Ok, someone has to talk about it. Susan Estrich has threatened (or promised) that some forces will engage in efforts to dredge-up negative personal attacks on the President. As is typical with democrats lately, Estrich is still fighting the campaigns that she lost and trying to find someone to blame today for what happened then.
Let's take a critical look at the premise behind her argument. For starters, has anyone tried to verify her claim that Lee Atwater apologized to her on his deathbed for supposedly planting untrue stories about Dukakis? Something about that claim strikes me as implausible, but who knows. (UPDATE--I ran a Google search for "Lee Atwater" and found a number of interesting stories, some regarding the late-in-life apologies that Atwater provided to political opponents. These apologies appeared to be about stores that he "planted" in the media. None of those stories, however, appears to be domonstrably false. Instead, they appear to be true, but hard-ball political tactics. Estrich implies in her story that Atwater planted FALSE stories. That does not seem to correspond to what happened.)
Estrich's basic premise is that Michael Dukakis lost the 1988 Presidential election because of Republican dirty tricks engineered by Lee Atwater and a cadre of Haldeman-esque "plumber" operatives and other accomplices. The charge is nothing new. Every time a democrat (or a Republican that democrats like) loses an election, the democrats blame it on Republican dirty-tricks, rather than an objective look at the issues. This phenomenon has manifested itself recently in democrats lamenting the loss of Max Cleland in the Georgia Senate race in 2002 and by the media's anger over John McCain's defeat to George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primaries. National Review has written about this, calling it the "McCain-Cleland martyr Myth."
The premise is questionable. Susan Estrich is hardly an objective source. She has been roundly criticized for many years for the way that she ran the Dukakis campaign.
Lets take a look at her claim that Dukakis lost the election because of two false stories that she claimed were planted by Republican operatives. The first, she claims, was a story that Michael Dukakis was mentally imbalanced. It would have been impossible for that story to gain any traction in the press if it originated simply with one Republican operative. The same can be said of the Kitty Dukakis flag burning story. If it were that easy to plant a bogus story, every campaign would do it.
George W. Bush apparently worked closely with Lee Atwater during his father's election campaign in 1988. Susan Estrich has apparently never forgotten this. Now is her chance for revenge and she's taking a serious shot across the bow. I hope that some in the mainstream media take a close and objective look at her claims.
