Whatever Happened to Willie Horton?

While the experts and pundits are still sorting out how important the so-called cultural/moral issues were to the 2004 election outcome, there was one traditional issue of this ilk that was conspicuously missing.

There was abortion, homosexuals, gun control, but...not capital punishment. In fact, there was no "soft on crime" rhetoric, and apparently no penalty exacted on John Kerry for being an opponent of capital punishment.

From the early 1980s until this election, the conventional wisdom was that nobody could win the presidency, or even be nominated, who didn't support capital punishment. King George I and Lee Atwater's most successful smear on Michael Dukakis was "soft on crime," notably with the now-notorious Willie Horton ad. Even in 1992, Governor Bill Clinton had to run back from the primary trail to Arkansas to preside over the execution of an allegedly less than all-there condemned man, or kiss the nomination and election goodbye.

But this year, the subject of crime barely came up. You could say it was because terrorism trumped it as a domestic safety issue, and that's revealingly true, because these issues are more about fear than real risk. But when Kerry announced he was against the death penalty, it didn't seem to raise an eyebrow anywhere.

Could it be that after two decades of bloodthirsty rhetoric and increasingly harsh sentences, and a couple of years of people leaving death row when their innocence was proven, that this issue has run its course? Or is in the declining crime rates, predicted by those who looked at age demographics, and cities that are perceived to be much less dangerous than in the 1980s?

An interesting set of questions...