Bush’s Most Valuable Player

Willie Horton. Black. Murderer. Rapist. Most valuable player in George Bush’s no-holds-barred bid for the White House.

Of all the tactics used by Bush’s strategists to brand Michael Dukakis a gooey liberal out of touch with mainstream values, none worked better than the relentless pounding of Horton’s horrible tale. By the end of the campaign, scarcely a voter had not been exposed to the lurid details of the rapacious spree Horton committed while on weekend furlough from the Massachusetts prison to which he had been sentenced to life without parole for a brutal 1974 homicide.

Like most attack ploys, there was a grain of truth to be exploited: the prison-furlough policy used by Massachusetts went beyond the boundaries of common sense. Unlike other states and the Federal Government, which usually employ furloughs to gradually acclimate prisoners near the end of their sentences to living outside the walls, Massachusetts granted weekend leaves to convicts whom judges had condemned to remain behind bars until they died. Horton is precisely the sort of criminal that people have in mind when they say someone should lock him up and throw away the key.

It was one of Dukakis’ rivals for the Democratic nomination, Tennessee Senator Al Gore, who first unearthed the furlough policy as a campaign issue. The fact that it was inaugurated by Dukakis’ Republican predecessor is irrelevant. As Governor, Dukakis stubbornly resisted attempts to rescind furloughs for first-degree murderers until a drive to ban such leaves through a state referendum gathered steam. By then, the presidential-primary season was under way.

If the Republican assault on Dukakis’ furlough policy had stopped with making these valid points, Democrats and blacks would have no just cause for complaint. But the Republican attack did not stop there. Instead, Bush’s handlers tapped into the rich lode of white fear and resentment of blacks that the G.O.P. staked out more than 20 years ago, when the party of Lincoln recast itself as the embodiment of the white backlash. It started with Barry Goldwater railing against Earl Warren’s Supreme Court and civil rights legislation. Then, as the long hot summers blazed, Richard Nixon courted voters with a “law-and-order” harangue. Ronald Reagan kept it up with his allusions to “welfare queens” and the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy a T-bone steak.

The fear of crime is, to be sure, deeply implanted among Americans of all races. No group is more victimized by street thugs than the law-abiding citizens of the ghetto. Doubtless the G.O.P. would have exploited Dukakis’ furlough policy if Horton were white. Yet the glee with which Bush’s campaign team leaped upon the Horton affair belies its denials that it intended to tweak white prejudices. In Horton, Bush’s staff found a potent symbolic twofer: a means by which to appeal to the legitimate issue of crime while simultaneously stirring racial fears.

How else to explain Bush campaign manager Lee Atwater’s remark to Republican activists gathered in Atlanta last July? Observing that Jesse Jackson, then pressing his demand to be selected as Dukakis’ vice-presidential running mate, had visited Dukakis’ home on July 4, Atwater suggested that “maybe he will put this Willie Horton on the ticket after all is said and done.” Or the relish with which Bush press secretary Mark Goodin pasted a mug shot of Horton on the wall above his desk. Or the ardor with which Bush’s media guru Roger Ailes declared, “The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it.” In the end, the Bush campaign refrained from using Horton’s likeness in its campaign spots, leaving an independent political-action committee to saturate the airwaves with the rapist’s glaring visage while a few state Republican parties stuffed mailboxes with flyers banging home the same message.

Dukakis, of course, might have spiked the Horton offensive early on by pointing to its racist implications. But the Massachusetts Governor was pursuing his own racially callous strategy, ignoring black supporters in an attempt to reach out to fickle Reagan Democrats, who abandoned their traditional political home at least in part because it is seen as the party of minorities. Only after his suit was rebuffed did Dukakis, in desperation, mend fences with Jackson, visit black churches and reassure the party’s most reliable supporters that he was, after all, “on your side.”

In 1964, in his first attempt at elected office as a Senate candidate from Texas, George Bush came out against the civil rights law that desegregated hotels, restaurants and water fountains — a stance he later admitted he regretted. Four years later, as a Congressman, he cast a courageous vote for open housing. In this year’s race for the White House, Bush, alas, came closer to the 1964 model, a politician who will do whatever it takes to win an election, even when his instincts tell him it’s wrong.