Here are the facts, not my opinion, not spit, but facts.
In 1988 both Gore and Dukakis were running for the Democratic nomination which Dukakis eventually won. During one debate Gore brought up furloughs for prisoners, mentioning two murders who had gotten furloughs. No ads were run. No one's race was mentioned. Dukakis later lost to Bush, in part, because of clearly racist ads starring Willie Horton, an inmate who had raped a citizen of MA, was released on a weekend furlough, and murdered someone in a different state. The ads were run by an independent group for Bush in 1998.
In 2000, when Gore and Bradley were running for the Democratic nomination, Bradley gave an interview in which he accused Gore of having first brought up Horton during the primaries. This is despite the fact that in 1996 Bradley said that Gore hadn't brought up Horton and hadn't racialized the issue of furloughs.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh110102.shtmlHere is the dailyhowler's take:
Is it true? Did Al Gore “bring Willie Horton to the American people?” Did Al Gore “bring Willie Horton into that race?” Only in the dysfunctional world of our deeply devolved public discourse. What actually happened in 1988? In one of 45 Dem debates that year, Candidate Gore challenged Candidate Dukakis to defend a Massachusetts furlough program under which convicts serving life sentences without hope of parole were released on weekend passes. In particular, Gore noted that two furloughed prisoners had committed new murders while on weekend leave. (Willie Horton was not one of these convicts.) The program was almost impossible to defend. But Gore only mentioned the program once, and he never mentioned any prisoner’s name; never mentioned any prisoner’s race; never ran any TV ads on the topic; and never used any visuals. More specifically, he never named Willie Horton, or mentioned his specific crime (Horton committed a brutal rape while on leave). In the Bush-Dukakis general election, the Bush campaign—and an independent, pro-Bush group—made extensive use of the Horton incident. In particular, the independent group used visuals of Horton which seemed to emphasize his race (he was black). In later years, as he neared his death, Bush campaign director Lee Atwater apologized for his own conduct in pushing the racial aspects of the Horton matter.
Did Gore “bring Willie Horton to the American people?” As usual, Hannity was lying, once again. Meanwhile, Alan Colmes again sat silently by as his partner slandered Gore, misled his viewers, and dragged our discourse through the mud where Hannity’s kind has always been happiest. What does it mean? What does it mean when the world’s most important democracy conducts its public discourse this way? We can say one thing: It means that Sean happens. Gaze again on the devolved, corrupt culture we now laughingly describe as a “press corps.”
BAD WILL HUNTING: Conservative dissembling about Gore-and-Horton began in 1992, when Gore was announced as Clinton’s VP nominee. Gore appeared on the July 12 This Week. George Will began the dissembling about Willie Horton, posing this laughable “question:”
WILL: Senator, it’s an article of faith in your party and in much of the media that the use of Willie Horton by the Bush campaign was impliedly racist and certainly negative beyond propriety. The Republicans learned about Willie Horton because you used Willie Horton, because you used Willie Horton against Michael Dukakis in this city
in April 1988, running against him in the primary. Given that you used Willie Horton, do you agree that it was racist and insupportably negative?
Sad, isn’t it? Dissembling hard, Will managed to say “you used Willie Horton” three separate times in a single “question!” Gore, asking if he could offer “a polite correction to the way you posed the question,” said that he had never even heard Horton’s name at the time that he raised the issue. Will broke in: “You raised the issue of furloughs, Senator. You did raise the issue of furloughs which is what Willie Horton was about.” “That’s correct,” Gore said, “I raised the generic issue.” But was something now wrong with raising an issue? The criticism of the Horton matter had dealt with the content of specific TV ads. If there was something wrong with just raising the issue, Will never tried to explain it. But through the years, conservative dissemblers kept making this point, often in ways that were baldly inaccurate. It was really Gore, not Bush or his supporters, who had first “used Willie Horton,” they said. And they kept insisting that this vile conduct showed how negative and nasty Gore is.
snip
and here is the same link with what Bradley did:
On January 12, 2000, Bradley conducted a remarkable interview with the Boston Herald. (New Hampshire voting was three weeks away. Bradley was behind in the polls.) Bradley “launch a laser-sharp new line of attack against Al Gore,” the paper’s Andrew Miga reported the next day. In his interview with the Herald, Bradley “ripped the vice president for injecting racism into the 1988 campaign by raising the Willie Horton case against Michael Dukakis.” Now Bradley was playing the Horton Card too. And Bradley—alas!—knew much better.
