Steve Kornacki: Park51 and the Right's Willie Horton Syndrome
[Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor.]
In the best sports movie ever made, "Hoosiers," Barbara Hershey’s character, perhaps the lone resident of hoops-crazed Hickory, Ind., not to have been bitten by the basketball bug, explains the down-side of venerating high school athletes.
"I've seen them, the real sad ones," she says. "They sit around the rest of their lives talking about the glory days when they were seventeen years old."
That same sentiment can be applied to more than a few right-wing pundits and commentators. But it’s not long-ago basketball games that they’re desperate to re-live: It’s the 1988 election. That, in case your memory is fuzzy, was when Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and the rest of George H.W. Bush’s political brain trust sold a crucial chunk of swing voters on a caricature of Michael Dukakis as a weak, criminal-coddling, and unpatriotic technocrat. A mid-summer deficit of 17 points was turned upside-down and Bush went on to score a commanding victory.
The country has long since moved on, of course. The Bush presidency was a one-term flameout, and we’re now on our third president (two of them two-termers -- so far) since he left office. Dukakis retired from politics 20 years ago and now, at 76, contents himself by teaching political science at Northeastern University, often making the two-mile commute by foot (and stopping to pick up litter on the way). Almost no one under 35 even knows who he is, or remembers much of anything about the ’88 election....
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In the best sports movie ever made, "Hoosiers," Barbara Hershey’s character, perhaps the lone resident of hoops-crazed Hickory, Ind., not to have been bitten by the basketball bug, explains the down-side of venerating high school athletes.
"I've seen them, the real sad ones," she says. "They sit around the rest of their lives talking about the glory days when they were seventeen years old."
That same sentiment can be applied to more than a few right-wing pundits and commentators. But it’s not long-ago basketball games that they’re desperate to re-live: It’s the 1988 election. That, in case your memory is fuzzy, was when Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes and the rest of George H.W. Bush’s political brain trust sold a crucial chunk of swing voters on a caricature of Michael Dukakis as a weak, criminal-coddling, and unpatriotic technocrat. A mid-summer deficit of 17 points was turned upside-down and Bush went on to score a commanding victory.
The country has long since moved on, of course. The Bush presidency was a one-term flameout, and we’re now on our third president (two of them two-termers -- so far) since he left office. Dukakis retired from politics 20 years ago and now, at 76, contents himself by teaching political science at Northeastern University, often making the two-mile commute by foot (and stopping to pick up litter on the way). Almost no one under 35 even knows who he is, or remembers much of anything about the ’88 election....