Dukakis v. Bush: Prison Reform and the Peace Dividend

Television Ads

There are twenty-two campaign ads from the 1988 presidential campaign between Michael Dukakis and George Herbert Walker Bush hosted by the Museum of the Living Image "The Living Room Candidate." Through this sample one can see contrary and intersecting campaigns of positive and negative media narratives as political language.

The Bush campaign staff included Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, Dennis Frankenberry, Larry McCarthy and Peggy Noonan. Reagan's Chief of Staff James Baker managed Bush's campaign. This mix of republican media consultants and business ad agents were part of a campaign that produced positive candidate ads like "Family/Children," "Father-in-Law" and "Bush America." The positive Bush persona is experienced in both domestic issues and Cold War politics. They also produced negative attack ads like "Tank Ride," "Revolving Door" and "Willie Horton." These ads attack Dukakis' handling of the Boston Harbor cleanup. They associate the Massachusetts prison furloughs with Dukakis. They question Dukakis' commitment to military spending.

The Dukakis campaign staff included Madeline Albright, Leslie Dach, Scott Miller and Tony Podesta. Susan Estrich was his campaign manager. Their campaign produced positive ads like "New Era," and "Oval Office." Other ads, like "Bay," responded to Bush attacks on Massachusetts clean water policy. They also respond to the prison furlough allegations in "Counterpunch" and "Furlough from the Truth." The positive Dukakis persona is a fiscally responsible technocrat who is tough on crime. The Reagan administration is depicted as fiscally irresponsible in "Hey, Pal" and financially supportive of international terrorism in "1982 Noriega." Dukakis' team attacks Quayle as intellectually deficient in "Crazy" and "Oval Office."

Three recurring issues from this sample include Boston Harbor, prison policy and military spending. The first of these, Boston Harbor, was an economic and jurisdictional conflict that manifested during the concurrent Reagan and Dukakis administrations. The Federal government mandated a national program, the Clean Water Act, in 1972. The Bretton-Woods system ended the year previous. Nixon's financial-ization of monetary policy and expansion of the environmental mandate should have resulted in a old fashioned-Civilian Conservation Corps or a proto-Modern Monetary Theory deficit funded cleanup. Instead, under Reagan's domestic austerity budget, the states (like Dukakis' Massachusetts) were expected to pay for the federal mandate. This is neither Keynesian nor MMT style economics.

Reagan's war on welfare-queens informed his austerity budget. This didn't affect the military or prison industries. This incongruity is probably why funding the military and prison industries were issues during the campaign for his successor. The two prison policy debates were about prisoner furloughs and the death penalty. The military spending debate included things like strategic defense, stealth bombers, aircraft carriers and the Pershing II missile.

Even though the campaign was about clean water, prison furloughs and defense spending there was actually little difference in the candidates stance towards these issues. Both candidates were in favor of clean water but they squabbled about who would pay for it. Massachusetts furlough program for first degree murderers ineligible for parole was started by Dukakis' predecessor and ended by Dukakis. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration furloughed thousands of federal drug criminals. The defense spending issue is confused too. The Reagan administration outlawed the Pershing II in 1987 and then Bush' campaign attacked Dukakis for being against the illegal missile. Dukakis, a Korean war veteran, was not a pacifist Dukakis' tank ride is evidence of his courtship of the military industrial complex. Both Bush and Dukakis embraced Cold War military spending even if their television ad campaigns differed. Considering there was little difference between the candidates on furloughs or armaments, it is strange that military spending and prison reform were even part of the campaign.

Media Coverage

Some contemporary media coverage described both campaigns' ads as playing "fast and loose with the truth." Others tried to correct the record. Dukakis described his opponents campaign of "distortion and distraction" and promised to end furloughs, be tough on crime, spend on conventional forces and explore Star Wars. These were stances that Dukakis held before the election and it was common knowledge--at least to Washignton Post readers.

