A couple of days before the 1964 presidential election, a full-page advertisement appeared in metropolitan newspapers paid for by the then well-known New York night club owner, Billy Rose. The big headline read, “I’m comfortable with LBJ,” and the text played on the theme that Rose felt America would be in safe hands with Lyndon Johnson but was scared of what candidate Barry Goldwater might do.
Rose encapsulated what millions of voters apparently thought. Most Americans do, indeed, want to feel “comfortable” about their President. They feel “comfortable” with Ronald Reagan and that projection was a major reason why he won his television debates against Jimmy Carter.
The more we see of George Bush on the evening news, the more comfortable we feel about entrusting the Presidency to him. There are no surprises in his background; his life has been an open book for years, and his wife and five children are tremendous political assets.
The more we see of Michael Dukakis on television, the more his image, his accent, and his arrogant manner grate on us like a fingernail on a blackboard. More important, as the details of his background become nationally known, Americans are feeling more and more uncomfortable about entrusting the Presidency to the man whom Ronald Reagan called “a true liberal.”
Until the Duke came into our national consciousness, many Americans had never taken a hard look at what a doctrinaire liberal really stands for. Other Democrats have usually been able to muffle their liberalism with warm fuzzies.
In that cloistered little world of liberal elitism in Massachusetts, Dukakis apparently never felt any need to fuzzy up his liberalism. He didn’t seem to realize that what plays in the Kennedy environs simply doesn’t play in Peoria.
Whereas George Bush’s “read my lips” is a realistic campaign promise, Dukakis is a liberal who believes in being liberal with other people’s money, and believes that the elite are more competent to spend our money than we are. Dukakis fought the Massachusetts tax cut called Proposition 2-1/2 and he raised taxes repeatedly.
As a typical liberal, Dukakis is soft on criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens and victims. He opposes the death penalty for anyone, including cop killers and drug kingpins, and he fought as hard as he could to continue Massachusetts’ system of paroling, commuting the sentence of, and giving unsupervised weekend passes to convicted murderers who had been sentenced to life-without-parole.
Dukakis is the most vociferous pro-abortion and pro-abortion-funding candidate ever to run for the Presidency. As a Massachusetts state legislator, he introduced a bill (at the request of radical pro-abortion agitator Bill Baird) to legalize abortion in 1970, even before Roe v. Wade. As Governor, he vetoed a bill in 1977 that would have cut off state funding of abortions.
Dukakis’s own campaign position paper documents his endorsement of so-called “gay rights laws” at both the state and federal level. “I will fight for federal legislation,” he says, “to add a prohibition against discrimination based on sexual orientation to the existing protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.”
Other bills introduced by Dukakis at the behest of Bill Baird included a bill “to repeal the law punishing blasphemy,” a bill “to repeal the law prohibition the crime against nature,” a bill “to repeal the laws punishing unnatural and lascivious acts with another person,” and a bill “to repeal the law prohibiting fornication.”
Governor Dukakis’s veto of a law that would have required public school teachers to lead the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag every morning was the action of a typical liberal who shrinks from flag-waving symbolism. He liked the law even less after it was overwhelmingly passed over his veto, and he never enforced it.
Nobody but a doctrinaire liberal would have made the remarks that are now coming back to haunt Dukakis. He not only called himself “a liberal Democrat,” but even called himself “a card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union.”
Although Dukakis proudly asserted at the Democratic Convention that this election isn’t about ideology, it’s about competence, the polls now show that the American public think George Bush is more competent. But this election is really about which candidate the American people feel more “comfortable” with, and an increasing number of voters feel downright uncomfortable with Dukakis because he is a synthesis of Walter Mondale on taxes, George McGovern on foreign policy, Ted Kennedy on crime, Tip O’Neill on spending, and Geraldine Ferraro on abortion.
