Dukakis in the Tank: Birth of a Cliche

Josh King, who worked on the 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign and later in the Clinton White House, recently wrote a history of what became in the annals of political history “The Dukakis in the Tank moment.”

Dukakis, at the time governor of Massachusetts and the Democratic candidate for president, was struggling with a perennial problem that Democrats on a national level had during the later days of the Cold War, that being a reputation of being weak on national defense. He had been a critic of the Reagan military buildup. Part of his platform consisted of reductions in defense spending. However he needed to reassure voters that he was not going to denude the United States military should be become president. The fact that he was running against George H. W. Bush, a war hero with vast foreign policy experience, made some kind of gesture imperative.

Someone, it is uncertain who, had the idea of the candidate making a campaign stop at the General Dynamics facility in Sterling Heights, Michigan, and being videotaped riding on an M1A1 tank. Despite misgivings by some in the campaign, this photo op was done, helmet and all.

The image that ensured, of the diminutive Dukakis riding in a tank grinning, was less that reassuring. The Bush campaign took full advantage by cutting their own ad, attacking their opponent’s defense record using footage of the tank ride.

Ever since the “Dukakis in the Tank moment” has been used to describe anything a politician does, visually or otherwise, that proves to be unintentionally embarrassing. In the 2012 election, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich proposed building a lunar base by 2020. Whatever the virtues of the proposal, it earned him a considerable amount of ridicule. Political pundit and (ironically) space enthusiast Charles Krauthammer suggested that the moon base proposal was Gingrich’s “Dukakis in a tank” moment.

Ironically, Gingrich’s opponent and chief jeer leader against the moon base Mitt Romney, was said to have had his own Dukakis in the tank moment when he sang, off key, “America the Beautiful,” used artfully in an attack ad by the Obama campaign that accused the candidate of shipping jobs overseas and other wise grinding down the poor.