I know I may be a late comer to the party on this one, but this movie was jaw-dropping for me. Not that it told me anything I didn't know (except a few very interesting details about Atwater himself), but because it was so goddamn honest. The most honest thing about the state of politics today that I have ever seen.
I want to share my take on it because now I have a whole new appreciation for the Republican Party, and I am even more convinced that their demise is rapidly approaching.
For anyone who is not familiar with the movie, here's the link to the movie at Amazon:
Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
In a nutshell, Lee Atwater grew up in Texas and scrapped his way up the GOP food chain. He was the architect of the infamous Southern Strategy, and the protege of Strom Thurmond. His own protege was none other than Turdblossom himself.
His first campaign was for the national chairmanship of the College Republicans. He was not favored to win, but with his newly discovered bag of dirty tricks he squeaked by to victory. After that, he kept climbing upward, winning elections, leaving pain and humiliation in his wake.
Follow me below the thingy - I need to get this off my chest.
There were several things about this story that had my jaw on the floor through about 80% of the movie. First off, I did not know that as a child he accidentally killed his little brother by pulling a deep fryer off the stove and covering the toddler in boiling oil. his brother pulled the deep fryer onto himself (see edit below). That put everything about this man into a new perspective for me; what a tragic, horrible thing to live with for the rest of your life. He told a friend that a day doesn't go by that he doesn't hear his brother's screams in his head. Pretty hard to be "normal" after going through something like that.
I noted that, in his friends' explanations of why he chose to be a Republican, there was never anything really about what the party stood for. It was more because he wanted to buck the tide, be a rebel. And at that time everyone his age were liberals. He also wanted power and prestige, and he felt more at home with white men in suits than he did with young hippies.
So from the very start, it was never about ideology for him. It was about one thing - winning. And he would do anything, anything to get there. Many of his friends spoke of his intensity - that it was almost scary to look into his eyes.
In one of his first elections, he spread rumours about his opponent that he had a history of mental illness, and that he had been hooked up to "jumper cables". That politician speaks about it in the movie; in fact, a lot of politicians (including Michael Dukakis) speak very candidly about what it was like to be on the receiving end of Atwater's offense.
I'll skip over the Southern Strategy stuff, because I'm sure most of you Kossacks are more than well-versed in the history of that. For those that aren't, here's the Wiki link and you better read it - it is at the very heart of today's GOP. I do, however, feel obliged to include probably one of his more infamous quotes:
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."
But, he's not a racist. Not a racist bone in his body. Remember that. [eyeroll]
What really got my attention was when they moved into the Bush/Dukakis campaign of 1988; Atwater was Bush's campaign manager (an ironic aside was that they put George Jr. in charge of "keeping an eye on him"). While I remembered the Willie Horton ad, there were a few things that I forgot. Like that they put the rape victim basically "on tour" to tell her horrifying account in detail of being raped repeatedly by Horton. Or that he pulled out an old trick - the mental illness bit - only this time he used it against Kitty Dukakis, the governor's wife. Dukakis' commentary in this documentary is stunningly honest - you really get to feel his disbelief, his humiliation, and his pain that he experienced during that campaign. And you also get how blindsided he was - this definitely was not "politics as usual".
In the movie, Dukakis said:
I used to joke that if I had beaten the father, we would never have heard of the son. So it's probably my fault.
Atwater died at a young 40 years of age due to a brain tumor. Much has been written about his "deathbed confessions", and the documentary goes into them in much detail. He really, really did regret what he did. He wrote a public apology to Michael Dukakis, and this I didn't know - he actually wrote a letter of apology to Willie Horton himself. He asked his friends to help him distribute letters of apology to everyone on his long list of people he had harmed, destroyed even.
IMO, the movie was done very fairly. They interviewed many of his friends, even his best friend. They interviewed a guy who was a top aide to the McCain/Palin campaign, who admitted that, yes, Lee Atwater did damage to this country. Mary Matalin, however, was the only GOP operative interviewed who totally dismissed the whole bedside confession thing as end of life delirium or something. One cold bitch, that one is.
Now to how I'm feeling now, and why I had to get this on "paper"....
One thing that the McCain campaign aide said really surprised me with his candor. He said:
You know when people say "how is it that so many people can vote against their own interests"? Well, it's just that patriotism trumps money for some people.
And you know what? He's right. It was the most honest thing I've ever heard a Republican say. They know what they're doing, and because they honestly believe that they are protecting our "values", they don't feel guilty one bit about the fact that their policies actually hurt their own constituents. Because they
believe that their constituents would rather bleed red white and blue than eat. And frankly - maybe some of them would.
The overriding theme of the whole story was Atwater's cynicism; Howard Fineman said it perfectly:
He was an attractive figure to cover because he could wink and nod with the reporters, saying, ``We all know what a phony deal this is, right?'' He used his own cynicism to anesthetize people to what was going on.
That answered every nagging question I've ever had about how these people can live with themselves. I know that we here at the dKos talk about the GOP's sociopathic behavior freely and frequently, but it never really sunk in for me like it did when I was watching this.
I got it. I finally got it.
At the end of the documentary, there were a few warnings issued to current operatives who wish to emulate Lee Atwater's modus operandi, and I believe one of them even came from a Republican.
This man died with a shit ton of pain and regret; it all caught up with him in the end. I'm sure the pain of killing his brother turned him into a true sociopath; the pain of that is something I can't even begin to imagine enduring. I think there's a good chance that most anyone would desensitize themselves completely, and no one but a true sociopath can do the things that Atwater did.
As a Buddhist, this cult of power, and greed, and winning at all costs is against every fiber of my being. It helps no one; it benefits no person, no country. It does not make the world a better place, but instead makes it uglier and more dangerous.
I understand that this is human nature at it's worst, and I also understand that our world will never be rid of those that subscribe to and thrive upon our basest of qualities. But after watching this story, I will no longer look in amazement at the news when Darrell Issa leaks another document or invents another X-ghazi. My jaw will no longer drop when the modern medievalists shut down the government over abortion, or block absolutely anything and everything that that Black man in the White House tries to do.
What I will do is have faith that the same reason and soul-searching that came to Lee Atwater at the end of life will someday visit the worst actors in this cynical, cruel movement that is today's Republican Party.
I will have faith that compassion and justice will return to Washington, and while both parties will forever disagree on ideological solutions to problems, we will no longer have to argue that there is a problem in the first place. Or that government is capable of solving problems; government does work.
If you hung out this long, then thanks for listening. :) I look forward to your comments and thoughts. All in all, watching this movie makes me strangely more comfortable and confident that we will win, and soon.
3:06 PM PT: Hey man, rec list?!?! Thank you!! :)
3:21 PM PT: h/t to PincheGringo and PatriciaVa for pointing out that Atwater didn't actually pull down the deep fryer on his little brother - the brother pulled it down on himself. It just wasn't that clear in the movie:
JIM McCABE: He didn't talk about Joe much. His mother, you know, she had a deep fryer I think, and full of hot grease, and the little kid— you know, he pulled on the cord and pulled the thing over and— you know, he didn't talk about Joe much.
JOE SLIGH: The grease on the stove ended up on Joe, and it killed him.
TUCKER ESKEW: Lee said he heard his brother's screams the rest of his life every day. How haunting could that be?