WI: Dukakis signs bill banning furloughs for first-degree murderers

Dukakis is prickly. He takes criticism personally.

And in the face of it, a furlough for someone sentenced to life imprisonment doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. Save the furloughs for someone who is going to re-integrate with society.

Or, since I do believe in redemption, if someone sentenced to life imprisonment does get probation and a release date, then we can think about a furlough.

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* And please notice, this almost immediately becomes a highly charged, emotional issue as we face how shitty the criminal justice system is, again and again and again.

Failure on both sides, both railroading innocent people to prison and not keeping the actual guilty and the actual dangerous in prison.

And, there were probably problems when Ronald Reagan was governor of California. Almost certainly, it's the most populated state in the nation. beyond the power of any single individual no matter how good a delegator, spot-checker, and positive encourager. And Reagan was more a dumper than a delegator, I'm sorry but he was.
 
I have to keep going through this again and again: "The Republican convention was particularly important. It took Bush from a double-digit deficit at the beginning of August to a narrow lead at the end of that month. After that, Bush never lost the lead. This is something that conventional accounts of the Willie Horton ad rarely mention: Dukakis was already behind when the ad appeared." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...top-the-endless-hype-of-the-willie-horton-ad/ As the article acknowledges "there is always the counterfactual: Could Dukakis have come from behind in October and won the election if not for the attacks on his record on crime?" I would guess that the answer is No, though he could have made the race a bit closer. 1988 was after all a year of peace and prosperity, which usually favor the party in power, and it's not like *apart from the Willie Horton issue* Dukakis was such a great campaigner. (For example, Bush had the edge on national security--and Dukakis' ride in that tnak didn't help--and Dukakis could be attacked on crime even apart from the prison furlough issue because of his opposition to capital punishment.)
 
I have to keep going through this again and again: "The Republican convention was particularly important. It took Bush from a double-digit deficit at the beginning of August to a narrow lead at the end of that month. After that, Bush never lost the lead. This is something that conventional accounts of the Willie Horton ad rarely mention: Dukakis was already behind when the ad appeared." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...top-the-endless-hype-of-the-willie-horton-ad/ As the article acknowledges "there is always the counterfactual: Could Dukakis have come from behind in October and won the election if not for the attacks on his record on crime?" I would guess that the answer is No, though he could have made the race a bit closer. 1988 was after all a year of peace and prosperity, which usually favor the party in power, and it's not like *apart from the Willie Horton issue* Dukakis was such a great campaigner. (For example, Bush had the edge on national security--and Dukakis' ride in that tnak didn't help--and Dukakis could be attacked on crime even apart from the prison furlough issue because of his opposition to capital punishment.)
If Dukakis lost without Willie Horton, what lessons would be learned by the Democrats?
 
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Point well taken. A lot of factors went into Vice-President Bush's victory over Governor Dukakis.
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...top-the-endless-hype-of-the-willie-horton-ad/

' . . . In this second time period, Bush’s popularity was sharply higher among people who already harbored unfavorable feelings about blacks. . . '

' . . . But what happened after Oct. 21? On that day, Jesse Jackson said on CBS News what few had said publicly to that point: that using Horton’s case as a campaign message actually played on racial fears. In so doing, Mendelberg argues, Jackson took an issue that had been only implicitly about race and made it explicit. Subsequent news stories began to mention race and racism when they discussed Horton and the campaign.

'Most crucially, voters, now aware that this campaign message potentially violated norms against racism, no longer reacted in the same way. Among voters interviewed after Jackson’s statement —between Oct. 22 and Election Day in Mendelberg’s survey — racial prejudice ceased to predict attitudes toward Bush and Dukakis. Jackson’s argument had neutralized the issue. . . '
So, good for Jesse Jackson to the extent he was able to de-toxify the issue. Heck the criminal could just has well been a German-American, a Polish-American, an Asian-American, Latino-American, etc, etc, etc. And same for the victim.

