Barack Obama saw it coming.
When the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee got a question on what he thought about Wednesday’s US Supreme Court decision outlawing executions of people convicted of raping children, the father of two of the cutest little girls you’ll ever see knocked it out of the park.
“I have said repeatedly that I think that the death penalty should be applied in very narrow circumstances for the most egregious of crimes,” Obama said at a news conference.
“I think that the rape of a small child, 6 or 8 years old, is a heinous crime. And if a state makes a decision that – under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances – the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that that doesn’t violate our Constitution.”
Obama is no fool. Clearly, he’s watched the tape of another Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, and how he swung and missed at a hanging curve of a question about rape and capital punishment.
In a 1988 nationally televised debate against George H. W. Bush, Dukakis, then the Massachusetts governor, was asked if he’d even support the death penalty if it involved the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife.
“Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” asked the debate moderator, Bernard Shaw.
“No, I don’t, and I think you know that I’ve, I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life,” Dukakis said. “I don’t see any evidence that it’s a deterrent, and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime.”
It wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. Dukakis couldn’t have shown less emotion if he were talking about a commuter tax.
It was the beginning of the end.
Fast forward 20 years. Obama’s question didn’t come neatly wrapped in a hypothetical box, but it may as well have.
Anyone with a cable connection or broadband access has seen 9-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha. Obama couldn’t possibly have answered the question without thinking of them.
By expressing some support for capital punishment, even in the most narrow of circumstances, Obama walked the fine line that always exists between reason and emotion. More important, he ended the debate before it began and dodged for another day the persistent attempts to paint him as a soft-on-crime liberal.
Now if he can just avoid any pictures in an Army tank. lgreene@nypost.com