Obama and Dukakis

The country was ready for change. A two-term Republican president was in his lame duck year. The Democrats were far ahead in the polls and after a Republican primary season a nominee emerged vowing some change while still speaking fondly of the current president. I'm referring to 1988, of course. It now seems so obvious that Michael Dukakis was doomed to lose to the first George Bush. But back then it wasn't so clear. Dukakis had a 17-point lead coming out of the Democratic Convention and famously blew it after the Republicans piled on with the pledge of allegience, Willie Horton, Dukakis in a tank, and a zillion other hot-button cultural issues.

Obama is obviously not Dukakis who, even in his heydey, was a cold fish. My colleague and friend Walter Shapiro wrote a profile of Dukakis for Time in which he discovered that the Masschusetts governor had taken a book on Swedish land planning on vacation. But Obama is arguably more vulnerable than Dukakis on a slew of cultural issues. He favors drivers licenses for illegal immigrants, endorsed sex education (of a kind) for kindergardeners and now it emerges in the New York Sun and elsewhere that he has hung with unrepentant radicals like Bernadine Dohrn, part of the Weatherman underground who has defiantly refused to apologize fro the group's bombmaking. Obama took a contribution from William Ayers also of the Weather Underground. The New York Sun examines the issue and so does Politico

The Clinton campaign, for which my spouse works, has fanned these charges today and sent them to reporters. Press accounts have noted, though, that Bill Clinton pardoned more than a dozen 60s radicals before leaving office.

All of this stuff, it seems to me, is garbage and not really germane to the presidency in the 21st century. But it is something that the Republicans can make a lot of especially from a nominee who spent the '60s in a North Vietnamese prison and it would seem that Obama has more of it to fend off than does Clinton. Maybe all that stuff won't work any more. Bill Maher has a joke about the GOP sponsoring a Constitutional amendment to put a fetus on the One Dollar bill. Absurd cultural gambits won't fly, he suggests. But they do have a good way of finding something and the lesson of Michael Dukakis is still instructive after 20 years.