Cleaning up loose ends from last week’s coverage of the death of former President George H.W. Bush, Carl Cannon of RealClearPolitics today destroys the idea that the famous Bush advertisement featuring rapist-murderer Willie Horton was racist. Eddie Scarry persuasively argued in this space last week that the real reason liberals still resent the ad is “because it was true, and because it worked.” In the same vein, Cannon delves into detail on the actual history of the two Willie Horton ads that graced our TV screens in 1988.
The subject had arisen in the campaign, quite naturally, because the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune had won a Pulitzer Prize that very year for reporting on the Horton case. It would have been campaign malpractice not to use the issue against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, who was partly responsible for the furlough program that had allowed Horton to go free and rape. As Cannon notes, the Bush campaign itself did not feature a photo of Horton, and purposely de-racialized its own ad on the subject.
The ad that most people now call racist — the one with Horton’s photo — was aired by an outside group headed by conservative activist Floyd Brown. As Cannon notes, even Dane Strother, who later became a Democratic campaign consultant, disagreed with this characterization of the ad as racist.
But let me add this coda: The same Floyd Brown who produced the supposedly racist Horton ad was the guy who produced the single best commercial ever aired against ex-KKK leader David Duke. Recall that Duke actually was within the polling margin of error in a 1991 runoff election for governor of Louisiana. Duke was at the time trying to sell the media on a message that racism was in his past, and that he now was just a conservative running against the “establishment.” Campaigning against noted scofflaw and former governor Edwin Edwards, Duke had convinced a lot of voters that Edwards’ corruption was worse than Duke’s racist past.
Those of us fighting against Duke, however, knew that Duke was playing on economic fears in a Louisiana that had not enjoyed the same boom times most of the country had. Duke’s opponents needed a way to turn around “the economic issue.”
Then, out of the blue, came Brown, who was heading up the Republican Challengers Committee. He created one of the best ads I’ve ever seen. It featured a Texan in cowboy boots bragging that once Louisiana elected Duke, the only responsible businesses that had not already moved to neighboring Texas would soon do so, taking even more jobs away from Louisianans and wrecking what was left of Louisiana’s economy.
Complete with Texas drawl, Texas swagger, and the reality that many Louisianans truly did envy Texas and its economic successes, the ad was a master stroke. It hit Duke’s working-class constituency like a gut punch. That ad, combined with a couple of other major campaign developments at the same time, helped turn that race around. From a virtual dead heat in polling, Duke fell back three weeks later to a 61-39 landslide loss.
Thank goodness, and thank Floyd Brown.
Just because Brown helped beat David Duke doesn’t mean he couldn’t have been capable of using deliberate racial overtones in an ad three years earlier. But considering all the other circumstances noted by Cannon, it certainly adds circumstantial evidence that the use of the Horton issue really was about crime as advertised, not about race. And that is why, as Scarry put it, it worked so well.
