It’s possible that Michael Dukakis didn’t understand the question.
“If Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered,” CNN anchor Bernard Shaw asked the Democratic candidate on live national television near the start of the second 1988 presidential debate, “would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”
What Dukakis could not have known at the time, amid the lights and the electric hum, was that the whole doomed history of the American left had quite suddenly come to rest on his answer. His rote reply — “No, I don’t, Bernard . . . ” — marked the end of more than…
