If the notorious Willie Horton ad must be referenced every time the news media mention former president George H.W. Bush, who died last week, there should at least be a real explanation about the connection. Bush was pointing out the consequences of his Michael Dukakis’ insane policy of giving holidays from prison to the most worst convicted criminals.
New York Times liberal writer Frank Bruni, in a column published Tuesday that was intended to be semi-favorable toward Bush, called the Horton ad “despicable.” A Washington Post item on Monday attempted to explain how the 1988 Horton ad “factors into George H.W. Bush’s legacy,” describing it as “one that stoked racial stereotypes…” The popular left-leaning Vox website said the ad “will always be the reference point for dog-whistle racism.”
“It was widely condemned for playing on racial fears by featuring a black man’s mug shot and linking blackness with depravity,” Vox said.
In fact, the “Horton ad” is actually just shorthand for “turning crime into a campaign issue that proved irrefutably effective.” Liberals and the media have for decades succeeded in making it about race.
Before the famous TV ad — which, by the way, was actually produced by a PAC supporting Bush — Bush had already been talking about Horton. But he wasn’t the first. The first reference to the tragic story of Willie Horton’s release came in a Democratic primary debate. Sen. Al Gore, D-Tenn., a candidate, challenged then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis on “weekend passes for convicted criminals.”
The Marshall Project, which studies crime, described the context of the time the ad was released: “The Horton ad caught the country at a time of rising crime, fear verging on panic, and a political climate in which Republicans and Democrats competed to prove their tough-on-crime credentials.”
The Bush campaign snatched the opportunity to show Dukakis was hopelessly weak on crime. Massachusetts’ weekend passes from prison, otherwise known as “furloughs,” were given out to convicted criminals, even criminals sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, allowing them to leave and return on weekends.
After Dukakis became the Democrats’ nominee, the Horton ad aired, describing the horrific rape that Horton committed while on furlough. He traveled to Maryland and broke into the home of Clifford and Angela Barnes. Horton tied Clifford to a pole in a basement, stabbed him, then raped Angela at gunpoint. The Horton ad described the incident, showed Horton’s mugshot in black and white and the narrator closed saying, “Weekend prison passes: Dukakis on crime.”
Everything in the ad was factual. It’s never been challenged for its accuracy, although I should add that it left out the important detail of why Horton was imprisoned to begin with. He had been convicted of murdering a 17-year-old service station worker. In the midst of a robbery, he stabbed the boy multiple times before throwing his body in a trash receptacle.
Today, the Horton ad is portrayed as a racist “dog whistle” on every front, often by people that I doubt have ever watched it. They find fault with everything, right down to the decision to call Horton “Willie.”
“No one ever referred to William Horton as ‘Willie’ before Republicans started doing it in 1988,” wrote liberal Washington Post columnist and amateur etymologist Paul Waldman.
Political scientists Claire Jean Kim of the University of California said the ad was intended to imply that, “If you elect Gov. Dukakis as president, we’re going to have black rapists running amok in the country.”
Well, maybe there would be rapists running amok, but no one said they had to be black.
So devastating was the Horton incident to Dukakis’ chances that even the New York Times acknowledged that the furlough program posed “a serious threat” to his campaign. The piece quoted Angela Barnes, Horton’s rape victim, rebutting Dukakis’ defense of the program: “Who ever said I was an acceptable statistic?” she said.
Dukakis lost the election, probably because Bush had made Horton and Dukakis’ furlough program central to the campaign. Democrats and liberals don’t hate it because it was racist. They hate it because it was true, and because it worked.
