On the surface, it may appear that federal inmate, Willie Horton, Reverend Jeremiah Wright and University of Illinois- Chicago Professor William Ayers are completely different people who share very little in common. After reading K.H. Jamieson's Dirty Politics: Deception, Distortion and Democracy, however, there appears to be more similarities between these three men than initially meets the eye. When running for political office, especially for President of the United States, you had better hope that that all your skeletons are permanently buried in your closet. As a public figure with the potential to represent the interests of the masses, all information regarding your past is fair game for the media and your opponents, regardless of whether you think it is relevant to your ability to assume the responsibilities of that particular political position or not.
To emphasize this point, one can analyze the relationship between Massachusetts Governor and 1988 Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis and convicted murderer and rapist, Willie Horton. As Governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis supported a furlough program that allowed criminals to leave prison and reenter the public for a short period of time. Although Dukakis stated the furlough program was 99% percent effective in the effort to rehabilitate criminals, it was this program that ultimately cost him the 1988 Presidential Election since, while on a weekend furlough, an inmate named Willie Horton viciously raped and assaulted a couple in Maryland. It was this isolated event that gave Republican candidate, George H.W. Bush the ammunition he needed to question Dukakis’s character and use media outlets to distort public perception and ultimately find his way to the Oval Office. By exploiting media’s coverage of the Horton case, Bush was able to doubt Dukakis’s character and utilize powerful imagery and persuasive discourse to instill a sense of fear in the public when considering the possibility of a Dukakis led nation.
When looking at the current Presidential election, it was only a matter of time before one of the candidates dug up questionable actions and associations of their opponent’s past. While Barack Obama could have mentioned John McCain’s role in the Keating 5 scandal to a much greater degree, it appears that Obama has tried to stay “above the fray” throughout the Presidential campaign while McCain and the Republican camp have focused much more effort on employing similar smear tactics to those used by George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Like Willie Horton, William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright have been used in recent politics to discredit a candidate’s character and legitimacy. William Ayers spent 10 years as a fugitive in the 1970s when he was part of the "Weather Underground," an anti-Vietnam War group that protested U.S. policies by bombing the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and a string of other government buildings. Having avoided prison time, Ayers now lives in Chicago where he went on to work with a young Barack Obama on community oriented projects and host an Obama attended fundraiser to support Obama’s candidacy for the Illinois State Senate. Reverend Jeremiah Wright has been Barack Obama’s pastor for the past 20 years and has played a large role in Obama’s life. He married Obama to his wife, baptized his two daughters and is even credited for coining the phrase, “the audacity of hope”, which is the title of Obama’s most recent book. However, Wright has come under fire in the past year for his inflammatory comments concerning America, racial relations, Israel and 9/11.
Because of the seditiousness of their past actions and their associations with Barack Obama, Ayers and Wright are both being used in a similar fashion to Willie Horton in that they have both been thrust into political discourse to associate public senses of doubt and fear with a particular political candidate. While John McCain has tried to use these men to support his cause and has used television commercials and powerful imagery to do so, it does not appear that the strategy that worked so well for Bush in ’88 is finding equal success for today given McCain’s current position behind Obama in the polls. Although there is no way of verifying the exact reason why this is the case, the differences between the political and economic atmospheres of 1988 and 2008 clearly play an important role in explaining why successful strategies of the past are now being met with failure.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/obama/902213,CST-NWS-ayers18.article
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=4443788
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