When Josh King asked Dukakis why his campaign failed in 2013 he responded "I lost the election because I made a decision not to respond to the Bush attack campaign..." This is not true for two reasons. First, Dukakis responded to the Bush misrepresentations of the harbor and crime in the "On Your Side" campaign ad. Second, the Dukakis campaign reciprocated two specific attacks from their opponent. The first is the "Counterpunch" ad about Reagan era furlough programs which is an homage to "Willie Horton." The second is politicizing Dan Quayle's intellect. While the Bush campaign didn't officially attack Dukakis' mental fitness, Atwater did question Dukakis' mental health treatment.

Quayle the idiot and Dukakis the insane are ridiculous and mean tropes. As political language, these personal attacks have weight in America. Add spelling potato and seeing a therapist to other ad hominem nonsense like Bush's distaste of broccoli and vomiting in Japan. Or Nancy Reagan's astrologer Joan Quigley. Or Bill Clinton's sexual proclivities. Or Jimmy Carter's southern accent. Or Bush II's DUI in 1970. Or Obama smoking cigarettes and wearing a tan suit. The purpose of these personal attacks is to differentiate between the campaigns while knowing that the election will not affect the regime.

There were three debates during the 1988 campaign. Debate clips were used by both campaigns in positive and negative ads like "Our Concern," "Crazy" and "Credibility." The first debate was on September 25 at Wake Forest. There were three Dukakis soundbites from the first debate used in "Our Concern" about the economy, job based health insurance and hope. The second, Vice Presidential, debate was on October 5 in Omaha. This is the debate where Quayle said he was as qualified to be president as JFK was. Bensten landed a pre-packaged applause line, "you're no Jack Kennedy." The Dukakis ad "Crazy" is based on Quayle's performance in Omaha where fictional republican handlers wonder if replacing Dukakis with Bob Dole was crazy. The third debate was on October 13 in UCLA. The first question of this debate, asked by Bernard Shaw of CNN, was about the death penalty. Shaw asked if Dukakis would change his position on capital punishment if his wife was "raped and murdered." Dukakis' technical answer and legal explanation was used in the Bush campaign ad "Credibility." This ad is about the Dukakis era Massachusetts prisoner furlough program, pardons and commutations. Dukakis' opposition to the death penalty, while answering Shaw, plays on the screen. A studio laugh track is added in post production. This mean spirited 'laughing-at-you' is a tactic used in real time against Quayle in Omaha, and against Dukakis in UCLA. Dukakis' "Hey, Pal" ad also uses this tactic--laughing at the lying Reagan administration's insincere deficit spending.

Combined Narrative vs. Professionals

The combined campaign and media narrative focused on clean water, prison sentences and military spending. Outside of the death penalty, both campaigns essentially agreed on these issues. This is problematic. First, having a two party system where both parties agree on water, prison and war devalues voting. In that way it is bad for the democracy. Second, the Bush-Dukakis consensus does not defer to military, university or prison professionals. This is more ideologically inconsistent for the annual budget balancer Dukakis than the Laffer curve Bush. But, the executive office is most rational when it works under the guidance of regulatory and industry professionals. For this reason, the expansion of the unitary executives is bad for the republic. Still, American politics has had a place for mavericks who listen to their gut and carry a big stick at the head of the government since Andrew Jackson.

The media's acceptance of the Washington Consensus on the environment, prisons and the military disfranchised the public and disqualified professionals. The resulting absurd, ad hominim and slanderous campaigns of 1988 were distractions from the fait accompli: the military budget would increase, the prison population will expand and austerity budgets (like Reaganomics, Read My Lips and balanced budget regimes under Dukakis and Clinton) were irreversible. America's choice in 1988 was determining who would lead the domestic austerity budget that they inherited from Reagan. Democrats who have inherited the Reganomics package--Clinton, Obama and Biden--have, respectively, raided social security, bailed out the banks and broken a railroad strike. From the Progressive Era to the New Deal, these actions would have been understood as anti-social right wing attacks. Somehow, through the manipulation of media and history, anti-union corporate welfare has become the left flank of American politics.

