October 13, 1988: Bernard Shaw's Killer Question

October 13, 1988: For the 1st time, a Presidential debate is held in a sports arena, rather than in a theater in a big city or on a college campus. The venue is Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles, home court of UCLA basketball. The combatants are the Republican nominee, Vice President George H.W. Bush, a former 1st baseman at Yale University; and the Democratic nominee, Governor Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts.

As the Number 2 man in the Administration of President Ronald Reagan, one of the most lawless in American history, Bush was on shaky ground to accuse Dukakis of being "soft on crime." Indeed, the very law he'd been ripping Dukakis for, a prison furlough program, was based on one that outgoing President Ronald Reagan had signed into law as Governor of California in the late 1960s.

CNN anchor Bernard Shaw was the 1st black person to moderate a Presidential debate. He decided to use his 1st question to ask Dukakis about crime: "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

Shaw had asked Dukakis to imagine his wife as the victim of a horrible crime. He did not know that Panos Dukakis, the nominee's father, had been badly beaten during a robbery. He seemed to ignore the fact that the death penalty is essentially a State-by-State issue, and that the President, aside from appointing federal judges and the power to grant clemency -- in federal cases only -- has no say over it. And what Shaw's own wife thought of that question has never been recorded.

Dukakis could well have become the 1st person to say, "Fuck you" on live prime-time American network television, and he would have gotten more votes if he had. Instead, he said, "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent." He said it so calmly that it was, to borrow the words from a similar incident on the TV show The West Wing 14 years later, "an answer so soporific, it's barely even human."

Shaw's indecency did not stop there. He had every right to ask Bush if his Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, just 41 years old and clobbered a week earlier in his debate with Dukakis' running mate, Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, was ready to be President:

Shaw: "If you were to be elected, and then die before the election -- "

Bush, cutting him off, with a fake look of shock on his face: "Bernie!"

Shaw: "Dan Quayle would then become the 41st President of the United States. How do you respond to that?"

Bush: "I'd have confidence in him. And I have never seen a candidate for public office take such an unfair pounding... "

Given all the crap that the Bush campaign had hurled at him, this was Dukakis' moment to say, "The hell you haven't!" But he didn't. Instead, his rebuttal gave only the slightest of mockings of Bush and Quayle.

Quayle didn't hurt Bush in the election at all. If Dukakis still had a chance on the afternoon of October 13, he had none on the morning of October 14.

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October 13, 1988 was a Thursday. Baseball was between its League Championship Series and its World Series. Football was in midweek. And the NBA season wouldn't start until November 6.

There was 1 game played in the NHL that night: The Philadelphia Flyers beat the Minnesota North Stars, 7-6 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. It was a rough game: There were 3 separate fights, and 10 of the game's 13 goals were scored on the power play.