My life

& World Report. When I was introduced on the field, the announcer joked that he hoped I didn’t take as long to make the calls as I did to finish the speech in Atlanta. I laughed, but I was groaning inside. I didn’t know what the crowd thought until the inning was over. A tall man stood up in the stands, walked out on the field, and came up to me. He said, “Don’t pay any attention to the criticism. I actually listened to the speech and I liked it a lot.” It was Chevy Chase. I had always liked his movies. Now he had a fan for life.

Neither my bad speech nor the good Carson show had much to do with the real work I did as governor, but the ordeal had taught me all over again that how people perceive politicians has a big impact on what they can accomplish. It had also given me a healthy dose of humility. I knew that for the rest of my life I would be more sensitive to people who found themselves in embarrassing or humiliating situations. I had to admit to Pam Strickland, an Arkansas Democrat reporter I really respected, “I’m not so sure it’s bad for politicians to get knocked on their rear every now and then.”

Unfortunately, while things were looking up for me, they weren’t going so well for Mike Dukakis. George Bush had given a marvelous acceptance speech at his convention, offering a “kinder, gentler”

Reaganism and telling us to “read my lips: no new taxes.” Moreover, the vice president’s kinder, gentler approach didn’t extend to Mike Dukakis. Lee Atwater and company went after him like a pack of rabid dogs, saying Mike didn’t believe in pledging allegiance to the flag or being tough on criminals. An

“independent” group with no overt ties to the Bush campaign ran an ad featuring a convicted killer named Willie Horton, who had been released on a Massachusetts prison-furlough program. Not coincidentally, Horton was black. His opponents were performing reverse plastic surgery on Dukakis, who didn’t help himself by not responding quickly and vigorously to the attacks and by allowing himself to be photographed in a tank wearing a helmet that made him look more like MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman than a potential Commander in Chief of the armed forces.

In the fall, I flew up to Boston to see what I could do to help. By then Dukakis had fallen well behind in the polls. I pleaded with the people in the campaign to hit back; to at least tell the voters that the federal government, of which Bush was a part, furloughed prisoners too. But they never did it enough to suit me. I met Susan Estrich, the campaign manager, whom I liked and who I thought was shouldering too much of the blame for Mike’s problems, and Madeleine Albright, a professor at Georgetown who had worked in the Carter White House. She was the foreign policy advisor. I was very impressed with her intellectual clarity and toughness, and resolved to keep in touch with her. Dukakis found his voice in the last three weeks of the campaign, but he never recovered the New Democrat image that the negative ads and his insufficiently aggressive debate performances had destroyed. In November, Vice President Bush defeated him 54 to 46 percent. We didn’t carry Arkansas either, though I tried. Dukakis was a good man and a fine governor. He and Lloyd Bentsen would have served our country well in the White House. But the Republicans had defined him right out of the race. I couldn’t blame them for sticking with a strategy that worked, but I didn’t think it was good for America. In October, while the campaign for President was in the homestretch, I was involved in two exciting policy developments. I began a new initiative with the governors of our neighbor states, Ray Mabus of Mississippi and Buddy Roemer of Louisiana, to revive our economies. Both were young, articulate, Harvard-educated progressives. To highlight our commitment, we signed a compact on a barge in the middle of the Mississippi River at Rosedale. Not long afterward, we took a trade mission to Japan together. And we supported the successful effort of Senator Bumpers and Congressman Mike Espy of Mississippi to establish a Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission to study and make recommendations to improve the economies of poor counties on both sides of the river, from southern Illinois to New Orleans, where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico. The all-white counties in the northern part of the Delta region were in about as bad shape as the heavily black counties in the south. All three governors served on the Delta commission. For a year, we had hearings up and down the river in small towns time had passed by, and we came up with a report that led to the establishment of a full-time office and an ongoing effort to improve the economy and quality of life in the poorest part of America outside the Native American tribal lands.