Richardson mentions the infamous “Willie Horton” ad and how it was a singular use of dog whistle politics to stoke fears of Black criminals that the Democrats were supposedly unleashing on the country. What was this ad, exactly, and what were its effects?
William, or “Willie,” Horton was a Black man who was involved in a robbery and murder in 1974 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Though he maintains that he did not murder 17-year-old gas station attendant Joseph Fournier, Horton was convicted and sentenced. He was a young man, only 23 at the time, and became eligible for the prison’s furlough program, which allowed inmates who had shown good behavior out of jail for a brief time to see family. Horton had been taking these occasional furloughs to see his daughter and attend church.
Horton took a furlough in 1986 but did not return to jail. Instead, he was driving a nephew’s car when he was pulled over and decided to flee police. He crashed the car and escaped to Florida and Baltimore. He eventually entered a suburban Maryland home and tied up and stabbed the male homeowner, raped the man’s fiancée, and stole various goods from the home. He was arrested and sent back to jail.
In the 1988 Democratic primary, Al Gore asked his opponent, the governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis, why criminals were loose (he did not name Horton specifically). It did not gain much traction at the time and Dukakis secured the nomination, but Republican strategists heard this and knew that Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have kept prisoners with first-degree murder convictions from getting furloughs (interestingly, all 50 states had furlough programs and the one in Massachusetts had been started by a Republican governor).
Lee Atwater, who worked for Republican George H.W. Bush’s campaign, had Bush talk about Willie Horton frequently. And in September of 1988, the infamous ad, entitled “Weekend Passes,” came out. It was financed by the National Security PAC and alternated photos of Dukakis and Horton while praising Bush’s support of the death penalty. The narrator sounded ominous and concerned, and the ad ended with the tagline of “Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime.” The photos of Horton showed a crazed, disheveled, large Black man and were intended to disturb and frighten viewers. It was clearly racist, identifying Black men with crime and depravity.
The Bush campaign claimed that they had nothing to do with the ad. However, the Bush campaign later ran a spot called “Revolving Door” which showed convicts going in and out of prison while the narrator talked about Dukakis’ “soft” positions on crime. Political scientist Claire Jean Kim noted succinctly, “the insinuation is, if you elect Gov. Dukakis as president, we’re going to have black rapists running amok in the country.” Bush ended up winning the election in a landslide.
The ad was immediately condemned as racist. An EBSCO article explains, “The advertisement was widely criticized in the mass media as racist. According to one media critic, for example, the Horton advertisement was evidence of the use of the black man as a ‘racialized-sexualized threat to white women and white social order generally’... Although the script of the advertisement never mentioned race, the visual image clearly identified Horton as a menacing black man and implied, to many, that his victims were white.”
The ad, Bill Keller of the Marshall Project said, instigated a "tough on crime” era for Republicans and especially Democrats, who knew how deleterious the ad and its implications were for them: “It had a tremendous impact. It taught Democrats that this was an issue where they had to be more Catholic than the Pope; tougher than tough. I think you can draw a line between the Willie Horton ad in 1988 and Bill Clinton’s tenure as president, who passed the 1994 crime act, which included nearly $10 billion for building more prisons, 100,000 more cops on the streets, and took away Pell education grants for prison inmates. He wasn’t exceptional—that law was actually drafted by a senator named Joe Biden.”
To conclude, the ad is seen as one of the most glaring examples of dog whistle politics, a term which is popping up again in the Trump years. It is, Vox explains, “political shorthand for a phrase that may sound innocuous to some people, but which also communicates something more insidious either to a subset of the audience or outside of the audience’s conscious awareness — a covert appeal to some noxious set of views.”
