Bill Clinton understood the power of that formula when he showcased his boyhood efforts to "stand up" to his abusive stepfather and shield his mother from blows. When facing George H.W. Bush, Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis learned this lesson too late, after he failed to fly into a vigilante-style rage in response to the question: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" Dukakis' reply -- "No, I don't, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life" -- whacked his approval ratings from 49% to 42% overnight and helped deny him the election. So did that other failed protection drama that dominated the campaign: the specter of black convict Willie Horton ("every suburban mother's greatest fear," as one GOP ad put it), who raped a woman after being furloughed in Massachusetts while Dukakis was governor. His campaign belatedly tried to counter with an ad about a convict who escaped from a federal program and raped and killed a mother of two.
The gender card
Post-9/11, the inclination to play the gender rescue card became an imperative. "Every suburban mother's greatest fear" was now not a black man's mug shot but a Muslim terrorist's, and every suburban mother was recast by the pundits as a Security Mom (a mythical creature, as it happened, but that's another story).
Victory on election day 2004 went to the candidate who best understood how to deal from that deck. Both George W. Bush and John Kerry worked hard to position themselves as the King of the Wild Frontier. (Both granted long interviews to hunting and fishing magazines; both bragged about their gun collections; Bush whacked at sagebrush; Kerry stalked wild animals and waved their bloody pelts at journalists.) Kerry's handlers, however, failed to put into play the female part of the rescue equation. They counted on the senator's service in Vietnam to qualify him for the hero role, especially in contrast to Bush's AWOL record.
Bush's advisors knew better, as was evident in their political ads. In "Wolves," set in a forest invaded by a pack of wolves (read: terrorists), a trembling female voice-over claimed that Kerry had voted for cuts in U.S. intelligence "so deep they would have weakened America's defenses -- and weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm." "Wolves" engaged the American terror dream, which the GOP was going to vanquish with a cowboy swagger.
