The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [69]
Dukakis, perhaps recognizing that he was now on a political hot seat, turned the matter over to the Massachusetts Supreme Court and the state’s attorney general for advisory opinions on the constitutionality of the new law. Both the state’s supreme court and the attorney general’s office proclaimed it, after reviewing the new law in light of Barnette, unconstitutional.
Then, with this apparent bipartisan evidence in hand, Dukakis committed what turned out to be near (if not complete) political suicide: he vetoed the new Pledge law.
The veto was quickly overridden by the Massachusetts legislature and the law remains on the books today as originally written. It has never been tested in court, primarily because it has rarely, if ever, been enforced.
What might have been a minor event in the days of Michael Dukakis’s term as governor of Massachusetts turned into one of the most important issues of his 1988 presidential bid.
When George H. W. Bush’s Republican strategy team filtered through Dukakis’s past for weaknesses to present to the voters, this 1977 Pledge veto surfaced as a political hot button.
Bush used the veto action in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, saying: “Should public school teachers be required to lead our children in the Pledge of Allegiance? My opponent says no—but I say yes.” Then to emphasize the point he finished the speech by leading the crowd in reciting the Pledge.
Dukakis never recovered from this moment. Earlier in the election year, Dukakis led Bush in polls by as much as sixteen percentage points. But as the Republicans hammered the Pledge issue more and more, the issue stuck and delivered perhaps the deciding blow to Dukakis’s campaign. In one survey of Democrats in Ohio who originally supported Dukakis and then defected to Bush, 21 percent said they changed their minds because of the Pledge issue that Bush had raised.
To counter this attack, Dukakis tried to provide a defense of his Pledge decision based on constitutional law. Dukakis found, however, that few voters had the patience to follow his scholarly arguments when such arguments couldn’t fit on a bumper sticker like “Save the Pledge.”
The Bush use of the Pledge as a political weapon was undoubtedly the most dramatic and effective of all time. However, it wasn’t the first time it was used in a presidential campaign. In 1964, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s campaign ran a powerful television commercial that featured images of a classroom of schoolchildren reciting the Pledge intercut with images of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivering his famous “We will bury you” speech of 1956. In that speech to a group of Western ambassadors visiting Moscow, Khrushchev stormed: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” (This oft-quoted line is, however, slightly mistranslated. The actual line was “We will dig you in.”) The message of the Goldwater commercial was clear. It would be better to have a nation “under God” than under Khrushchev.
In the Bush/Dukakis struggle, Dukakis actually made things worse for himself when he tried to turn the issue around and portray Bush as a president who would ignore constitutional rights. Answering that charge, Bush simply lashed Dukakis to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which, as a group, had backed and won Supreme Court cases that have often been largely unpopular among voting Americans—such as, the Pledge case of 1943. In addition, Bush also successfully painted Dukakis as a person who, as president, would likely attempt to appoint people to the Supreme Court predisposed to agreeing with the positions of groups like the ACLU, which, for many people, meant the destruction of beloved American traditions and national beliefs such as the Pledge.
While other factors contributed to Bush’s landslide victory over Dukakis, the Pledge issue