On Screen

The timing couldn’t be any more perfect. Republican strategist Lee
Atwater was responsible for launching Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential
campaign in a town known mainly for murdering civil-rights workers,
then throwing the race-baiting Willie Horton ad at Michael Dukakis in
1988, and throughout his career running all kinds of amoral whisper
campaigns against Democrats (a favorite was the mental instability
charge). Atwater’s protégé Karl Rove used the same
playbook against John McCain in the Republican primary in South
Carolina in 2000, derailing McCain’s candidacy amid false whispers
about McCain having fathered a black child out of wedlock (and setting
George W. Bush on the path to two terms as president).

Now, in one of the great ironies of modern presidential politics,
John McCain and his chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, are desperately
using Atwater-style tactics against Barack Obama, trying to combat
sagging McCain poll numbers by suggesting Obama is a terrorist
sympathizer and a dangerously unknown quantity (read: Manchurian
Candidate). Schmidt, of course, is a Rove
protégé—which makes him basically the grandson of
Atwater and shows both how durable Republicans believe the Atwater
magic to be and how out-of-new-ideas their party has become.

But about the documentary: It is a wonderful, cold-eyed look at what
created this man/monster. It turns out, both depressingly and
satisfyingly, that Atwater’s evolution is an old story. At a young age,
his younger brother was burned to death before his eyes by a pot of
boiling cooking oil that fell off his mother’s kitchen counter. Why
believe in a just world after that? Atwater didn’t, and on top of that
he had a chip on his shoulder about the condescension white Southerners
like himself suffered from Northern elites. Naturally, he went on to
perfect the art of doing everything that just, decent, moral people
won’t do to get elected—and doing it, most famously, to that
quintessential Northern elite, Dukakis. Then, as he was dying of a
brain tumor in his 40s, his face puffed up by steroids, his enemies
circling, Atwater came to regret it all. He had grabbed power, but in
the process he had given away his soul. By that time, though, it was
too late—for him, and for the country.

This documentary might be unbearable for liberals to watch were it
not for the fact that this year, finally, Democrats have learned how to
respond to Atwater-style (and heir-of-Atwater-style) attacks. The final
bit of schadenfreude: It’s an African-American who’s doing it, and the
polls say he’s going to win.