The most effective ad ever made for a presidential election featured a violent, career-criminal, Willie Horton, walking out of a Massachusetts prison on a weekend pass. On one of those passes, he went on another vicious crime spree. George H. W. Bush used those crimes — and the lax policies that let Horton roam the country — to destroy his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis.
The past is prologue. Once again, voters are worried about their safety and angry about the open-border policies that have degraded it. Donald Trump knows that, so he will be…
A little background is helpful. The 1988 ad (the video is here) was a searing attack on Dukakis’s lenient parole rules and his “soft on crime” policies, showing how they endangered the public. Willie Horton was a compelling example. He was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after stabbing a boy nineteen times during a robbery, killing him. Yet the Massachusetts prison system, under Dukakis’s leadership, repeatedly gave Horton passes to leave for the weekend.
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