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.