In the Year of Our Lord 1988, the Democratic Party, with an excellent chance of reacquiring the executive branch after an eight-year run of Cauliflower Conservatism under Ronald Reagan, nominated as their candidate one Michael Dukakis, the sitting governor of Massachusetts, a man with the earnestness of a Sunday school class treasurer, and the charisma of laundry detergent. Offered a gift of an opponent in George Herbert Walker Bush, who in his years as Vice-president to the Vegetable-in-Chief was compared to items as diverse as macaroni, steamed prunes, and runt canines with an obsequious streak, he still couldn’t cut the cheese. One of the gargantuan goofs of his Harvard and Cambridge, Massachusetts ensconced advisors, was to believe that Mike’s positions, which were entirely reasonable, would not be vulnerable to unreasonable attack by the greasy opposition, on the grounds that voters, like the eggplants conducting the bull sessions up in Bean Town were manifestly reasonable people. Wrong. If the reactionary scum told the population that the Commissar from Massachusetts wanted to puree American flags at a manufacturing plant in Havana, Cuba, and then sell the contents in jars to witches in Transylvania, the population just might believe it, if you didn’t offer them a fierce rebuttal. This rebuttal would have been along the lines that, any effort to pursue a constitutional amendment banning the toasting of flags was a heinous abuse of the nation’s apathy, of congresses’ preoccupation with parking spaces and office supplies, and terribly, terribly stupid, even for Republicans to bring up. Someone other than the Harvard schmucks might have told the nation that people assaulting the patriotic fidelity of the good governor of Massachusetts needed to take a bath in lye, and had demonstrated nothing less than their alienation from American values; and were, by the way, the moral and intellectual inferiors of species living in the yards of barns.
Similarly, if the poisonous huckleberries on the right told the country that Moscow Mike thought that copies of the Pledge of Allegiance should be shredded by kindergarteners, defecated upon by student bodies in K thru 12, and pissed upon by everyone else, it not only was in your interest, but absolutely required that you present an alternate exegesis of the Massachusetts court case providing the fodder for the Bush coven’s putrescent misinformation and deception. Unfortunately, the Dukakis pros demonstrated themselves brainiacs on the streets, but chumps in the sheets, so to speak. Give them credit for making history, by running a presidential campaign that landed them in the Museum of Clowns for perhaps the worst campaign of all time. Considerable blame certainly fell to the party faithful, whose votes in the primaries made him the party nominee. Among their boners was voting in the primaries for a well intentioned, effective New England governor, who was a rock formation on the stump, and had surrounded himself with Ivy league-blinkered counselors. Likewise, choosing a candidate because of his high scores on the party’s strictest litmus tests ended up another case of liberal self-gratification that precluded scoring for real.
One stunningly egregious flop in the campaign was when, during a debate with Poppy Bush, a media questioner presented the candidate with a hypothetical scenario in which the Dukakis spouse was sexually assaulted and murdered. The candidate was asked whether this could cause him to become a proponent of capital punishment. His calm and bloodless reaction to the hypothetical killing and raping of Kitty Dukakis, while intended to convey that he was unflappable when presented with hyperbolic bait, in fact made it appear that the gruesome demise of his lawfully wedded wife would not cause a fuss for him if it was done at a reasonable hour, preferably with prior notification, and if all involved were dressed appropriately. Of course the Bush paterfamiliadufus won the election, putting in office another blue-blooded asshole, willing to wear a cowboy hat, and eat beef jerky in order to become Queen Shitkicker for a Day. As expected, he ran the feudalist and authoritarian agenda up the flagpole for four years, in the process systematically putting the shitkickers and the rest of us into the shithouse, and pissing the shitkickers and the rest of us off mightily. On the bright side, in the next election he got reamed like a Tijuana hooker holding a five hundred dollar retainer from a fraternity house.