Dukakis did run a bad campaign, but I'll concur with Eschew here. By my count, there have been 7 major presidential campaigns over the past 40 years that have gone on to win the nomination, but totally blow it in the big game. Some were doomed from the start, like Barry Goldwater in 1964 or George McGovern in 1972. Others had a decent shot in the beginning, but ended up losing anyways due to a variety of factors. Many campaigns become a victim of their own successes in the final analysis. Why? It takes a different set of campaign skills to win a Presidential primary, where you're courting ideological interest groups. In the general election, your audience is much wider. Such candidacies fail because they don't address the bigger issues facing the country at large. Dukakis had a 17 point lead over George Bush 4 months out from the general election, yet Bush ended up winning by 7 points. In many ways, Dukakis was an interesting candidate who was very highly intelligent, but he simply lacked the campaign skills needed to take the big prize. He was tagged as a soft liberal and when he tried to counteract that, he only made matters worse by climbing on that tank wearing that helmet. I'll say that Dukakis himself wasn't a bad candidate per se, he just had bad advisors. Still, that people would display a Dukakis for President campaign item tells you a lot about the weak crop of liberal candidates out there!