Prison Reform

"Willie Horton," and "Revolving Door" conflated race and crime. They targeted white nationalist, Democrat turned Populist David Duke supporters. This wasn't an educational campaign that explained the benefits of a racially integrated society to the racists. Instead, the G.O.P. was extending its big tent to include white nationalists by embracing racism itself. The ads misrepresented the Massachusetts furlough program as of the Dukakis administration. The program was started by Dukakis' predecessor, Republican Francis Sargent. It was part of a national wave of similar prison reforms which reduced recidivism. The state program ended against Dukakis' veto. The conflation of minorities, tardy returning furloughs, escaped murderers and repeat offenders is used to turn out white voters. Instead of denouncing "Willie Horton" as a cynical way to turn out the racist vote, Dukakis' ran "Counterpunch" and "Furlough from the Truth" that emphasized Dukakis' hard right bona fides and courted the racists.

Dukakis has provided a decade of evidence of his support for the prison industrial complex. Dukakis was the governor of Massachusetts from 1975-79 and 1983-91. The state prison population, local jail population and incarceration rates per 100,000 people rose steadily between 1978 and 1991. The only meaningful dips in these numbers come after Dukakis left office. This is not only true for Massachusetts. It is a state and national trend according to Prison Policy Initiative data. The federal prison population also increased between 1980 and 2005 (24,640 – 187,394) including the eight years that Bush was Vice President. For proof that this wasn't a partisan issue: the first person to weaponize the furlough program in 1988 against Dukakis was Al Gore (then Albert Gore Jr.) during the primary. The Dukakis campaign didn't run on the left of prison reform. Instead he explained why he was even more carcereal than Bush I. There is no prison reform candidate in this election. This is weird because both campaigns are obsessed by furloughs, the death penalty and mandatory minimum sentences. The lack of political diversity is why a technocrat like Dukakis should defer to specialists.

The Massachusetts prison furlough program was overseen by the Department of Correction and Boston University. These are the bureaucrats, academics and professionals who advocated for furloughs. This was the class of people Dukakis ignored to play politics with people's freedom. Francis Sargent initiated the Furlough program. Dukakis is the one who, against professional advice, ended it. The rest of it—Atwater's race baiting and apology, Novak and Evans rejection of the apology and GOP Chairman Ken Mehmlman's 2005 pivot to black republicans—is an explanatory framework around this truth: the number of people in prison and their percentage of overall the population steadily increased during the concurrent Reagan and Dukakis administrations.The outcome of the 1988 election wasn't going to change that but the "Willie Horton" issue was animating to voters. Talking about prison reform without intending to reform prisons is a method to engage and turn out disfranchised third party voters like the racists, socialists and libertarians without addressing any relevant policies.

Cold War Military Spending

1988 was the last campaign of the Cold War. This should have resulted in a "peace dividend" where decreased military spending led to a reallocation of wealth from the defense department to domestic social programs. In September 1991 Bush declared the Soviet Union "no longer a realistic threat" to Europe. The Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act was intended to "enhance" NATO, pullback in Europe and destroy armaments. Bush—who had reduced military spending at the start of his administration—warned there wouldn't be a "windfall" and disarmament would actually cost more than maintaining Cold War readiness. There was more than 1% GDP decline in defense spending between 1988 and 1992. The overall result was an increase of more than $10 billion dollars in defense spending during the Bush administration. The defense budget was generally decreasing from the end of Vietnam until 9/11. But there isn't a lasting reduction in spending after the Soviet state collapsed in 1991. Margaret Thatcher described this post Cold War conservatism where austerity couldn't touch the military, "[p]eace is the dividend that you get from investment in defense." The peace dividend is like prison reform in the 1988 election, neither neither supports it in practice but partisans are opinionated about it. The solution is to make military spending into a political issue addressed by both parties using the exact same method. In this case, both Dukakis and Bush vowed to maintain Cold War military expenditures even as they promoted domestic balanced/austerity budgets.

