On Tuesday, The Atlantic featured an article that lamented decades of Republican race-baiting in presidential campaigns. The piece by [authors] allow that race-baiting “does not mean that those who employ them are racists,” but it does “show a willingness to exploit societal ills for political gain.” The authors don’t think Republicans are racists, just that Republicans have a tendency to exploit racist attitudes across America.
Michael Dukakis
Daily Beast Pundit: Dems Finally Got Their Act Together For 1992, But ‘Delusional’ Republicans Won’t For 2016
By Tom Johnson | November 12, 2015 | 6:01 PM EST It’s often noted that Republicans have lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, just as Democrats had lost five of six before that. Dems snapped out of it thanks to a Bill Clinton-led tack towards the center, but Michael Tomasky predicts that the GOP will stay to the right in 2016, thereby extending its slump.
After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, observed Tomasky in a Tuesday piece, Democrats at last could “say to themselves, OK, we’re screwed unless we change. Welfare reform? Free trade?...Whatever, man…The question for the Republicans is, is this 1988 or 1992? I think it’s 1988, because they haven’t yet lost that third one [in a row]. It’s the third one that drives it home. Especially if it’s to you know who.”
By Mark Finkelstein | June 8, 2015 | 9:18 PM EDT
Apples and oranges: or shall we say, Harleys and Abrams.
On this evening's Ed Show on MSNBC, guest John Nichols of the far-left Nation mag and guest host Michael Eric Dyson lamely tried to analogize Scott Walker riding a Harley to the infamous episode of Michael Dukakis in a tank. The difference? Walker is a for-real biker and Harley owner. Dukakis did serve two years in the Army, but there's no evidence he did tanks before his ill-fated ride during the 1988 campaign. Check the photos at the foot to see the difference. You'll note that the hopelessly buttoned-down Dukakis is actually, yes, wearing a button-down shirt and tie.
By Tim Graham | May 19, 2014 | 7:26 AM EDT
Chris Matthews gave the commencement address at Ohio State on May 4 (not without some pre-speech complaints). His Hardball page posted the transcript. Matthews tried to be bipartisan, praising both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton for his message of the day of persistence. It’s too bad he seemed a little deficient in modern political history, or he was too focused on boosting the mythology of the Clintons.
“Bill Clinton is another case study. At the age of 34, he got beaten for re-election as governor of Arkansas. Everyone figured he was through,” Matthews claimed. “The people had gotten a look at him and had rejected him, dumped him from office.How many governors get dumped from office and ever get the job back? I can’t think of one.” Seriously?
By Noel Sheppard | September 9, 2012 | 1:23 PM EDT
The media are gushing and fawning over new poll numbers showing Barack Obama getting a bounce from the just ended Democratic National Convention putting him four points ahead of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
Before they get too cocky, they might want to recall that after his convention ended in 1988, Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis led George H.W. Bush by seventeen points.
The New York Times reported July 26, 1988:
By Noel Sheppard | July 18, 2010 | 8:53 PM EDT 
If you needed to know just how liberal Chris Matthews is, consider that he thinks Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis are on the center-left of the political spectrum.
So said Matthews on this weekend's syndicated talk show bearing his name.
To be sure, the host of "Hardball" has in the past expressed his pride in being a liberal.
But claiming on national television that Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis are all center-left should open a lot of eyes (video follows with transcript and commentary):
By Mark Finkelstein | January 27, 2010 | 8:31 PM EST
Call it the unkindest Dukakis of all . . .
In the pre-SOTU kibitzing, Game Change co-author Mark Halperin, having read released excerpts of the speech, says it reminds him of the man in the tank, Michael Dukakis.
Halperin, who prefaced his punch by professing his respect for PBO et. al, was reacting to Andrea Mitchell, who claimed to hear echoes, of all people, of Ronald Reagan in PBO's remarks.
By Mark Finkelstein | August 20, 2008 | 11:04 PM EDT
H/t FReeper hotshu.
Billed as a roundtable, it played more like a group therapy session for distraught Dems on the verge. Obama's polls dropping. An inchoate sense this might all be slipping away. Chris Matthews and his guests for the show-ending "Politics Fix" on this evening's Hardball were united in bemoaning Barack's plight. The host himself was the ultimate downer, analogizing Obama's campaign to that of . . . Michael Dukakis.
