New numbers expose conservative ‘tough on crime’ hypocrisy

Crime. For decades, it’s long been a tried-and-true election tactic of the American political right to campaign under the “get tough on crime” banner.The model was cynically perfected during the 1988 presidential campaign in the infamous and racially charged “Willie Horton” ads crafted by supporters of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to attack Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis.That said, the practice goes back at least as far as the 1968 presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon and George Wallace and has continued right through to the present day.You’ve seen and know these ads. An ominous sounding narrator describes a horrific crime allegedly attributable to the “soft” policies of the attacked candidate. Frequently, the ads play the race card by highlighting situations in which the crime victim is white, and the perpetrator is a person of color.

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