The Rove before Karl

Last night PBS aired a Frontline episode titled, "Boogie Man, The Lee Atwater Story." It was a scarily fascinating biography of Lee Atwater, a Republican political operative. He helped George H. W. Bush get elected in 1988, and later became chairman of the Republican National Committee. He died of a brain tumor in 1991 at the age of 40.

I remember the name "Lee Atwater," and was in my early 20s during his rise to fame and power. After watching this biography, I realize that I had no clue as to his level of impact on our political landscape. He has been characterized as the "happy hatchet man" and "Darth Vader" of the Republican Party. I am attaching a link to the documentary, where portions can be viewed on line (see below):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/atwater/

While watching this documentary, several points were very striking to me:

• Even Karl Rove needed some mentoring, and Lee Atwater was the man to do it. Atwater invented or improved upon ruthless strategies, like starting and spreading unflattering rumors about a candidate, and the aggressive use of opposition research. Opposition research is when someone representing Candidate A calls voters and asks a question such as, "would you be upset to learn that Candidate B has an illegitimate black daughter." This is what happened to John McCain in 2000.
• Many feel that if Atwater were alive to help George H.W. Bush during his 1992 run against Bill Clinton, that he may have won. Lee Atwater realized that Clinton would be a threat to Bush early on, and started the dirty press early. But, Atwater became sick and died in 1991.
• Lee Atwater destroyed Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. It reinforced for me how excellent a campaign Barack Obama ran. The Dukakis approach of "taking the high road," or ignoring negative smears definitely did not, and does not work. This was shown again by Kerry in 2004. Barack Obama fought smears head on. Obama addressed the "elephant in the room," before it came back to bite him (or charge him - I'm not sure what elephants do).

I wanted to include a television ad that was used by the George H.W. Bush campaign against Michael Dukakis. It was used to make reference to (although never showing the picture of) Willie Horton, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in a Massachusetts prison who committed a rape while participating in a weekend furlough strongly supported by Michael Dukakis. In reference to Dukakis, Atwater declared that he would "strip the bark off the little bastard" and "make Willie Horton his running mate."