Matthews fellow sufferers were Jeff Johnson, host of The Truth on BET, and Salon.com editor Joan Walsh.
View video here.
Excerpts from the sigh-in:
By Brent Baker | August 9, 2008 | 6:58 PM EDT 
Over a drawing of Michael Dukakis waving in front of Air Force One, the cover story for last Sunday's Boston Globe Magazine posed the question very few have ever wanted answered, but if such people exist they most likely live within the Globe's home delivery area: “What If? Twenty years later, imagining there was a President Dukakis.” While certainly hagiographic, staff magazine writer Charles P. Pierce avoided the ludicrous level of veneration he espoused in a 2003 profile of Senator Ted Kennedy:
Over a drawing of Michael Dukakis waving in front of Air Force One, the cover story for last Sunday's Boston Globe Magazine posed the question very few have ever wanted answered, but if such people exist they most likely live within the Globe's home delivery area: “What If? Twenty years later, imagining there was a President Dukakis.” While certainly hagiographic, staff magazine writer Charles P. Pierce avoided the ludicrous level of veneration he espoused in a 2003 profile of Senator Ted Kennedy:If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age.The August 3 piece imagined a tour of the new Michael Dukakis Presidential Museum and Library in Lowell, Mass. which highlights how the former Massachusetts Governor slam-dunked Bernard Shaw's murder of Kitty Dukakis question, “deftly saved” himself from the tank ride embarrassment “by quipping, 'I looked silly in a tank for 15 minutes. George Bush has been in the tank for 30 years,'” applied his diplomatic skills to prevent Saddam Hussein from invading Iraq and thus avoided the Gulf War, and “the success of his diplomatic efforts in the Middle East gave him the political capital to spend on reforming the nation's passenger-rail system” and so “the third floor of the museum is built around a central hall celebrating what Dukakis had come to call 'The Steel Interstate.'”
By Tom Blumer | July 9, 2008 | 12:26 AM EDT
Although the term isn't used, it's clear that the Obama campaign sees itself and their candidate as victims of a vast conspiracy of right-wingers.
Going all the way back to the 1988 presidential election, Obama's "Fight the Smears" chart (featuring the campaign's new sort-of "presidential seal," replacing the one that was "dropped," at the top left) purports to tell us "Who's Behind These Lies."
If the page's historical starting points are any indication, to paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there may not be "a whole lotta smearin' goin' on" among the current "smearing" parties it identifies:
By Mark Finkelstein | May 29, 2008 | 11:25 PM EDT 
Of all the people to call for a "truce" on excessive partisanship . . .
Interviewing Scott McClellan tonight, Keith Olbermann sanctimoniously suggested that a "truce" on rough political tactics "would be nice." But speaking with John Dean just minutes later, the Countdown host—he who has repeatedly called President Bush a liar and a fascist—reverted to form and regretted that it might be too late to impeach him.
Of all the people to call for a "truce" on excessive partisanship . . . Interviewing Scott McClellan tonight, Keith Olbermann sanctimoniously suggested that a "truce" on rough political tactics "would be nice." But speaking with John Dean just minutes later, the Countdown host—he who has repeatedly called President Bush a liar and a fascist—reverted to form and regretted that it might be too late to impeach him.
SCOTT MCCLELLAN: [The 1988] election was very much a turning-point election. I think that George Bush, George Bush 41, George Herbert Walker Bush, is a decent individual, and a man who really believes in civility, but he, his advisors around him, knew the only way they could win was to bring down his opponent and go fully negative, and paint Michael Dukakis completely to the left. A guy who had painted himself—who had a record of trying to work to the center in a lot of ways [Ed: ?].
And, um, that legacy continues to this day, and Senator McCain says that he's going to speak out against that and not let that happen. I think that would be good for the country if that is the case. But there are certainly plenty of groups on the Republican side that are going to go forward with that kind of strategy. [Unlike groups on the Dem side. You know, like the kind-and-gentle one that ran the dragging-murder ad against W in 2000.]
KEITH OLBERMANN: Yeah. Truce would be nice.View video here.
By Clay Waters | May 5, 2008 | 8:39 PM EDT
The liberal media just can't get over the way Democrat Michael Dukakis lost to George H. W. Bush.