It's election season, which means it's time for college professors and media pundits to start reciting falsehoods about the 1988 Willie Horton scandal.
In case you're unfamiliar with the saga, here's a brief overview. During the 1988 presidential election between Vice President George H. W. Bush and former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Bush campaign released an ad about Dukakis' crime policies. Dukakis had supported a program of weekend furloughs ' or breaks from prison ' for convicted felons. Under his watch, more than 70 convicts, including rapists and murderers, had left prison on furloughs and never returned. One of them was Willie Horton, an African-American murderer who committed another vile crime while on a break from prison. According to liberal legend, Republicans made a campaign ad about Horton in order to appeal to America's fear of the black man.
This is total nonsense. The Willie Horton scandal did not prove Americans' hatred of blacks; it proved that, when losing an argument about their policies, liberals accuse Republicans of racism in order to shut down debate.
Willie Horton was a convicted first-degree murderer whose crime had been especially brutal: After robbing a gas station convenience store, he hacked apart the 17-year-old cashier, Joey Fournier, and stuffed the body in a trash can. Because Massachusetts had abolished the death penalty, Horton was sentenced to life in prison. And yet, thanks to Dukakis' idiotic weekend furlough program, this killer was permitted to roam the streets unsupervised every weekend. Unsurprisingly, he struck again on April 3, 1987.
Horton broke into the home of Maryland residents Cliff Barnes and Angela Miller and waited for the couple to return. When Barnes arrived home, Horton attacked, pistol-whipping him and slashing his torso with a knife 22 times before binding and gagging him. When Miller returned, Horton dragged her into the bedroom, cut off her clothes and savagely raped her for several hours.
The couple survived Horton's attack, which was the direct result of Dukakis' astonishingly stupid idea that first-degree murderers should spend only five days a week in prison. Unfortunately for him, Republicans brought it up when he decided to run for president ' and the myth of the racist Willie Horton ad was born.
Before accusing Republicans of hating black people and appealing to Americans' incurable racism, Democrats had employed a number of diversionary tactics to defend Dukakis' furlough program. First, they insisted that furloughs were necessary to rehabilitate criminals and reintroduce them to society. But, of course, Willie Horton was serving a life sentence. He didn't need to be reintroduced to society because he would never be released. Then they moved on to claim that a Republican governor had instituted the program. While it was true that a furlough program had been in place, Dukakis was the first governor to extend weekend passes to first-degree murderers. The Bush campaign's Willie Horton ad simply exposed Dukakis' dangerous crime policies. Several weeks later, when their other defenses failed, Democrats suddenly accused Republicans of racism.
Of course, it might have been difficult for the voters to discern that Horton was black, because the ad released by the Bush campaign didn't even show his face. In fact, it showed an all-white group of convicts leaving prison. The only ad that showed Horton's face was released by a victims' advocacy group, not the Bush campaign. (If you want to see them for yourself, both ads are available on YouTube.) Yet, to this day, liberals cite the ad as proof that Republicans stir up racial hatred in order to win elections.
The only thing the Willie Horton scandal proved was the utter failure of liberal policies on crime. For decades, the left had claimed that criminals were actually victims of our racist/sexist/classist society, and if only we were nice to them and gave them weekend passes from prison, they would reward us with good behavior. Dukakis lost the election not because of Republicans' racism, but because he believed in playing nice with vicious murderers.
And, fortunately, it forever changed America's policies on crime. A few years after the Willie Horton scandal, the staunchly Democratic city of New York elected Republican mayor Rudy Giuliani, possibly the most successful crime-fighter in American history. Today, candidates running for mayor of New York can only win by promising to continue his policies.
Even the Democrats can no longer get away with being soft on crime. In 1992, Democratic voters chose the pro-death-penalty, tough-on-crime duo Bill Clinton and Al Gore as their candidates. Whatever his faults, Clinton played a major role in the sharp decline in crime during the 1990s ' because, unlike Dukakis, he believed that violent criminals should be punished, not coddled.
The next time your professor cites the Willie Horton ads as an example of how politicians pander to voters' fear of the black man ' as one of mine did recently ' mention Horton's crimes. Better yet, tell him it's time to move on. Some liberals are still pouting and falsely accusing Republicans of racism 20 years after the fact. Frankly, I think we've all had enough of their pity party. Ashley Herzog is a senior journalism major. Send her an e-mail at ah103304@ohiou.edu.
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Ashley Herzog
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