Gary Wills in “Under God” offers a explanation for Dukakis’ defeat that doesn’t rely on the notion of being too nice, innocent, or honest. Wills argues that Dukakis was our first secular presidential candidate and lost because he couldn’t connect with average voters. Dukakis belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church but largely avoiding explaining what that meant and how it effected him or his policies, he was private about his faith. Bush benefited from being able to define himself using the shorthand, “I’m a Christian, like you.” Dukakis couldn’t make this argument. Then when Willie Norton was turned into a household name and Dukakis gave a weak answer to the death penalty question in the debate, people got the idea that they didn’t know what the guy stood for. I agree that Obama is cerebral and can sometime come off as aloof as Dukakis, but he also has had a religious life that is very common in America. By this time, people should be familar with Obama and his goals, if not, they would have never voted for him anyway.

Is it that hard to swallow that maybe most people just rejected Dukakis' policies? For instance, crime was a big issue in the 90s, and Willie Horton and the death penalty question weren't just firebombs, they pointed to very real differences in how the candidates saw crime and what sorts of solutions they favored for it.

And don't forget, the Cold War was still on and Dukakis looked like a doofus in that tank.

I think you mean the 80s (Dukakis lost the 88 election).

Most people credit his lame answer to the "What if Kitty Dukakis had been raped and murdered" question. Now, personally, I would have walked down from the podium and slammed Bernard Shaw's head into the conference table for even asking such a question about my wife.

Dukakis, however, gave a technocratic answer. It wasn't so much that he opposed the death penalty, it was that in the moment of the debate, he gave an answer that was completely devoid of emotion. He refused to speak about how such an event would have affected him. It made him look, well, more vulcan than human. In the age of TV, people do want to see a certain amount of passion from their candidates. Not so much that they look unhinged, but enough to lend courage to their convictions.

Kerry didn't have a similar, single moment where you could say that he "blew it", but I do believe that he, too, suffered from an image as a boring technocrat from New England.

I agree that the Kitty debate question was a big moment but I don’t think it cost Dukakis the election. In the polls Dukakis went from 49 to 42 immediately after the debate but that is only a snap shot.

Here is an excerpt from “In God we trust”:

During the 1988 primary and elections, the Times Mirror Corporation, publishers of the LATimes, using factor analytic techniques, developed a sophisticated method to measuring ten independent sectors of the electorate. The sector they identified as “moralist” is a purer measure of the conservative religious community than the measures “fundamentalists” or “evangelicals” used by most pollsters. In the last Times Mirror poll conducted before the general election, the moralists favored Bush over Dukakis by a margin of 93 percent to 3 percent (Times Mirror 1988). Furthermore, George Gallup, who conducted the polling for Times Mirror, reported that while the moralists constituted 12 percent of the electorate, they were expected to represent 14 percent of all voters (Gallup 1988).

Bush’s solid sweep of the South and Southwest, where evangelical Christians concentration is the greatest, was impressive and the margin of victory can substantially be attributed to the evangelical vote. Albert Menendez (1988) an authority on religion and voting has been reluctant to acknowledge that the New Christian Right has ever had any political clout, concluded that the evangelical vote was also probably the margin of victory for Bush in the tightly contested states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Missouri. Menendez reported, for example, that seventeen strongly evangelical counties in Pennsylvania delivered a 134,000 plurality for Bush to offset a Dukakis margin of 34,000 for the rest of the state. And in a sample of campus precincts of ten evangelical colleges, Menendez reported that Bush did almost as well as did Reagan in 1984 (84 percent to 86 percent).

That's hardly shocking news. Evangelicals have been voting republican in overwhelming numbers for decades now. That has little to do with Dukakis as an individual than it does with the fact that as a group, evangelicals tend to be issue voters who turn on things like abortion, gays, etc.

Dukakis lost the election not because he lost the evangelical vote. He never had it. He lost the election because he was a terrible campaigner who let the Bush campaign define him in the minds of voters over simplistic issues like the death penalty, the pledge, and Willie Horton.

>>Dukakis lost the election not because he lost the evangelical vote. He never had it. He lost the election because he was a terrible campaigner who let the Bush campaign define him in the minds of voters over simplistic issues like the death penalty, the pledge, and Willie Horton.<<

I’m not sure the evangelical vote went predictably to republicans in 1988. It wasn’t until 1980 that the evangelical movement came to oppose abortion. Reagan won the evangelical vote over Carter, and again in 1984, but Dukakis didn’t have to concede this group. Bush was equivocal on abortion and Barbara was pro-choice. Dukakis couldn’t win this group, especially after Bush proclaimed Jesus Christ as his personal savior, but he could have tried engaging religious people to limit their influence; Dukakis had refused to talk at Catholic Universities. In contrast, Bush sought the support of Jerry Falwell and Jim Bakker and fought hard for the evangelical vote. Bush defined Dukakis because Dukakis didn’t understand the importance of religion in America or know how to frame issues to lessen the religious outrage.