Bardley’s attack was especially striking because of something he’d written a few years before. Bradley’s 1996 best-seller, Time Present, Time Past, included a chapter on race in politics. And in the book, Bradley specifically said that Gore had not mistreated race in discussing the furlough matter. Here was the passage in question:
BRADLEY (Time Present, Time Past): In 1988, the race card was played more subtly. The Bush presidential campaign skillfully linked the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, with a black man named Willie Horton, who had raped a woman and stabbed a man while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, where he had been serving time for murder. Oddly, the first politician to mention Horton (but without racializing it) was not Bush but Senator Al Gore. In the New York Democratic primary that spring, he attacked Dukakis for his prison-furlough program. The Republicans, though, emphasized Horton’s blackness.
end of quote
http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/The_real_meaning_of_Willie_Horton+.shtml
and though I would prefer a different source here are some of Bradley's actual quotes in the interview
''Gore introduced him into the lexicon,'' Bradley said in a Boston Herald interview last week. ''I wouldn't have used Willie Horton.... It proved in the course of the campaign to essentially be a poster child for racial insensitivity.''
Bradley didn't go into details. He didn't have to. After all these years, we know we're supposed to react with a shudder when the words ''Willie Horton'' are pronounced. We've been instructed countless times that ''Willie Horton'' stands for the dirtiest kind of dirty politics. For playing the race card to besmirch an opponent's record. For launching attack ads with coded appeals to bigotry. For trying to score points by demonizing an unpopular scapegoat.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06EFD7123AF937A25752C0A9669C8B63
and finally a neutral summary of the article via the NYTimes
Former Senator Bill Bradley told The Boston Herald that Vice President Al Gore, while running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, was responsible for turning the released murderer Willie Horton into a racially divisive symbol of the campaign. The image of Mr. Horton, a black man who committed rape while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison, was used in advertisements by supporters of then-Vice President George Bush, who was the Republican nominee for president, to attack Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts, the Democratic nominee. But Mr. Bradley told The Herald, in an interview published yesterday, that Mr. Gore had brought up Mr. Horton first and that ''it bothers me a great deal.'' Mr. Gore's campaign said Mr. Gore had not mentioned Mr. Horton but only challenged Mr. Dukakis to explain his prison furlough policy in a debate.
end of all quotes
Now, let's be blunt here. You can call me a bitter Hillary partisan until the cows come home and give birth to aliens. But the facts are these. Gore didn't mention Horton. Bradley said, in 1996, that Gore didn't mention Horton's race or racialize the issue, then Bradley ran against Gore and all of the sudden Gore introduced Willie Horton to be a poster child for racial insensitivity. That was then, and is now, a divisive lie. Gore didn't do this. It isn't me saying Gore didn't do this. It is Bradley saying Gore didn't do this. It is Gephart saying Gore didn't do this. It is Sommersby saying Gore didn't do this. It is every account of 1988 saying Gore didn't do this. Bradley told us a bald faced lie when it was convienent for him to do so. The press both spread that lie and still spread that lie to this very day. That doesn't make it true. The fact I favor Clinton over Obama doesn't change the facts.
editted to add link to Jacoby.
One last edit, yes Gore used the word furlough. But if you think the problem with the Horton ads was that they suggest we should be tough on crime you are either naive or just plain lying. It was the huge fro, and very dark skin of Horton coupled with the details of his crime, absolutely none of which were from Gore, that made those ads.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