In reality, I suspect is was a combination of Jesse de-toxifying the issue and people giving socially acceptable answers, for an interview with a person taking a poll is afterall a real human interaction.
 
Even if Dukakis still loses, if he does even modestly better, that could change the results of three Senate races: FL (Connie Mack III (Republican) 50.4% Buddy MacKay (Democratic) 49.6%); WA (Slade Gorton (Republican) 50.7% Mike Lowry (Democratic) 49.3%) and WY (Malcolm Wallop (Republican) 50.4% John Vinich (Democratic) 49.6%).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_1988

Now some or all of the Democrats elected might be defeated in the Republican year of 1994, but they could still make a difference before then: remember that Clarence Thomas was only confirmed 52-48....
 
I suspect that probably the neatest single POD to make Dukakis win is to have him not fire (or more quickly rehire) John Sasso as campaign manager - Sasso was talented and tough (and generally credited with propelling Dukakis to the top of the Democratic primaries in the first place) - whereas Susan Estrich had absolutely no prior experience managing a campaign and didn't exactly acquit herself well in 1988.

If Sasso is brought back as campaign manager in March after the Michigan primary (which was apparently mooted), rather than late September - it's very easy to see Dukakis not blowing the massive lead he had after the Democratic Convention and (at the very least) eking out a small victory.


George W. Bush led Al Gore by seventeen points after the GOP convention in 2000. http://www.gallup.com/poll/2338/maj...-election-primary-season-party-conventio.aspx

That he actually lost the popular vote to Gore may be explained in one of three ways: (1) Far from being a genius, Karl Rove was an idiot, and Bush ran an incredibly bad campaign. (2) Al Gore's campaign, so criticized at the time, was absolutely brilliant. (3) Nobody should take huge leads after a party convention too seriously.

I don't think you'll be surprised to learn that I lean toward (3). Other examples besides 1988 and 2000: Jimmy Carter led Ford by 35(!) points after the Democratic convention in 1976. If you will say "Well, the fact that Carter almost lost shows that he was a poor campaigner, too" then consider this--Ronald Reagan led Carter by 28 points after the GOP convention in 1980. https://books.google.com/books?id=DzTvCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT115 Yet he ended up winning by "only" ten points. This shows the absurdity of taking such leads seriously. Unless you believe that by a strange coincidence all those candidates with huge post-convention leads were terrible campaigners.

My own view is that given peace and prosperity, the Republicans had the advantage in 1988. I think Dukakis could have done better than he did, but I am dubious about him winning. Remember that he had *already* lost his lead over Bush by the time the GOP convention opened, long before not only the Willie Horton ad but also before a lot of the mistakes for which he has been criticized--the ad with the ride in the tank, the answer to Bernard Shaw about how he would feel about capital punishment if his wife were raped and killed, etc..
 
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First of all, the lead after the RNC was likely just the RNC bounce. Anybody with a rudimentary understanding of the concept of convention bounces knows that after a party's convention the party receives a large but temporary bounce in the polls. Dukakis's 17 point lead was that, and so was Bush's lead, but as the campaign went into fall, Dukakis screwed up. He made a variety of mistakes, from the debate loss to the tank ride to not responding to the GOP attacks. There is no doubt, however, that Horton did damage. With crime a major issue in 1988 Bush was able to destroy Dukakis on a key issue and terrify suburban voters. The fundamentals explanation is too simplistic. In 2016, with a good economy and had high approval ratings, similar to Reagan's in 1988, Hillary Clinton still lost to Donald Trump. In 2000, despite the peace and prosperity of the 1990s, Al Gore lost. In 1960, with a popular incumbent President, Vice-President Nixon lost. The fundamentals are important, but Dukakis could have won and it looked like he would have. George HW Bush was a bad candidate, uninspiring, out of touch, 'wimp factor', loses the 'have a beer with' test. However, only be rendering Dukakis unacceptable was he able to pull out a win and in 1992 the bad candidate Bush got shellacked. So if Dukakis had been able to present himself as a pragmatist and beat Bush on crime(the national Reagan administration furlough program, Massachusetts had one of the lowest crime rates in the nation) then IMO he could have, and would have, won.
 
