The worst moment in my opinion of HW's political life was using Willie Horton ad as scare tactics. If Trump plays that ad today, no one would bat an eye.
Umm no one bated an eye in 88 either, in fact the ad was a major factor that helped HW win.
I wrote a post when this mythology first started popping up in the HW specific thread but deleted it because it was just benji benji'ng, and here's The Queen herself, expert on all subjects, repeating it, it's just sad.
The "Willie Horton" ad ran for like a week, and was run by a GOP PAC in select states.
The Bush campaign ran
this ad for like the whole final month of the campaign:
I'm willing to say ten times as many people saw both ads, and probably fifty times as many people saw the Horton specific ad NOT through the advertising itself but through the media's covering the "controversy" which ran both the ads multiple times in "news reports" on it, even after the Bush campaign denounced the Horton ad, to roll out this one, all while continuously mentioning Horton's specific case at other times.
Now I was going to, and had, compared it to the LBJ "Daisy" ad which ran once. One time. And never mentioned Goldwater. But the media replayed it continuously as framing to discuss the "controversy" over the ad and did explicitly tie it to Goldwater.
But I realized that's going the wrong way. We just lived through a campaign where any Trump message no matter how meaningless or dumb (like his direct insulting of the media at all his events, which he'd been doing for months before THE CONTROVERSY took off and it's been an endless attack on our most important institution, the institutional D.C. press and their special privileges) was amplified, and continues to be, as the media can't stop discussing "the controversy" it causes endlessly until it fizzles out and the next one comes along for them to repeat the process over. The Court Press doesn't seem to understand how little their tut-tutting afterwards matters compared to endlessly playing his comments, whatever they are, which draws the attention.
The "Horton controversy" (not "the Horton ad") played perfectly into this. That was the meaning of Atwater's statement about how people will think Horton is Dukakis' running mate. Not that they'd flood the airwaves with an ad from a second party group, especially not in 1988's media environment. (The Horton ad was specifically rejected by a large number of stations, they had to send them a different one for approval, then bait and switch the one full of Horton pictures to get it on some stations.) Instead it was that once the media was all in, they could have someone campaigning for Bush just mention Horton and it'd dominate a news cycle again. They no longer even needed Bush himself to bring up Horton. He could actually stand back and say "look at these liberals trying to make this about race!"
