Even if you're not as excited about Obama as I am, you need to help him win, because 20 years down the road you could be looking at cascading negative effects of a McCain legacy.

Of course, the short-term effects are likely to be bad as well.

I guess I should stop blaming my wife's vote for Nader as the root of our nation's ills.

I always thought Dukakis would have made a fantastic President...and we wouldn't have Clarence Thomas on the SCOTUS.

If Dukakis had surrounded himself with good people, maybe we'd have avoided Newt Gingrich altogether, and our country would be in a very different place now.

goes to show you: we can NEVER be complacent about our right-wing nut jobs. Unless and until we can confine them to the attic where they belong, they will always be out there, plotting to destroy this country, to make it into the monarchy the founding fathers so feared.

Dukakis and GHWB should get together and commiserate. I bet they both feel the same way.

Snap! And damn! (Hee-heee.)

Bush and the republicans were given an opportunity. What they did with that was all theirs. Vote for a republican and get gays marrying, flags burning, hordes at the border, and everyone's abortin'. Blame yourself for running a lousy campaign, but don't blame yourself for the goddam republican party.

.............that gets people into trouble all the time. Taking on the responsibilty for someone elses actions or lot in life. There's only one person Michael Dukakis is responsible for....himself.

Dukakis should have realized as a mediocrity he would never be elected, so he shouldn't have entered the primaries.

I liked him. I phone banked for him.

But, yeah, Willie Horton was invented to beat him ... if only we'd realized it was just the beginning ...

Forces beyond his control.

What babes in the woods we were.... little did we realized that, no, they have no shame

Yup, he rides public transportation to the airport. Seemed like a heckuva nice guy.

I've always blamed Dukakis (just a teensy bit) for letting himself get hornswaggled, but I kind of feel bad that he still blames himself.

And are we doing "SCOTUS" now? Is it too late to vote no on that one?

Would have made a fine president. He's wrong though about us never hearing about Junior if he'd won.

I'm sure we would have read about him from time to time at websites like TheSmokingGun.com & drunklosers.com

Who cares? Is there anyone less relevant today?

Sooo typical of this little fraud...he pimped up a "Massachusets Miracle" (the miracle was that economic activity happened at all during his term) as a prelude to a Presidential run, hosted PBS television, under-cut Biden with his leak of the Dimmock tapes, didn't know which end of the tank to look out over, and generally travelled as if the weight of world change rested upon his very broad(--and--oh--so--much--better--than--anyone's) shoulders. Now he's back saying he's at the center of this miasma...pulleeeese!Basically "The Duke" has been marginalized for over a decade (he pops off every so often about AMTRAK) and is now clamoring for the attention that he thrives on. He should be sitting in the darkened third deck of the Pepsi Center, aloof and alone, which is pretty much how he took advice during the "world changing" 1988 campaign. He proves that being "wicked" smart isn't necesarily the ingredient in a good candidate or leader.

It was exactly this kind of earnestness that made him appear "weak" in 1988.

But it's clear he actually cared about America and its people more than the Bush Dynasty.

I vote to absolve the gentleman from Massachusetts.

You were the first in a long line of Democrats to get slimed by the Republican Party in the early days of it's Ugly Attack Dog Mode. Blame yourself for the mistakes of your own campaign, not for the ugly, slimy thing the Republicans turned their party into. I think you're a good, decent man, if one with zero charisma.

I used to think of Republicans as good, decent people I simply happened to disagree with. Well, Newt Gingrich, GHWB, GWB,Dan and Marilyn Quayle, Dick Cheney, Jack Abramoff, The Hammer, Donald Rumsfeld Condi et al, really poisoned THAT well for me. Twenty years down the line, we're finally seeing evidence that people are getting tired of that act, even though lying, negative slimeball campaigning still works, to all our sorrow.

I sure wish sometimes that GHWB and Barbara had used a bit more contraception before GWB turned up. But Dukakis blaming himself for those two presidencies at this late date is just a little bit of reverse self-aggrandizing and a bid for attention.

Although it's amusing to see Dukakis flog himself a bit, the fact is that in 1988, the Democrats were being roundly outflanked by the reactionary movement of the GOP (the outflanking of the Dems today is purely reflexive, almost Pavlovian, after so many years of experiencing it); back in '88, they were simply stunned, busy trying to work with a GOP that was increasingly motivated to destroy the Democrats.

What's more, back then, Americans had the luxury of their own ignorance of the GOP's primary political motivation -- their ideas seemed new and refreshing to the politically gullible majority. But after so many years of them getting their way, with American prosperity evaporating under their watch, under their guiding ideology, corruption, and mismanagement -- well, today, it doesn't sell so well, as McCain amply demonstrates.

I don't think even a Dukakis win in '88 would've stopped what steamrolled America in the heyday of the reactionary movement. If anything, it might've hastened the demise of the New Deal, as Republicans attacked it from the sidelines, with the Democrats happy to not appear soft on anything.

Even Bill Clinton, the Democratic "success" story of the 90s, won by out-Republicanning the Republicans. There's no guarantee that a Dukakis one- or two-term presidency might not have been similarly co-opted.

Blaming GW Bush (or even Cheney) as the prime movers of where the country is today ignores the larger underpinnings of the reactionary ideological industry that's worked tirelessly since about 1974 to undermine democracy in this country.