Dukakis was an Army veteran in Korea and Bush was a Navy pilot in the Pacific and neither advocated for a reduction in military spending. Dukakis came close when it came to the Pershing II missile. This would have been a bad investment for either administration beginning in 1988. This is because the Pershing II program was over and the American stockpiles were being liquidated because of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Reagan and Gorbachev. This is the clearest case of both campaigns posturing over a fictional issue.

Dukakis did have a flip-flop during the campaign. At first he wanted to maintain spending on military hardware like bullets and tanks and questioned Bush's experimental missile defense programs. Dukakis was posing as technocrat who deferred to the generals. He was not going to defund the military. This was not a political winner. The tank ride at an arms manufacturing plant in Michigan was supposed to reinforce Dukakis as a military commander. Political histories of this event, like King in Politico, are lessons about authenticity, press control and political optics. But these narratives don't explain how arms spending can and did increase after the war ended. This is a squandering of the peace dividend. Neither Bush nor Dukakis campaigned to audit the Department of Defense yet both ran versions of balanced budget-no new taxes-austerity campaigns.

The more existential critique that is downplayed in these political histories is about state militarism. Both major party candidates were courting the military industrial complex and promising Cold War levels of spending even as the war was ending and the international treaties promised more plowshares. Dukakis' the tank passenger was the leftist candidate. Comparative politics show that he was running a far right campaign of austerity and militarism.

In the United Kingdom it is the right wing politicians that do tank rides. The Dukakis photo-op was modeled after a Margaret Thatcher tank ride trope from 1976 and 1986 (and Liz Truss in Ukraine, 2021). The stunt was unsuccessful for Dukakis but not because it was mismanaged. Dukakis' campaign was trying to get to the right of former CIA director Bush by embracing state militarism. This wasn't inauthentic to the veteran Dukakis. He didn&apaos;t account for the pacifists in his coalition who came by way of Edmund Muskie or Eugene McCarthy who would be offended by a purported leftist shilling for General Dynamics.

The Bush campaign capitalized on the "Tank Ride" in a television ad which portrayed Dukakis as a military miser which Dukakis parried this threat by, quoting from Rosenthal in the New York Times "endorsing three nuclear arms programs and calling for a major buildup of conventional forces," admitting that there would be no peace dividend. Any leftist who watched the tank ride, even before it had been spun by the Bush team, knew that Dukakis would work for the defense industries. When a budget hawk like Dukakis or Bush writes a blank check to the defense industry they must also raise taxes or cut social programs.

No New Taxes

The power of the purse, in general, is under the legislative purview. That makes the convention speech "...read my lips: no new taxes" an empty promise. Bush was pandering to his base at the Superdome in 1988, having clinched the nomination. He had no reason to make a new promise to the conservatives before the general election. Luckily for Bush, the political language of the 1988 campaign wasn't based in facts. The expansion of military spending and reduction of tax revenue was not an issue that either campaign could address without a domestic austerity regime. Bush's luck ran out when the 1990 budget compromise raised taxes. Bush's chances in the 1992 general were over because of this unnecessary promise.

Bush's appeal for not taxes was an appeal to Ron Paul voters in the same way as Willie Horton was an appeal to David Duke voters. Third party critiques were more nuanced concerning federal spending on the military and prisons than the Dukakis-Bush debate between who could spend most and raise least. Republican turned Libertarian Paul ran in 1988. His appeal to military nonintervention and drug decriminalization would have been contrary to the two party prison military complex. Bush's no taxes pledge would have appealed to this same laissez faire voter even if this promise in 1992 ended his campaign in 1996.

