CNN Race for the White House: Discussion Thread

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Tonight, the third installment of CNN's Race for the White House series will be on.  It's about the 1988 Bush vs. Dukakis campaign.  I was wondering if any of you have been watching it, and if so, what you think of it.

I watched the first one on 1960, and I was pleasantly surprised at how fair it was to Nixon and how much it challenged the traditional depiction of him as a cartoon villain of history.  I haven't seen the second episode (on 1860), but there's a rerun tonight.  They're calling it "Lincoln vs. Douglas," which irritates me since it ignores John Breckenridge and John Bell.  I wonder if it mentions anything about them in the documentary itself. 

I'm looking forward to the '88 one tonight, but dreading it at the same time.  1988 is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented presidential campaigns in history, so I'll be interested to see whether they parrot the traditional "Bush ran a dirty, nasty, racist campaign, and that was the only reason he won" narrative.  Never mind that it's far from the truth.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

I watched the 1988 episode last night.  I don't know what to think.  I'm glad they didn't fall for the old "racist Willie Horton ad" myth, but otherwise it was the same old myths about this campaign.  (To be fair, John Sununu said they were afraid the Willie Horton attacks could be interpreted as racist, which is probably true, but the program itself did not try to make it out as a racial issue.)  They tried to make Lee Atwater into Bush's running mate and depict his campaign team as a bunch of evil geniuses.  Meanwhile, Dukakis was the poor, innocent, helpless victim of dirty tricks and character assassination.  They described Dukakis as "taking the moral high ground," and playing fair.  This is pretty much what I've come to expect from anyone writing about the 1988 campaign, but it doesn't stand up to facts. 

I was disappointed that they didn't focus much on Bush's convention speech, or on the more positive themes of his campaign like, "Read my lips: no new taxes," "a kinder, gentler, nation," or "a thousand points of light."  They downplayed the Democrat attacks on Bush for putting Dan Quayle on the ticker.  They also ignored the VP battle between Quayle and Bentsen, including the "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" exchange.  I wish they had covered all of this, but they had a clear agenda to paint Bush and the GOP as the bad guys.  At the very end, they showed clips of Bush's inauguration with "Hail to the Chief" playing, and then at the end showed Dukakis riding on a subway or bus (or something like that), implying that "This man should have been president, but those mean, nasty Republicans cheated him out of it with their dirty tricks."

They also parroted the talking point that Bush only won by attacking Dukakis and going negative, which is also a myth.  At one point during the episode, they showed a clip that showed two polls: one that had Dukakis winning by 10 points after the DNC, and one before the convention that had Bush winning by about 3 or 4.  So it's probably safe to say that the early lead Dukakis had in the summer was mostly a post-convention boost.  Dukakis also shot himself in the foot a number of times (like riding in the tank and his answer to the debate question about his wife).  Bush also had the advantage of being VP when voters were mostly happy with the status quo (though to be fair, you could make the same case for why Nixon should have won in 1960 and Gore in 2000).

[Oldiesfreak1854]

I was a little bit disappointed by some of the factual errors in the 1948 episode.  Hardly anything was mentioned about Strom Thurmond, although there was a brief mention of the Southern delegations at the DNC protesting Humphrey's speech.  (There's probably a reason that CNN didn't want to emphasize that--it highlights the Dems' racist past.)  They ignored Stassen and made it look like Taft was Dewey's main competition for the GOP nomination, then said that Taft was President Taft's son (he was actually his grandson, IIRC.)  They did the same thing in the 1988 episode when they said that Dukakis was the grandson of immigrants, when it was, in fact, his parents who were the immigrants.  Then, at the end, they called Truman's victory a "landslide," in spite of the fact that he got exactly the same number of electoral votes that Kennedy did in 1960, which was one of the closest elections in US history.  It's an especially egregious error when they previously said that the election came down to Ohio and California.

The whole thing was clearly biased in favor of Truman (and why wouldn't it be, given that it was one of the greatest political comebacks in history?). 

[Oldiesfreak1854]

I thought the Tafts were indeed father and son?

Yep. Robert Taft was President Taft's oldest son.

I stand corrected.