Barbara Bush Agrees Dukakis Is Unfairly Depicted on Crime
Barbara Bush found herself agreeing today with her husband’s rival, Michael S. Dukakis, that Republicans have unfairly depicted the Democrat’s positions on crime.
She said that a piece of campaign literature being distributed in Illinois about Dukakis is objectionable and that neither she nor her husband wanted to see it used.
The literature, which carried the imprint of the Illinois Republican State Central Committee, described Dukakis as weak on crime and said “all the murderers and rapists and drug pushers and child molesters in Massachusetts vote for Michael Dukakis.”
The Massachusetts governor held the literature up at a campaign rally on Wednesday and called it “garbage.”
Barbara Bush, interviewed on the CBS program “This Morning,” said she asked campaign chairman James A. Baker about the pamphlet Wednesday night. “I said: ‘Jim, I don’t like that and I know George wouldn’t.’ ”
She quoted Baker as saying, “We don’t know where it came from but I’m certainly going to find out.”
Barbara Bush said she is proud of her husband’s campaign despite criticism that it has been overly aggressive in attacks on Dukakis.
She also defended Nancy Reagan’s borrowing of designer clothes. “You know, if I was a Size 4, maybe they’d give clothes to me,” she joked.
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