The other third party contender was Lenora Fulani of the New Alliance Party who ran a race, gender and urban justice campaign. Nationally, the Libertarian, NAP, Christian Populist tickets combined for less than one percent of the vote. Statewide Paul had success in the West, Duke in the South and Fulani on the East Coast but none of the candidates got more than 3% of any state wide ballot. This is the Kodos and Kang two party system that advises third party voters to "go ahead and throw your vote away." Or, one could vote for expanding the prison and military industries.

Partisanship

So much of the 1988 election was about the prison population and military spending. The two candidates that got 99% of the votes basically agreed on increasing military budgets and incarcerating more people. It is hard to know how many of the forty-one million Dukakis voters thought they were voting for fewer prisoners and a smaller military; or how many leftists stayed home instead of voting third party. Regardless, the false dichotomy and obnoxious campaign language doesn't promote informed democracy within the two party construct.

Inmate populations increased regardless of political party on a statewide and federal level. Military spending didn't decrease after the Cold War ended and the peace dividend didn't shore up the social safety--it went to defense contractors. These two facts are obvious looking backward with historical perspective. They should have been obvious during the 1988 electoral cycle too. Dukakis' tank ride is proof that he was courting the defense industry and he would do anything to get their vote. Attempts to sift voters based on the furlough program and demilitarization was insincere. The confused political language of Willie Horton and the Tank Ride allowed the two major parties to talk about Socialist and Libertarian issues like prisons and the peace dividend in a bourgeoisie space using acceptable politicians. Regardless of which one is elected, the Washington Consensus remains.

In Dukakis' memory, his 1988 campaign was about a "New Era" message of balanced budgets, healthcare and jobs. He believes that Bush ran an ideologically opposite campaign. The deception and distractions employed by the Bush team were lies to distort Dukakis' record. Some of Dukakis comments from the twenty first century reinforce this misconception. George W. Bush is the "worst national administration" of Dukakis' lifetime and it never would have happened if he had beat H.W. Bush. (Schulte 2008). Dukakis "didn't lose the election because of [the tank thing]." Instead, he claims, that he didn't "respond the the Bush attack campaign, and in retrospect it was a pretty dumb decision." (King 2013). He did respond and that was also a pretty dumb decision. To Dukakis, Trump is the "draft-dodger-in-chief." Dukakis, like Bush I or the recently deceased McCain, feels more qualified to be president because they were in the military. (Moore 2019). Dukakis' personal attacks and glorification of the Military-Industrial complex continue thirty years after the election where he was the "New Era" liberal alternative to the Reagan-Bush doctrine. Even with thirty years of hindsight Dukakis doesn't accept that he and Bush had a shared ideology that included austerity, rejecting the peace dividend and expanding the prison complex. He also doesn't accept that he ran a similar ad hominem against Quayle that Atwater ran against him. Dukakis didn't learn about decorum from the 1988 election. He continues to level ad hominem attacks at elected officials like Bush II and Trump. He also doesn't acknowledge that his campaign politicized the Reagan era federal furlough policy for the same purposes as the Bush campaign weaponized state furloughs in"Revolving Door" and "Willie Horton."

In the 1988 election the only viable candidates were militarists competing for military honor. Dukakis is acknowledging the political reality that campaign language, unrelated to facts, is the tool for winning an election. Political language is also independent of policy. Dukakis embraced military spending during the campaign and the tank ad was the response to Bush's characterization of a imaginary Dukakis era military austerity. In fact, the tank ride was a promise to keep spending after the Cold War was over and both parties were onboard.

Atwater, whose obituary referenced both Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, is emblematic of the insincerity of political language vis a vis policy. Leaders are chosen based on party narratives and the outcome of the elections are either predetermined or meaningless. In practice this isn't doublethink because the press reported on the untruths in real time. The political actors acknowledged them. The 1988 election is an example of the two major parties acting on behalf of the prison and military industrial complexes to inevitably spend the peace dividend and incarcerate more people.