George HW Bush had to switch from being moderately pro-choice in the 70s to assuring Falwell that he was strongly pro-life in 88.

Yes, Barbara was pro-choice, but she kept that quiet until after her husband was out of politics.

By 1988, the message from the evangelical camp was clear, if you wanted their support, you had to be pro-life and anti-gay. Period.

>>By 1988, the message from the evangelical camp was clear, if you wanted their support, you had to be pro-life and anti-gay. Period.<<

The point about the evangelical concentration in the South and Southwest, where Bush won, and the data on Bush’s majority in some swing states with a large percentage of Evangelical voters in some districts was to show the importance of religion as a whole. From polling taken after the democratic convention and just before the debate shows white Protestant support dropped from 40% to 34% and Catholics dropped from 55% to 40%. Sure, the social issues hurt Dukakis, but it can be argued that not engaging religious leaders or being sensitive to their importance is what cost him the election. My point is Obama does get it, and has worked hard not to make the same mistake.

And my point is, it wouldn't have made a difference if Dukakis had. The evangelical vote in 1988 was already spoken for and Dukakis rand a lousy campaign in too many other areas for it have made a difference in any event.

Things are a little different today. There is a new generation of evangelical voters today that aren't defined solely by abortion or gay rights issues. They're starting to care more about the environment and the economy as well. So, Obama may make some inroads there, but McCain will still win a large majority of the evangelical vote.

>>And my point is, it wouldn't have made a difference if Dukakis had. The evangelical vote in 1988 was already spoken for and Dukakis rand a lousy campaign in too many other areas for it have made a difference in any event.<<

In 1988 Evangelicals made up 12-14% of all religious perspectives. Dukakis could have competed for the remaining religious moderates but his secularism didn’t give him the skills or inclination.

>>Things are a little different today. There is a new generation of evangelical voters today that aren't defined solely by abortion or gay rights issues. They're starting to care more about the environment and the economy as well. So, Obama may make some inroads there, but McCain will still win a large majority of the evangelical vote.<<

Yes, the Evangelical priorities are changing, but more important has been the Democrats understanding that it was a mistake to shy away from using religion to help define oneself.

In 1988 Evangelicals made up 12-14% of all religious perspectives. Dukakis could have competed for the remaining religious moderates but his secularism didn’t give him the skills or inclination.

Perhaps, but we were talking specifically about the evangelical vote, which was a vote that Dukakis never had a chance of winning in 1988.

Fom my first post-

"Wills argues that Dukakis was our first secular presidential candidate and lost because he couldn’t connect with average voters."

And then the conversation moved to be specifically about evangelicals.

But getting back to the original point, I don't really agree with that. There are dozens of presidential candidates who failed to connect with average voters. They're called the losers. You see at least one every four years.

As for him being "secular", I'm not sure what that means in this context. He was running for a secular office. He wasn't running for Pope, so in that context, both he and Bush were secular.

Do you mean that he didn't wear his religion out on his sleeve? Well, Jefferson didn't either and that didn't seem to hurt his presidential aspirations. The idea that a president has to put on a religious display in order to "connect" with average (religious) voter is a relatively recent phenomenom in American politics. Kennedy's problem in 1960 was that some people thought he wasn't secular enough. He had to reassure (ironically, mostly the evangelicals) many that he was going to respect the separation of church and state and not take orders from the Pope about American policy.

Yes, presidential speeches often contained some generic platitudes about faith and God, but the idea that the American voter needed to think that the candidate attends a church that's just like theirs is relatively new concept. And one that most of the founding fathers would have found repellent.

Getting back to Dukakis, he had said he was Greek Orthodox. Whether his devotion to that church was sincere or even fervent enough to satisfy some people is a question I find very strange.

Being a regular church going is hardly an indication of being honest or trustworthy. Just look at George W. Bush.

>>And then the conversation moved to be specifically about evangelicals.<<

I used Bush’s favorability with Fundamentalists and Evangelicals (93% compared to Dukakis’ 3%) to explain why there was more going on then Dukakis’ tin-eared response to the Kitty rape/murder question (7% point drop following the debate).

>>Do you mean that he didn't wear his religion out on his sleeve? Well, Jefferson didn't either and that didn't seem to hurt his presidential aspirations.<<

Nice anidote.

Another excerpt from Wills-

“Yet Michael Dukakis, the first truly modernist candidate in our politics, as trustful of secular values as of technology, was a man isolated from his fellow citizens, while George Bush was accepted by ordinary Americans as their spokesman, despite his elite (verging on effete) background. The secularist prejudice may be useful to those wanting to get ahead in certain fields; but in politics one does better to cultivate, as have all our recent presidents, the religious prejudice. No one did that more than George Bush in 1988.”

As I said, it's a relatively new phenomenon

But your stat that over 90% of evangelicals going with Bush confirms my point that the evangelicals were already in his pocket to begin with.

And I still find the idea that candidates are supposed to put on some kind religious show very distasteful. I believe Jesus called such people hypocrites.