Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor and candidate for governor Kerry Healey has connected to Lee Atwater. He gained notoriety managing Bush Senior’s media campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988 when he promised to “strip the bark off the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate.” Horton was a black man who raped a white woman while on a weekend furlough from prison. The mugshot of Horton, who is African-American, gave what Atwater described as “every suburban mother’s greatest fear.”
Healey is channeling Atwater by running essentially the same campaign. She is buying a lot of TV time to scare the bejeesus out of those suburban mothers by attacking her opponent, Deval Patrick, for having provided competent legal counsel to defendants in court. Patrick defended a man convicted in Florida, now serving a life sentence, of shooting a policeman. Healey, who had no professional involvement with that or any other case, simply wants the defendant dead, and apparently does not believe in defendants having competent defense counsel. Other ads focus on a case in which her opponent supported a convicted rapist receiving a DNA test to prove his guilt or innocence. The DNA test did not prove his innocence and he remains in jail. End of story.
But not for Healey, whose ads are exactly what Atwater would have done back in the day.
Atwater contracted brain cancer in 1990 and died in 1991. His words as he approached death contain a lesson for Kerry Healey: “In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said I would ‘strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his running mate.’ I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not,’ he declared….The eighties were about acquiring wealth, power and prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. It took a deadly illness to bring me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.’
So far, Kerry Healey has not learned that lesson. She will likely end this campaign a loser in more ways than one.