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.