Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of campaign curiosities.

I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

Our whistle stop today is just after Memorial Day, 1988.

Lee Atwater, the top campaign strategist for Vice President George Bush's presidential campaign

is talking to Jim Pinkerton,

a member of that campaign's research department. George Bush is 16 points down in the polls to Michael

Dukakis, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts. Bush had once been up by a handful. To change

this dynamic, Atwater, who grew up in Aiken, South Carolina,

hands Pinkerton a three-by-five card and says,

You get me the stuff to beat this little bastard.

And I want you to put it on this card.

Use both sides.

I did not grow up in Aiken, South Carolina.

Pinkerton came up with seven entries for the three-by-five card.

Dukakis' national defense positions, his records on taxes and spending, the pollution of Boston Harbor, his position on the death penalty, his position on the pledge of allegiance, and to mandatory sentences for drug offenders.

Of course, the longest and most powerful item on the card was Dukakis' policy on prison furloughs,

including one case in which a murderer named Horton got a furlough from a Massachusetts penitentiary

and on his weekend of liberty attacked a couple in Maryland,

raping the woman and stabbing her fiancée.

The systemic use of the items on that three-by-five card to define Michael Dukakis won George Bush, the 1988 election, in what is perhaps in the modern era the most sustained successful negative campaign that we've seen.

We'll tell you all about all of that right after a word from our

sponsor. The Great Courses gives me joy, nothing negative about that, and they've got a lecture

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