the hammers he threw at you in the [1988] debates. He brought up Willie Horton, that's a subject that hurt you badly, and Al Gore brought that up first, not George Bush.

DUKAKIS: That is not true—

SIMPSON: New York primary. There it was—

DUKAKIS: Alan, Al Gore never did what George Bush did on that issue and you know it.

MATTHEWS: I have to say it was not exactly true, what you said, Senator Simpson. It is true that Al Gore brought up the furlough program in Massachusetts, but he never gave it a personality of such ethnic strength as Willie Horton. He didn't do that.

SIMPSON: The issue was brought up first by Al Gore—

MATTHEWS: Right. The issue, but not the man.
__________________________
MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL STAR TRIBUNE: Who played the race card

Copyright © 2000 Nando Media
Copyright © 2000 Scripps Howard News Service

(March 8, 2000 12:01 a.m. EST http://www.nandotimes.com) - You remember Willie Horton, don't you? He was the poster boy of George Bush's successful presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis back in 1988. Horton, a menacing-looking black murderer, raped a Maryland woman and stabbed her fiance while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

Bush and his campaignmeister, the late Lee Atwater, used Horton to make Dukakis, the Massachusetts governor, appear soft on crime. A not-subtle suggestion, playing to a truly offensive stereotype, was that Dukakis would unleash the Hortons of the world on an unsuspecting American public - read black rapists unleashed on white women. Horton has become synonymous with "playing the race card" in presidential politics.

But who played that card first? If you listen to right-wing radio hosts, or to William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, or to Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, or to many other conservative pundits, it was Al Gore who introduced Horton during the 1988 primaries. So frequently has this "fact" been repeated that it most often goes unchallenged.

But it is wrong - not partly wrong, not slightly wrong, not merely mistaken, but viciously wrong.

Who says so? Well, of course, Al Gore for one. So does Michael Dukakis. But so did several Bush staff members, including Atwater. And so does the record. Even in these overheated presidential election years, the record ought to count for something. A certain interpretive political license is allowed partisans in the quadrennial battle, but there is no way that Al Gore's actions can be stretched to justify Kristol's Newsweek assertion that Gore is "the guy who introduced Willie Horton to the American public in his primary campaign against Michael Dukakis."

Here's what happened in 1988: During a primary debate in New York, Gore asked Dukakis about a program that involved "weekend passes for convicted criminals," noting that two murderers had killed again while on furlough. Dukakis was forced to admit that the program, which he inherited from a Republican predecessor, had been plagued with problems and finally canceled.

Writing in Slate magazine, Timothy Noah says, "Gore never mentioned that Horton was black; indeed, he never mentioned Horton by name. He merely drew attention, correctly, to the damaging fact that Dukakis had tolerated a furlough program for especially violent criminals in his state even after a horrific incident strongly suggested this was a bad policy."

Shortly after the debate, Gore dropped out of the race. End of story ... except that a Bush campaign researcher following the debate picked up on the issue and did some digging. Subsequently, an independent group put together an ad for Bush which challenged Dukakis' record on crime and included a picture of Horton. A Republican letter in Maryland pictured Dukakis and Horton together and asked, "Is this your pro-family team for 1988?"

Horton later told Playboy that Bush folks tried to get him to endorse Dukakis. In Illinois, a Republican leaflet asserted that, "All the murderers and rapists and drug pushers and child molesters in Massachusetts vote for Michael Dukakis." A "Meet Willie Horton" Bush mailing in New York included a picture of the inmate.

These efforts were parts of a larger Bush strategy - to suggest to American voters that Dukakis did not care about them because he was too liberal and too close to the black community.

It was cynical and divisive, and it worked very well. Perhaps Kristol is right in asserting that Gore can be a "mean" campaigner. But all the rewriting in the world cannot shift responsibility for Willie Horton from George Bush and Lee Atwater to Al Gore.
__________________________
From the Washington Post:

Question: Is it true that during the 1988 presidential campaign, Democratic hopeful Al Gore created the issue about prison furloughs which eventually led to the racist Willie Horton ads used by the Republicans against Michael Dukakis? – Elmore Lockley, Yorktown, Va.

Answer: Well, Gore was the first candidate to bring it up. During an April 1988 Democratic debate prior to the New York primary, he asked Dukakis about his state's program of "weekend passes for convicted criminals." Years later Gore insisted he raised the generic issue of furloughs without knowing anything (including the race) about Willie Horton, an African American and convicted murderer who took advantage of a Massachusetts weekend furlough program and raped a woman during Dukakis' tenure as governor. The Bush campaign later exploited the Horton issue to portray Dukakis as soft on crime, and an independent expenditure group went one step further and used Horton's picture in its ads, a tactic many claimed was racist. For the record, the furlough issue was first raised in January of '88 by a reporter for the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune.
_____________________

Michael Dukakis: Al Gore did not first bring up the Willie Horton issue for the first time in the 1988 campaign. The Massachusetts furlough program had been a controversial issue for a long time in my state. It was first implemented by a Republican governor. I tightened it up substantially, but that didn’t prevent Horton from doing what he did. Actually, the most liberal furlough program in the country in 1988 was the Reagan-Bush furlough program in the Federal prison system. They were furloughing people for up to forty-five days at a time, and one of their furloughs murdered a young, pregnant mother in the Southwest. Unfortunately, I never said that, and that was a pretty dumb thing to do.
__________________________

I could go on...