Hillary Clinton has been putting herself forward as the carefully reasoned candidate, behaving in calm contrast to the shoot-from-the-hip (and often shoot-in-the-foot) emotionalism of Donald Trump. Clinton’s camp is convinced this strategy will win her the election. But it may actually be the thing that loses it for her.
With the debates approaching, it’s worth remembering the last presidential hopeful who defined himself as the candidate of Spock-like rationality: Michael Dukakis. As the governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis prided himself on his technocratic bona fides. “This election is not about ideology,” Dukakis said at the Democratic convention in the summer of 1988, “it’s about competence.” None of this passion nonsense for Mike. It was, with him, a point of pride—the sort that comes before a fall.
The fall came October 13, that election year, at the beginning of the second debate between Dukakis and Vice President George H.W. Bush. CNN’s Bernard Shaw famously came out of the gate asking how Dukakis would respond to a brutal assault on his wife: “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
Mike was cucumber-cool.
“No I don’t, Bernard. And I think you know I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent. And I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.” Dukakis smoothly went right into the technocrat’s favorite mode of dispassionate discourse: statistics. “We’ve done so in my own state. And it’s one of the reasons we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in America—why we have the lowest murder rate of any industrial state in America.”
And on he went, imperturbable, right into his talking points about how to fight the war on drugs: “I want to call a hemispheric summit just as soon after the 20th of January as possible.” That’s right: He responded to a question about what he would do were his wife raped and murdered by bloodlessly asserting he would “call a hemispheric summit.”
When Dukakis’s two-minute answer was done, his campaign was done. Just to be certain, Vice President Bush stuck a fork in him, expressing the outrage—”heinous” was the emotionally charged word Bush used—and resolve about the hypothetical crime against Kitty that her husband hadn’t been able to muster.
Hillary faces the same risk at next week’s debate. Like Dukakis, she not only fancies herself the candidate of careful, deliberate reason, she’s quite pleased with herself for it—a prideful trap. If asked how she would react to killers attacking Americans, Clinton will want to contrast herself with her loose-cannon opponent. She will want to show off her mastery of the policy details. She will want to demonstrate her judicious and scrupulous commitment to the legalistic niceties. She will want to detail her experience in dealing with pressing international problems. And along the technocratic way, she may forget to mention, and fail to convey, that terrorism is heinous.
In other words, she may pull a Dukakis.
