Even when he was seated, his body was always in some form of motion. He talked in bursts and was given to biting rejoinders and harsh language that fostered his reputation as a master of political negativism. His earliest ambition was to be a jazz musician, and he made an imprint on the Bush presidency by organizing and performing with his electric guitar at a post-inaugural rhythm and blues concert.
The intense public exposure he received often made him uneasy. Yet he craved the spotlight, once posing for a gag photo for Esquire wearing a pair of gym shorts with his sweat pants draped around his ankles. But Atwater commanded attention on more substantial grounds. His success was a metaphor for the political era in which he thrived and helped to shape, embodying some of the major themes that have defined American politics and particularly the Republican Party that he led.
In the first place, Atwater was a Southerner. His lifetime spanned the transformation of his native region from Democratic bulwark to Republican stronghold in presidential elections.
This heritage thrust him into the crucible of racial politics and taught him the strategies that Republicans used to make massive inroads among Southern whites by playing on their resentment of the Democratic-backed drive for integration.
As governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis proved his effectiveness as a skilled, technocratic manager of government. This experience offered a great talking point as Democrats were railing against Reagan, who seemed to have little control over his advisers and his administration. In his speech accepting the Democratic nomination, Dukakis said that "This election is not about ideology, it's about competence.
He was liberal on most key issues that were necessary to win core Democratic votes, such as the death penalty, but centrist enough on matters like labor relations, economic regulations and bureaucratic reorganization to ward off simplistic right-wing attacks.
When the campaign began, Dukakis was boasting of the "Massachusetts Miracle," the dramatic regeneration of the state's moribund manufacturing economy that had taken place as a result of the recruitment of high-tech investments along the Route corridor. But after the Republican Convention, Atwater put together a campaign that gradually picked Dukakis apart, piece by piece. The power of the negative ad. One of his main tactics was guilt by association. Atwater wanted to capitalize on an issue that had emerged involving Dukakis' support of a weekend furlough program in Massachusetts that had allowed one prisoner named Willie Horton, who is African-American, to go free, after which he raped a white woman and stabbed her partner.
Atwater produced an advertisement, "Revolving Door," that showed criminals walking in and out of prison as the narrator explained Dukakis' liberal positions on issues like mandatory sentencing for drug dealers.
On the campaign trail, Bush warned that Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" who opposed prayer in school and supported leftist causes.
Atwater also brilliantly used ads and speeches to shrink the grandeur of the Democratic nominee. The Bush team used footage of Dukakis touring a defense equipment production facility in the fall, seeking to show his support for the military.
When the Republicans saw one of the images of the diminutive Dukakis popping out of an M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank with a helmet on, they almost popped the corks on the champagne. Dukakis campaign manager John Sasso recalls members of the media breaking out into laughter when they first saw him. The Bush campaign ran an ad -- which it put together the night of the event -- showing video of Dukakis in the tank in order to question his position and commitment to defense.
The ad read, "He opposed new aircraft carriers. He opposed anti-satellite weapons. He opposed four missile systems, including the Pershing II missile deployment. Dukakis opposed the stealth bomber, a ground emergency warning system against nuclear testing. He even criticized our rescue mission to Grenada and our strike on Libya.
And now he wants to be our commander in chief. America can't afford that risk. The vice president joked, "He thinks a naval exercise is something you find in Jane Fonda's exercise books. They also ran ads highlighting the polluted Boston Harbor and problems in the state's economy to take away Dukakis' claim of having ushered an economic miracle into the moribund Bay State. There were even rumors spread -- though the Bush campaign denied being the source -- about whether Dukakis was mentally stable.
When their opponent made any mistake, Atwater's team immediately mobilized to use it in devastating fashion. I first met him in those days, and wrote about him in Atlantic articles that led to my book, National Defense. Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals.
But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign. Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap.
A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. A famous profile of Hart by E. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini , on the cover of the National Enquirer.
Considering what American culture has swallowed as irrelevant or forgivable since then, it may be difficult to imagine that allegations of a consensual extramarital affair might really have caused an otherwise-favored presidential candidate to leave the race. Yet anyone who was following American politics at the time can tell you that this occurred. Too convenient? Might the nascent Bush campaign, with Atwater as its manager, have been looking for a way to help a potentially strong opponent leave the field?
He mainly kept the news to himself. As the years went by, he discreetly mentioned the conversation to some journalists and other colleagues, but not to Gary Hart. In the nineteen-eighties, Atwater became infamous for his effective use of smears. A menacing ad featuring Horton was a blatant attempt to stir fear among white voters that Dukakis would be soft on crime. At the very end of his life, Atwater publicly apologized to Dukakis for it.
In fact, it seems that practically everything Atwater learned about politics he learned in high school. Born in Atlanta, Atwater grew up in a middle-class white family in South Carolina.
His father worked in insurance, and his mother was a teacher. He sneered at the top grade-getters and student-government leaders. His aim, he wrote, was to be seen as too smart and too cool to care. And I pulled a lot of shit. When speakers came to assembly, Atwater would signal his followers to rise in unison and turn their backs for a few seconds, or cross their legs in synchronized motions, or break out in wild applause.
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