There’s something about years ending in “8” and evolving presidential campaign tactics and strategies.
During the 1948 race, television was a novelty, with fewer than 170,000 sets sold. Four years later, television was an American domestic staple, with more than 50 million sets in Americans’ homes. Starting with Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s smashing win in 1952, helped by the first presidential campaign television ads, candidates have to this day relied on the medium to reach voters.
Six decades later, social media jumped from the tech fringes in the 2008 race, to a must-use tactic four years later. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools were in their infancy, or at least toddler stages, in Barack Obama’s first successful presidential race. By 2012, President Obama and Republican rival Mitt Romney used social media tools aggressively, and both spent serious campaign resources on it. For 2020, Facebook is central to President Trump’s reelection strategy. It, no doubt, will be as well for the eventual Democratic nominee.
The 1988 presidential race falls squarely in this tradition as a bridge campaign, as John J. Pitney details masterfully in After Reagan: Bush, Dukakis, and the 1988 Election. Pitney, professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College, offers innovative and insightful perspectives on the three-decade-old contest, known until now as one of the most negative and vicious of the modern political era. But it’s a campaign which, compared to Trump-style win-at-all-cost politics, seems quaint and almost gentlemanly.
Vice President George H.W. Bush (then known just as George Bush) that year beat Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in a near-landslide. It was the last race of the Cold War era, in which us-vs.-them strategies against the Soviet Union took center stage.
And, Pitney notes, it was the last race in which the winner was considered truly legitimate by both sides. Each of Bush’s successors faced questions, some more outlandish than others, about whether they had come by the Oval Office honestly, including the racist conspiracy theory that Obama had been born in Kenya.
Also, the 1988 race was the final presidential campaign run strictly within the confines of old media. The three major broadcast networks and a handful of influential national newspapers dominated coverage. By 1992, cable television was more ascendant, while candidates increasingly sought ways to bypass the press outright, including Clinton’s saxophone-playing on The Arsenio Hall Show.
Pitney’s portrait of the 1988 race smartly sums up the negative touchstones for which it’s known. The Willie Horton ad and the Dukakis photo op in a tank are among the many episodes in the lore of negative campaigning given worthy coverage by the author.
On a lighter note, political junkies will enjoy cameo appearances by future newsworthy figures. A biographical sketch of Dukakis campaign manager Susan Estrich includes a mention of a future star-crossed Supreme Court nominee.
“Estrich was Harvard law professor who had been elected the first female president of the institution’s law review — a position for which she defeated classmate Merrick Garland,” Pitney writes.
In that same spirit, readers of a certain age will nod their heads at several cultural references enmeshed with presidential politics. For example, Pitney describes Democrats’ evolving ideology in the mid-1980s, made necessary through a series of stinging presidential defeats.
“The neoliberals were enthusiastic about high technology, which is why some called them the Atari Democrats, after the year’s top maker of video maker consoles. (The company later failed and buried many of its unpopular games in a mass grave.)”
Then, there’s 1984 presidential contender Gary Hart’s rise from small-town Kansas to U.S. senator and White House prospect — with the backing of professional class voters, the kinds currently being fought for vigorously by 2020 Democratic contenders Pete Buttigieg, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and others.
“Hart’s rural boyhood was something he had put behind him, and his core constituency consisted not of peasants with pitchforks but professionals with Peugeot’s,” a reference to a leading luxury vehicle brand at the time.
Amid the opening rounds of primary voting in the 2020 presidential race, and in the face of acrimonious impeachment proceedings, Pitney’s portrait of the 1988 election is a needed refresher on how presidential politics used to work. In that era, campaigns were run hard and tough, and then the governing began. That now seems so quaint.
