What if Michael Dukakis Won the 1988 Election?

Although this was probably unlikely, what are some potential ways Dukakis could have defeated H.W Bush in the election? Could he have emphasized the Iran-Contra scandal and the stock market crash that year? Or perhaps Bush's being complicit in Iran-Contra?
 
Although this was probably unlikely, what are some potential ways Dukakis could have defeated H.W Bush in the election? Could he have emphasized the Iran-Contra scandal and the stock market crash that year? Or perhaps Bush's being complicit in Iran-Contra?

Not that hard - have Bush's infamous "throwing up in the Japanese prime minister's lap" incident happen four years earlier, immediately after he says "read my lips". Nerves, something wrong with his breakfast, who knows.

Good luck cementing your post-convention popularity boost, establishing your toughness as C-in-C, and spreading rumors about your opponent's mental health when 19 million people have just seen you throw up on live TV.
 
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If Dukakis had not responded to Bernard Shaw's question about whether he would favor the death penalty for a criminal who raped Kitty Dukakis in a chilled, technocratic way and instead said "Bernie, I am shocked by that question. I am tempted to come over there and slug you. I think George will agree with me that you need to apologize to me, Kitty and the American people." He could have won.

If he had put on the flannel shirts earlier, I think he could have put together a win.
 
IIRC Dukakis's planned answer for a question about the death penalty was to talk about how his dad had suffered a brutal assault and his brother had been killed by a drunk driver and how angry he'd felt at that but vengeance is not the way etc.... and he got thrown by it being more personal to him to begin with.
 
He needed to respond to Atwater’s despicable attacks on him. Not firing Sasso is the best way to do this.

Dukakis is one of those people who were too good to be POTUS, he didn’t want to fight fire with fire.
 
In the last few weeks of the campaign Dukakis was looking like he would suffer a Mondale-level defeat, and so he abandoned the Atari Democrat/technocratic campaign he'd been running up to that point and focused on a strongly populist message. It was too late to get him close to the win but it did help him avoid a repeat of 72/84. If he'd run a populist campaign from the beginning he could have won.
 
Dukakis is one of those people who were too good to be POTUS, he didn’t want to fight fire with fire.
I disagree.

Dukakis was prickly. He seemed to get hung up on the fact that the criticism of him was unfair.

Of course it was unfair. Embrace it. View it as the equivalent of texture during the course of a long poker tournament.
 
Well he is going to have to have taken a harder line on crime as governor for one thing.

Its hard to get this across today, with movements for criminal justice reform and all of that, but in the 70s and 80s, Americans were disgusted with crime, and we had embarassingly high amounts of it and embarassingly high amounts of people victimized by it without recourse. Tough on crime was a winning argument under the circumstances.

But as President, I wonder how he would have approached NAFTA and the fall of Communism. Keep in mind that Dukakis I believe won West Virginia in 1988. This was solely because of the unions, so they were a fairly large component of his support. Therefore, he might be under pressure not to do NAFTA or anything like it. Also, I wonder if the fall of the Soviet Union would have been put off a bit due to a slackening of American pressure on the subject of the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe. If not, though, does he engage as much as Bush did to ensure that there were no rogue nuke holding generals? Tough to say.
 
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Simple: if he fires Sasso, hire anyone other than Susan Estrich. Andrew T went into why she was a problem in a post years ago. Or, alternatively, keep Sasso...

Another way would be to have Willie Horton hit by a bus before he commits his Maryland crimes...
 
If Dukakis had not responded to Bernard Shaw's question about whether he would favor the death penalty for a criminal who raped Kitty Dukakis in a chilled, technocratic way and instead said "Bernie, I am shocked by that question. I am tempted to come over there and slug you. I think George will agree with me that you need to apologize to me, Kitty and the American people." He could have won.

If he had put on the flannel shirts earlier, I think he could have put together a win.

Agree on the first part.

Flannel shirts wouldn't have helped. It would just come across as phony.

Trump broke the "rules" by showing up at the Iowa State Fair in a suit and finished a close second. He got away with it because a suit is who he is.
 
Simple: if he fires Sasso, hire anyone other than Susan Estrich. Andrew T went into why she was a problem in a post years ago. Or, alternatively, keep Sasso...

Another way would be to have Willie Horton hit by a bus before he commits his Maryland crimes...

Has it ever been articulated why he hired someone who'd never managed a campaign before, that late in the race?
 
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