It was early morning mid-October 1988 when my partner and I were in an edit suite in New York finishing up a political commercial for one of our clients. We were called into the next edit suite for our opinion. A couple of Roger Ailes’s political consultants were working on a project for the George HW Bush presidential campaign and they wanted our opinion. It was not unusual for us to collaborate with Roger Ailes, who was a premier political consultant prior to becoming president of FOX News, because my partner left Ailes Communications to start Princeton-Fairfax Communications with me. We were viewing on the studio’s big screen shots of the funniest little guy riding around in an army tank.
Here we are at about 2:00 am speeding up, slowing down, getting a good chuckle from footage of Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis riding around in circles in an army tank looking like a chipmunk from some cartoon. Ailes had written some copy around the news footage of Dukakis’ visit to a General Dynamics facility a month earlier where he took a joy ride in an M1A1 Abrams battle tank. Dukakis was hoping it would boost his image from being a military and foreign policy weakling. Well, we viewed that footage for quite a while before selecting the final cuts in what became a very famous commercial about Dukakis’ terrible record of military opposition. One of the lines in the copy was “He even criticized our rescue mission to Grenada and our strike on Libya. And now he wants to be our commander in chief.”
Dukakis suffered a landslide loss, only carrying 10 states and Washington, DC. The rest is history. At least until today. Dukakis likely would have been the biggest idiot since Jimmy Carter to sit in the White House, but the American people decisively put their foot down, especially after the tank commercial brought into clear focus what could happen under a Dukakis White House. Fast forward to 2020, where another chipmunk hid in his basement for most of the campaign, held sparsely-attended rallies at drive-ins, and bumbled through speeches promoting an insane platform of wealth redistribution and submissive foreign policy. The difference this time is THAT guy made it to the White House.
And we are seeing first-hand the channeling of Dukakis in every policy decision from not securing our border to mishandling a pandemic to rising inflation and spending to extraordinary foreign policy travesties with Iran and Afghanistan. The demonstrated incompetence of Joe Biden AND HIS ADMINISTRATION, mixed with delusional arrogance places all of us and our families in great danger. Psalm 34:15 says, “The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open unto their cry.” Let us cry out to the Lord that He may hear our pleas and deliver us from this trouble. Until then, like Dukakis, Biden is running around in circles thinking he is the emblem of courage and righteousness when in reality he is…say it with me…Stupidocrisy.
