Clinton, Obama Aides Looking For An Edge? -- Read Sun Tzu
"The terms of the 2008 Presidential campaign were set twenty years ago—or, more accurately, perhaps, sometime around the fifth century B.C. In 1988, as Lee Atwater, President George H. W. Bush’s young campaign manager, was contemplating how to defeat Michael Dukakis, he consulted 'The Art of War,' by Sun Tzu, the well-known ancient Chinese political consultant.
"Among Sun Tzu’s pithier bullet points: 'Know your enemy.' Atwater conducted a bit of opposition research, identified Dukakis’s vulnerabilities, and gleefully promised to 'strip the bark off the little bastard.' The two TV spots that ended Dukakis’s political career followed in due course. One, calculated, in Atwater’s words, to make Willie Horton Dukakis’s 'running mate,' featured Horton, a black murderer who raped a white woman after escaping while on furlough from a Massachusetts prison—under a program that Dukakis supported.
"The other used footage from an event organized by the Dukakis campaign in an effort to show that he was tough on defense. Waving from a tank in an unfortunate helmet, Dukakis looked, as Atwater put it, like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. Those were the most memorable moments of the Bush-Dukakis campaign, and every Presidential candidate since has absorbed their lesson."
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