Michael Stanley Dukakis is an American retired lawyer and politician who served as governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to 1979 and from 1983 to 1991. He is the longest-serving governor in Massachusetts history and only the second Greek-American governor in U.S. history, after Spiro Agnew. He was nominated by the Democratic Party for president in the 1988 election, losing to the Republican nominee, Vice President George H. W. Bush.
Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist for the Republican Party. He was an adviser to Republican U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee. Atwater aroused controversy through his aggressive campaign tactics, especially the Southern strategy.
Marvin Pierce Bush is an American businessman. He is a son of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush and First Lady Barbara Bush and the brother of former U.S. President George W. Bush, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, the late Robin Bush, Neil Bush, and Dorothy Bush Koch.
Mary Joe Matalin is an American political consultant well known for her work with the Republican Party. She served under President Ronald Reagan, was campaign director for George H. W. Bush, was an assistant to President George W. Bush, and was counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney until 2003. Matalin has been chief editor of Threshold Editions, a conservative publishing imprint at Simon & Schuster, since March 2005. She is married to Democratic political consultant James Carville. She appears in the award-winning documentary film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story and played herself, opposite her husband James Carville, John Slattery, and Mary McCormack in the short-lived HBO series K Street.
Eric Alterman is an American historian and journalist. He is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College and the author of twelve books.
William R. Horton, commonly referred to as "Willie Horton", is an American convicted murderer who was the subject of a major political controversy in the 1988 presidential election. Horton had committed violent crimes while on furlough from prison, where he was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for murder. Released for a weekend as the beneficiary of a Massachusetts furlough program, he failed to return, and was later recaptured and convicted of committing assault, armed robbery, and rape in Maryland, where he remains incarcerated.
Fahrenheit 9/11 is a 2004 American documentary film directed and written by, and starring filmmaker, director, political commentator and activist Michael Moore. The subjects of the film are the presidency of George W. Bush, the Iraq War, and the media's coverage of the war. In the film, Moore states that American corporate media were cheerleaders for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and did not provide an accurate or objective analysis of the rationale for the war and the resulting casualties there.
Negative campaigning is the process of deliberately spreading negative information about someone or something to worsen the public image of the described. A colloquial, and somewhat more derogatory, term for the practice is mudslinging.
In politics, opposition research is the practice of collecting information on a political opponent or other adversary that can be used to discredit or otherwise weaken them. The information can include biographical, legal, criminal, medical, educational, or financial history or activities, as well as prior media coverage, or the voting record of a politician. Opposition research can also entail using trackers to follow an individual and record their activities or political speeches.
Katharine "Kitty" Dukakis is an American author. She is married to former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis.
Steve Brodner is a satirical illustrator and caricaturist working for publications in the US since the 1970s. He is accepted in the fields of journalism and the graphic arts as a master of the editorial idiom. Currently a regular contributor to GQ, The Nation, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, Brodner's art journalism has appeared in major magazines and newspapers in the United States, such as Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Time, Playboy, Mother Jones, Harper's, and The Atlantic. His work, first widely seen exposing and attacking Reagan Era scandals, is credited with helping spearhead the 1980s revival of pointed and entertaining graphic commentary in the US. He is currently working on a book about the presidents of the United States.
Roger Jason Stone is an American political assistant and lobbyist. He is most well known for the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation, and his involvement with and connections to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a political consultant for the 2016 campaign of 45th, and 47th U.S. president Donald Trump.
Howard David Fineman was an American journalist and television commentator. In a career that spanned nearly five decades, Fineman covered nine presidential campaigns as a reporter, writer, and analyst. For 30 years, he drove Newsweek magazine's political coverage. At the height of the publication's influence, Fineman was its chief political correspondent, senior editor, and deputy Washington bureau chief. His "Living Politics" column was posted weekly on Newsweek.com. After his tenure at Newsweek, he was named global editorial director of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group.
The 2000 presidential campaign of John McCain, the United States Senator from Arizona, began in September 1999. He announced his run for the Republican Party nomination for the presidency of the United States in the 2000 presidential election.
Floyd Gregory Brown is an American author, speaker, and media commentator. He is formerly the CEO of USA Radio Network. Brown founded the conservative website Western Journalism in 2008. Brown in his early career worked as a political consultant and conducted opposition research for political campaigns. Brown is noteworthy for founding Citizens United in 1988 and for his introduction of the "Willie Horton" television ad during the 1988 presidential election campaign.
Charles R. Black Jr. is an American lobbyist and businessman, who is the Founding Chairman of Prime Policy Group, a public affairs firm which is now a subsidiary of Burson Cohn & Wolfe. Prime Policy Group was formed with the merger of Martin B. Gold's Gold & Liebengood with the Washington, DC–based lobbying firm he co-founded—BMSK—with Paul Manafort, Roger J. Stone, and Peter G. Kelly. In 2010, Black was inducted into the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC) Hall of Fame.
Karl Christian Rove is an American Republican political consultant, policy advisor, and lobbyist. He was Senior Advisor and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W. Bush administration until his resignation on August 31, 2007. He has also headed the Office of Political Affairs, the Office of Public Liaison, and the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. Rove was one of the architects of the Iraq War.
Tucker Eskew is a political and communications strategist in the United States who served as Deputy Assistant to the President for Media Affairs and Global Communications under President George W. Bush. He joined Senator John McCain's presidential campaign in August 2008 as senior advisor and counselor to Sarah Palin. He was the founder of Eskew Strategy Group, an Alexandria-based communications firm. In 2005, he merged the Eskew Group into a new bipartisan communications firm called Vianovo.
Stefan Forbes is an American screenwriter and film director whose films and social justice work often address issues of race, class, masculinity, violence, and restorative justice.
The 1988 presidential campaign of George H. W. Bush, the 43rd vice president of the United States under President Ronald Reagan, began when he announced he was running for the Republican Party's nomination in the 1988 U.S. presidential election on October 13, 1987. Bush won the 1988 election against Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis on November 8, 1988. He was subsequently inaugurated as president on January 20, 1989.
