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Boogie Man

“Let him deny it.” – Lyndon Baines Johnson, after an aide questioned him about implying in a stump speech that his opponent had improper knowledge of a farm animal.

“Run like the man you want your grandchildren to remember.” – Advice to Walter Mondale at the end of the 1984 Presidential election, when it was clear that Ronald Reagan was going to be reelected.

I know a lot of you are going to find this hard to believe, but six months ago I considered voting for John McCain, but I lost a lot of respect for him during his run for the Presidency. While I did not agree with some of his stances, he always seemed to be an honorable, straight shooter, the kind of man that Americans want in the White House. Yet, like Golem from The Lord of the Rings, the call of the Oval Office was so strong that he hired several of the disciples of Bush’s Brain, Karl Rove. They were many of the same bottom feeders that smeared him in the 2000 Presidential campaign. While promising high standards, the campaign drove right into the first gutter it could find, justifying the ooze by stating that it was all due to the young Democrat refusing to do ten proposed town halls with McCain. (I do not quite get the twisted logic, but I also did not get the whole Billy Bass thing, so what do I know.) The slime that swift-boated John Kerry was unearthed to do the same thing to Obama and failed. He chose an air-headed running mate who was basically Spiro Agnew in a bra and panties, okay, Spiro Agnew, a right wing S and M pinup for those who think sex is dirty. Even though she is sleeping with a man who belonged to a party who openly advocated Alaskan independence (okay we fought a war over this type of thing for those of you who do not know), palled around with individuals that buried assault rifles in their front yard in preparation of the new world order, engaged in some religious wackiness, and abused power, the McCain campaign tried to seize power by attacking Barrack Obama’s character, claiming he hung out with terrorists, hated America, was a socialist, and constantly tried to keep the faint hint of racism in the air like a man in church who just ate two pounds of chili, instead of campaigning on the issues. When that did not work, his campaign fell back to the old standard of blaming the “liberal” media even though they were most of the same reporters that had carried his water for over the last decade. Like the Democratic standard bearers, Carter, Mondale, Gore, and Kerry before him, Obama tried to run a high-minded campaign. Instead of “swift boating” the Senator’s time as a prisoner of war, the Keating Five, Cindy’s drug and legal problems, rumors of adultery, and whole can of worms up in Wasilla, they stayed on message and surprisingly won. If one is to understand what went wrong with the Arizona gentleman’s bid, a person has to draw the connection to Lee Atwater, the man who played mentoring Sith Lord to Rove and whose dirty tricks helped Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush become President.

Since the two party system developed, American politics has always been a full contact sport. As far back as 1800 Thomas Jefferson was claiming that his rival for the Presidency, John Adams, would give the country back to England in exchange for the King giving the hand of his daughter to our second President’s son, John Quincy. Adams and friends retaliated by claiming that Jefferson had a little Indian and Black blood flowing through his veins and if he won the streets would be filled with “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest." John’s son, who did not marry the King’s daughter a quarter of a century later, claimed that Andrew Jackson’s mom was a woman of loose virtue who married a mulatto gentleman after becoming pregnant with Andrew. The boy’s real father was a British soldier. James Buchanan, whose eye problems caused him to have to tilt his head to the left, had to fight lies that this habit was due to a failed attempt to hang himself. Buchanan got his opponent, John Fremont, back by claiming that he was a secret Catholic. Samuel Tilden lost the closest Presidential election in US history amidst charges that he was a syphilitic alcoholic. In the 1990s parents wondered how they were going to explain to their children what the President was doing with a chubby intern with an oral fixation; over a century early, Grover Cleveland won the White House even though he fathered an illegitimate child as crowds chanted, “Ma, ma, where’s my Pa?” Cleveland exited the Oval Office four years later, not due to his love child, but rather to a Republican dirty trick, a forged letter to the British ambassador, asking which candidate the British government supported. While William Jefferson Clinton was proud to be called the “first black President” and Obama probably is, Warren G. Harding faced numerous whispers that he was, at a time that the KKK was the largest fraternal organization in America. During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt heard smears that his wife knew a love whose name dare not be spoken. Lyndon Johnson passed out children’s coloring books depicting Barry Goldwater in a KKK robe. Edmund Muskie found his Presidential hopes lost when an ill-fated snowflake landed on his face just below his eye, appearing to be a tear, during a speech where he was defending himself over a forged letter that claimed he used the word “Canucks.” Richard Nixon helped off his other main rival that year in a twofer, Hubert Humphrey, by stealing some of Muskie’s stationary and printing on it that the “happy liberal” had been arrested for drunk driving.

Yet, the king of the political smear was Harvey Leroy “Lee” Atwater, a liar, manipulator, scam artist, and the father of modern Republican politics, a.k.a. “Darth Vader,” “the happy hatchet man.” A son of the Deep South, after graduating Newberry College, Atwater began his political career by working on the campaigns of South Carolina Senator Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond, men who had made a career out of using racism and wedge issues to their advantage. Learning at the feet of these masters, by 1980, he was consulting with various Republican candidates including Florida’s Floyd Spence, in his bid for Congressional re-election. Atwater employed what would become a Republican standard, push polling, the use of fake surveys to put mis-information in the minds of voters. Florida voters were asked if they were more or less likely to vote for the Democratic opponent if they knew that he was an “alleged member of the NAACP” and had electroshock therapy for depression as a teenager, been “hooked up to jumper cables.” It was these tactics that came to the attention of Ronald Reagan’s political director Ed Rollins, who quickly hired Atwater as an “aide.” Employing the Southern Strategy that had first been developed under the likes of Thurmond and perfected under President Richard Nixon, by the 1988 election, Atwater was preying on white fear with Willie Horton ads, an African-American convicted of murder in Massachusetts who had committed a rape while on a weekend furlough. This commercial helped George H.W. Bush overcome a 17 percent deficit in public opinion polls to win the Presidency. Atwater also used the media to release several personal allegations about Michael Dukakis’s personal life, including such far out lies as that Kitty Dukakis, the governor’s wife, had burned an American flag during the Vietnam War and that Dukakis had been treated for mental illness. Young George W. Bush took an office across the hall to learn from the master.

With senior Bush in the Oval Office, Atwater was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. From his new position, Atwater continued the art of the smear in various races until, on March 5, 1990, he collapsed at a fundraising breakfast for Senator Phil Gramm. Doctors discovered brain cancer and he died a little over a year later. Most political insiders concede that if Atwater had survived, history might have turned out much different for daddy Bush in his re-election bid against a young Arkansas Governor and a crazy Texas oilman.

In the last months of his life, Atwater came to regret many of the stunts he had done to ensure Republican victories in various races, even converting to Catholicism and writing letters to the individuals he had hurt and smeared. Lamenting the “Pandora’s box” he had helped unleash, he wrote about the “tumor on the American soul” that is still with us almost 20 years later. It is a tumor that took over John McCain, Karl Rove, George W. Bush and countless others. They tried to gain the world and lost their souls somewhere along the way. Yet, Atwater saw the light. So maybe there is hope for the rest of us.

Verdict: A middle of the road documentary