Sure, three examples do indeed suggest that there's absolutely no way Dukakis wins by the 17% margin that polls had him at at before the conventions. I don't think he could have won by that much either.

But Dukakis' wide (hypothetical) lead also casts doubt on the whole 'peace and prosperity was so obvious that Bush was clearly going to win, nothing could change that' counter-hypothesis here.

If anything, 'parties get turned out of office after they've served more than one term' is a much more straightforward fundamental predictor if you insist on using one, since it's only been wrong once since 1948 - in 1988 itself. Maybe Atwater and Estrich were a part of that.

OOTH, given that 1960 was so close (and 1968 and 1976 almost as close) and that in 2000 and 2016 the party in power did actually win the popular vote, I'm not really sure how seriously we should take the idea that it is very hard for a party to win after it has controlled the White House for two terms. (Which after all was not true for 1940-48, or for Hoover in 1928 or Taft in 1908.) 2008 was actually the only time since 1952 that the party holding the White House lost *by a large margin* for its third term--and obviously that can be explained by the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. The most you can say is that after two terms a party in power does suffer some wear and tear, and usually cannot win the third term by nearly the same margin it did the second. Thus, while Nixon might plausibly have won in 1960, there is no way he (or even Ike if he could legally run for a third term) could have equaled Ike's 1956 victory, just as Ford in 1976 could not have equaled Nixon's 1972 margin even if he had been running against McGovern himself! Obviously, Bush was not going to win in 1988 by anything like Reagan's 1984 eighteen-point margin. But I do think he had a better than even chance of winning, given peace and prosperity and the fact that Reagan's job approval ratings rebounded somewhat in 1988 from their 1987 lows.
 
That I will agree with - if there ever was a time for a party to make it to three terms post Truman, 1988 was it. The economy was good, and Bush had an better time piggybacking of of his president's popularity than either Nixon or Gore would.

[If anything, one of the things that Dukakis would probably need to do to pull out a win is change up the electoral math - Bentsen was a good VP pick but the southern states and Texas were still all way beyond reach for him - if he runs with someone like Jim Blanchard or John Glenn and focuses more on Michigan or Ohio, he only needs something like a 3% swing elsewhere to win, and that does seem a bit more doable (The tough part is probably getting a big enough home-state bounce for VP, to be honest) - and then we have a scenario where Dukakis scrapes out a victory despite Bush winning the popular vote by a sizable margin]

Why was 1988 better than 2000? 2000 had a stronger economy and more peace and prosperity, there was very little asides from a blowjob Clinton could be attacked on. Reagan was the Great Communicator but his legacy was controversial. Bush promised a kinder, gentler nation after all, that contrasted with Reagan. Bush was a bad candidate, his 1988 victory disguises that simply because Dukakis was unable to capitalize on that.
 
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showelection.php?year=1980
Reagan 50.7%
Carter 41.0 %
Anderson 6.6%

Yes, Reagan did technically beat Carter by about 10 points, but with Reagan having 50.7% of the popular vote, I'm going to consider that, not so much a mandate, more than voters are giving his administration a chance.

OTOH, there's no reason to think that Anderson voters would be unanimously, or even overwhelmingly, for Carter if Anderson weren't running. As Newsweek pointed out after the election, "John Anderson’s impact on the race was largely overshadowed by the broad-based Reagan landslide. It was in one sense tempting to view him as a spoiler; Anderson’s vote was actually greater than Reagan’s margin of victory in thirteen states, among them New York, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Connecticut. But had Anderson not run, Carter would have picked up barely half (49 per cent) of his vote; 37 per cent of Anderson voters said they would have backed Reagan." http://www.salon.com/2011/04/04/third_party_myth_easterbrook/
 
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