Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story is a Frontline documentary that got a theatrical release. Atwater was a successful and dirty political operative and Karl Rove's mentor who died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 40. While there were negative politics before him, most would say he's father of the modern negative attack campaigns.
Atwater is described as a brilliant political mind who cared about winning regardless of the cost or method. He didn't even care about policy and joined the Young Republicans in South Carolina because they were smaller and it would be easier for him to get ahead.
In 1973 Karl Rove was the executive director of the College Republican National Committee and was running to be the chairman. Atwater was his southern campaign chair and the deal was if Rove won, Atwater would take over the executive director position. It was a close campaign with a lot of dirty tricks including throwing out votes of Rove's competitors. It came down to a tie and the chairman of the RNC had to decide it. That person was George H. W. Bush. He probably chose Rove because the campaign manager of the competitor leaked accusations of Rove's dirty tricks to the Washington Post. At the time, Bush was dealing with Watergate and didn't want the party tarred by dirty tricks leaking to the press.
In 1980 Atwater worked on a congressional campaign in SC and brought up his Tom Turnipseed's (his Democratic challenger) previous electroshock therapy, describing it as being hooked up to jumper cables. After that success, Reagan hired him in Washington and we worked for Ed Rollins before viciously backstabbing him. Atwater was Bush's campaign manager in the 1988 presidential election, responsible for the Dukakis tank ad and the Willie Horton ad. At this time he became friendly with George W. Bush. After the election he became chairman of the RNC and there were more dirty tricks.
In early 1990 he collapsed and was diagnosed with brain cancer. He was treated with radiation and steroids and was paralyzed and swollen. He went from looking like a young Michael J. Fox to an old Larry Flint. As he dropped out of politics he turned to religion and apologized for some of his actions, though the film suggests they may not have been sincere.
The story is told with lots of archival footage but mostly via interviews with people who worked with him and competed against him, including Dukakis, Ed Rollins, Robert Novak, Sam Donaldson, Tucker Eskew, Roger Stone, Mary Matalin (who was his chief of staff at the RNC), etc. They all often said similar things about different parts of his life or different political attacks. I wished there more details. Also many of them seemingly admired his audacity to pull these things off, even some of the reporters who were manipulated by him into spreading damaging lies.
Atwater was apparently a lot of fun to be around and an accomplished blues guitarist. The film is full of clips of his playing. While it's clearly positioning him as the source of modern day Republican dirty campaigning, his likability and illness are supposed to yield a dramatic arc or at least some compassion. Some say at the end that he found peace in the Bible and apologized for his career. Tom Turnipseed read a letter he got from Atwater, which said he knew what he did "was bad and bad for the country".
I learned a lot about Atwater but I felt no sympathy for him whatsoever. It could be because the film sets up the proposition that without Atwater there would have been no Bush presidency, either of them and no Karl Rove. For giving us that and for the completely amoral way he operated, I'm happier he's not around. I don't care how well he played the blues or how much fun he was while drunk or if he ultimately realized what he did was wrong. That's certainly callous, but the film never showed Atwater showing sympathy for anyone.
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