How much would Dukakis have won by if not for the media's bias?

[Alcon]

[Alcon]

IIRC, this was Dukakis Campaign photo opportunity.

Exactly.

He made his own news.

[Alcon]

Granted, Dukakis looked about as bad as anyone possibly could have in his response to the question, but I still maintain that it was extremely unfair.

It was such an incredibly idiotic question that I could hardly even pay any attention to what his answer was.

Sorry, Bandit, but in politics, issues aren't always what win.  Both parties have skated solely on personality and the other party's bumbling.

[Alcon]

Granted, Dukakis looked about as bad as anyone possibly could have in his response to the question, but I still maintain that it was extremely unfair.

It was such an incredibly idiotic question that I could hardly even pay any attention to what his answer was.

Sorry, Bandit, but in politics, issues aren't always what win.  Both parties have skated solely on personality and the other party's bumbling.

The interesting thing is that for Bush, it was a pyrrhic victory, in the sense that because he ran without a positive agenda, he had nothing to fall back on to rally his supporters when the economy wasn't doing well.  A positive agenda that won a mandate gives a politician something to hold onto when the seas get rough.  Purely negative campaigns usually don't win, except by default, which was the case with this one.

Not that I had any real problem with any of the negative campaigning that Bush did.  He told the truth about the inanities of liberal philosophy.  But that alone is not enough to govern effectively.  He didn't offer a positive agenda because, apparently, he didn't have one.

I believe there was a poll sometime during the election - I forget when - that asked an amusing but very significant question:  which candidate would you rather have a beer with?  The answer, overwhelmingly, was Bush.

And that was, in part, the crux of his victory.  The triviality of a 2.46 percentage margin is really quite astounding.  I mean, take away a small oddity group like gay Republcians and Bush's margin is cut right in half.  Bush won, among other things, because he was folksy.  Upbeats liked him because he was upbeat;  downbeats liked him because he wasn't arrogant-seeming.  None of this has much to do with politics, but who knows what could have changed the minds of 1 in 40 voters and swung the election entirely.

Bush did not win on substance alone.  Not that he should be faulted for it.  It's good politics, and the only people who complain about it are sore losers or those with unreachable standards.

[Alcon]

The triviality of a 2.46 percentage margin is really quite astounding. 

Alcon, where do you come up with this margin?  I though Bush won by 8 points -- 54%-46%.

He assumed that you referred to G W Bush, not G H W Bush.

I'd like to add that, if Alcon thinks 2.46% margin is trivial, then what of Al Gore's 0.48% margin in 2000, the one which Democrats still believe is a mandate for leftism? Not that any of this matters, since presidents are elected by 50 states, not by "popular margin."

I really ought to change my earlier comment because it was factually wrong. But I was 9 years old during the '88 election, so my impressions of Dukakis are all based on vague sense of hearsay.

I was confused, yeah.  Sorry bout that.  In any case, 8 points is still a pretty small margin, when you consider that it would be less than an 11-to-9 split in a room full of people - hardly something you'd notice.

Obviously, I think that 0.48% is even more trivial of a margin and anyone who thinks that is a mandate for anything other than "the plurality of the country voted for Al Gore" is a fool.  Why wouldn't I?

[Alcon]

Can someone explain to me what the whole deal about Dukakis in a tank was about.  I've seen the pictures.  What's the big deal?

He did look awkward, but only when I view the picture in an historical context.  I agree with you.  I do not see the significance, although that is probably because it epitomised the flow of the campaign, which we're both too young to know much about.