The Willie Horton ad did as much damage to Michael Dukakis and the Democratic Party as it was intended to do, but after the fact, at least, Democrats still had enough fight in them to denounce the ad and make its use a mark of shame. That's what should have happened with the ad used in the 2002 Georgia governor's race that linked Osama bin Laden and Saddam Huseein to then-Senator Max Cleland -- who, of course, lost three limbs in Vietnam and should never have had his patriotism questioned. The ad has been frequently denounced out here in Lefty Blogosphere Land, yet even out here I don't think I've ever seen anyone blamed by name for it, except, of course, Saxby Chambliss, the man it helped elect.

I learned from yesterday's New York Times Magazine that the man responsible for the ad is a GOP consultant named Tom Perdue -- the guy who got current Senate majority leader and likely future presidential candidate Bill Frist elected to the Senate for the first time in 1994 -- and that Frist had a hand in it, too:

Frist decided in 2000 to take the largest political gamble since he ran for office and to assume the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which controls every race across the country by recruiting candidates and disbursing millions of dollars...

While some Democrats claimed that Frist was calling into question their patriotism, Frist relied again on Perdue, who unleashed what was considered the most devastating ad of the cycle: it showed a picture of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein that eventually faded into the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland, a Vietnam war hero who lost both his legs and his right arm in battle. Perdue told me that he sent each commercial he made to Frist and his staff to "let them be another focus group," and "they never told us not to do anything."

In '94, Frist and Perdue ran a fairly nasty campaign against Democrat Bill Sasser:

[Frist] dispatched Perdue to unleash a barrage of negative attacks.... His campaign ... tried to link Sasser to Joycelyn Elders, the black surgeon general who had spoken controversially about masturbation, and Marion Barry, the black mayor of Washington who had been caught smoking crack cocaine with a former girlfriend. ''We'd never seen anything like it,'' Sasser told me. ''I'd been in the Senate 18 years, and I'd never seen a campaign so vicious. Handbills would mysteriously appear in redneck areas showing me with Joycelyn Elders. He'd say while he was saving lives as a heart surgeon, I was busy sending Tennessee dollars to Marion Barry. It was clearly a racist attack. The slanders went on and on and on.''

The Democrats should have made the Cleland ads a national scandal, even after the election -- they could have, and should have, demounced them until the ads made the news and everyone in America saw them. Hell, if I were the Democratic presidential nominee in '04, I'd seriously consider picking Max Cleland as my vice presidential candidate. And it was the saintly Dr. Frist and his longtime hatchetman Perdue who were responsible. They should be held to account for them.