In Massachussets, the ghost of Willie Horton has been resurrected.

If you are too young to remember Willie Horton, he was a black convict who, while on furlough in the 80’s, committed a rape and a robbery. This case was used as a political bludgeon against Democratic Presidential Candidate, who had been the governor of Massachusets at the time Horton committed these crimes and helped sail George H.W. Bush into the Presidency. This ad campaign was the very definition of fearmongering and race-baiting by strike fear in the hearts of white voters that a black savage was going to attack their women so, they needed to vote for someone tough on crime.

Well, it appears that a Willie Horton-type campaign is being used again in, of all places, Massachusets:

This time, the part of Horton is being played by Benjamin LaGuer, an African-American rapist who argued he had received an unfair trial for a 1983 rape in Worcester. Between his persistent letters and his high-profile lawyers, LaGuer managed to attract some prominent supporters, including Boston University President John Silber, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel -and Deval Patrick, the Democratic candidate for governor.

Patrick wrote a couple of letters to the parole board on LaGuer’s behalf and contributed to a fund to underwrite a DNA test to prove his innocence, but dropped his support when the DNA test found him guilty. Patrick has made some mistakes in responding to criticism about the case, misstating the number of letters he wrote and initially denying he had made a contribution to LaGuer’s cause, but he did nothing wrong in showing an interest in the case.

Nor did he do anything wrong in another case, which is the subject of a brutal ad by his opponent, Republican Kerry Healey. In 1985, when he was a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Patrick helped successfully appeal a death sentence imposed on Carl Ray Songer, who had killed a police officer in Florida. That’s what NAACP lawyers do.

But, here’s the real gotcha about this ad:

Healey’s ad acknowledges as much, in a backhanded fashion: “Lawyers have the right to defend cop killers, but do we really want one as our governor?” it asks. Note the syntax, which leaves the impression a cop killer is running for governor. That’s no accident.

And, finally, for a bit of irony:

Meanwhile a real cop killer has been roaming the halls of the State House, the Boston Herald reported yesterday. The head of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Union, no stranger to political games, charged the Romney-Healey administration with allowing the man who killed a Boston detective during a 1973 robbery to be part of a Beacon Hill cleanup crew while serving the tail end of his sentence in a pre-release center.

And as Patrick has noted, if writing to a parole board disqualifies him for public office, it would also exclude Healey’s running-mate, former state trooper Reed Hillman, who wrote to the parole board on behalf of a friend convicted of assaulting a police officer.

So, it looks like the tried and true Republican tricks of painting opponents as soft on law enforcement and, more disturbingly, playing on the racial fears of white voters, are in full effect.

Well, in four weeks, we’ll see how well they worked.

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