Willie Horton
This installment of the presidential TV spot of the day is a two-for-one special. First, here’s the actual Willie Horton spot, an independent ad by an outside conservative group called the National Security Political Action Committee:
And here’s the Bush campaign’s official “revolving door”spot on Dukakis’s weekend furlough program, with no picture or even mention of Horton:
It’s difficult to overestimate how important the crime issue was in boosting conservatism’s political fortunes during the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. And one of the main reasons for its potency was the tendency of liberals to dismiss the “law and order” issue as a smokescreen for racism (as they tried to do with the prison furlough ads). Yet the explosion in criminality was all too real, and conservatives were right to take the problem seriously. Between 1965 and 1980, the nation’s murder rate exactly doubled; the rate for aggravated assaults jumped by 165 percent; robberies, by 244 percent; burglaries, by 155 percent; car thefts, by 94 percent. Over the same time period, however, the share of robberies cleared by arrests sank from 38 percent to 23 percent; for burglaries, the drop was from 25 percent to 14 percent. Meanwhile, between 1960 and 1980, the number of prisoners per 1,000 arrests declined from 232 to 124.
For a variety of reasons, the crime issue has lost much of its juice in recent years. First and foremost, crime rates have been dropping. The rate of violent crimes peaked in 1992 at 758 per 100,000 people; by 2003 it had fallen 37 percent to 475 per 100,000. Also, “New Democrats” like Bill Clinton strove to defuse the issue by backing capital punishment and other pro-law-enforcement measures. More recently, a related issue — protecting the right of people to defend themselves — has begun to fade as Democrats have been backing away from their old support for gun control.