February 05, 2005

THE STORY SO FAR (PART IV)...

Prior Chapters linked below:

Part III

Part II

Part I
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THE COLLEGE YEARS (Part 2: Life with Bob and the ‘88 Primaries):

During my sophomore year in college (from late 1986 to mid-1987), I lived in a dorm at S.C.S.U. My first year I roomed with a friend from home who later dropped out and now I was with a Senior who bore a striking resemblance to John Belushi. Being twenty-one and on his way out, he didnÂ’t spend a lot of time at the dorm, but I had no complaints. He was a good guy and I pretty much had the room to myself most of the time. At this point I befriended a fellow named Bob who I remained close friends with for many years afterward. We had a lot of things in common. The three biggest were: we loved the NY Football Giants, we both enjoyed domestic beer (too much) and we were both life-long Democrats. Bob, in fact, was more "up" on local politics than I was being as his father was a member of his town's Democratic Committee.

Like me, Bob was a Democrat because he came from a family of Democrats and he held the same "us v. them" view as I did about Republicans. It was after the Hart fiasco that we began to discuss the remaining candidates – none of whom I was really familiar with. But Bob, being from a town not far from the Massachusetts border, he knew one of them quite a bit. Mass. Governor Michael Dukakis. Now, as you know by this point, I was looking for candidate to root for and not really knowing much about any of them – and trusting Bob’s judgment – I was ready to accept this recommendation. In fact, I had a kind of warped view that held to the idea that a person should support the most local candidate for President because, when in office, he (or she) would treat the old stomping grounds with a little geographic favoritism. So, Dukakis soon became "the Man" for me in ’88.

All right, now itÂ’s my first Presidential election in which I can actually vote, and not just the general election in November. I actually get excited about the primary. It was at the end of March, so with the most of the primaries out of the way, Connecticut didnÂ’t mean all that much. Dukakis was in the lead as far as delegates went and the only credible challenger still in the race was Al Gore. As I recall, there were a number of Northeastern States also holding primaries that day and Gore, who had picked up several delegates on "Super Tuesday" a few weeks before, was not polling well outside of the South. So there I was, ready to cast a ballot for the lead horse in the race.

Had I been more politically savvy then, I would have realized that a Northern Liberal Techno-crat really had no chance to win over the heartland. But I naively hoped and believed. OK, he wasnÂ’t John F. Kennedy but I spent a lot of time researching his career and reviewing his accomplishments as Governor. True, Massachusetts had prospered under his tutelage but it had more to do with the rapid development of technology in the state than anything else. To DukakisÂ’ credit, he did support measures that were pro-growth in the business sector but government spending programs also weighed it down. In addition, taxes were pretty bad in the State. Typical of a Democrat, Dukakis believed that bigger Government was better.

If nothing else, my experiences were really educational in terms of understanding how politics works. It was during this time that the concept of strategy began to sink in. As soon as Dukakis was coronated at the convention (I actually taped his speech and played it back a couple of times), the GOP strategists began to go in for the kill. One of the big guys on Team Bush was Lee Atwater. He was, in a word, a genius when it came to politics and I hated him for it - not unlike today's Democrats despise George W. Bush's political handler, Karl Rove. He knew the game and, more importantly, he knew the electorate. Atwater understood that of the people who actually vote a third of them always voted Republican, another third always voted Democrat, and the remaining third waited until after Labor Day and took a look. And what they looked at were sound bites, headlines on the network news shows and the occasional political commercial.

Today of course, with cable news and the Internet, voters get their info from a more diverse group of sources. But back then it was still just the big three networks, and a handful of cable systems that got CNN. In 1988, people wanted pretty much the status quo. And while George Bush wasnÂ’t exactly a dream date of many voters he was at least a known quantity. Of course, Lee Atwater knew that by and large the electorate did not look favorably on Liberals. From George McGovern to Walter Mondale, voters had had their fill of the Left and it was DukakisÂ’ burden to prove he wasnÂ’t you standard garden-variety establishment big government high-taxing Liberal with a capital "L".

Part V

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