Filmmaker Stefan Forbes recently released Boogie Man, the story of Republican strategist Lee Atwater. The film
is a comprehensive look at Lee Atwater, the blues-playing rogue whose rambunctious rise from the South to Chairman of the GOP made him a household name. He mentored Karl Rove and George W. Bush and played a crucial role in the elections of Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He wrote the Republican Party’s winning playbook which the McCain campaign is currently using.
It looks spectacular. Here’s the trailer:
Atwater was George HW Bush’s campaign manager in 1988. Trying to get Michael Dukakis elected in California, I remember loathing him. That’s probably a memory shared by more than a couple of Democrats.
Atwater was a kind of political pioneer, a race-baiter and a shameless fact twister. At the beginning of the 1988 campaign, referring to Dukakis, he said that he would “strip the bark off that little bastard.” He also produced the Willie Horton ad, which, during the campaign, he denied having anything to do with. As the Washington Post points out, that wasn’t true:
Atwater’s single most notorious bit of work came during the 1988 campaign, in the form of the Willie Horton ad used against Dukakis. The ad attacked a prison furlough program that Dukakis had supported while governor of Massachusetts. Horton, a convicted killer who is black, escaped while in the program and raped a woman. The ad said Dukakis was soft on crime, and made prominent use of Horton’s glowering mug shot. Atwater said he was going to make Horton Dukakis’s “running mate.”
The ad pretty much became the touchstone for demonizing black men in political campaigning. In archival footage, we see Atwater denying that he or the Bush campaign had anything to do with the ad, insisting he’d never even seen it.
Then Forbes cuts to one of Atwater’s friends describing how, before the ad was ever aired, Atwater called him into his office, showed him the ad, said he was going to set it up as the work of an independent committee (and thus, with no fingerprints) and asked what he thought. The friend says that he told Atwater it was appalling, racist and that it was going to “follow you to your grave.”
Atwater, he says, responded with a vulgarity that implied his friend was weak.
The most interesting aspect of Atwater’s life may have been his ability to bring the Republicans’ racist Southern Strategy — earning the votes of southern whites by letting them know that Republicans shared their anti-black sentiment — into the modern age. He described it this way:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
In 1990, at only 39, Atwater was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. He died less than a year later. At the end of the trailer is a shot of him looking bloated and disfigured. It’s a shocking image and one I remember causing me to feel immense sympathy for him for the first time.
If this movie ever makes it to Houston, Janice and I will be first in line.
