Play Dumb and Keep Moving

There's a new documentary out on the late conservative political consultant Lee Atwater called Boogie Man. It's airing on Frontline [1] on most PBS stations on Tuesday, 11/11 (perhaps so Atwater can't affect another election). Director Stefan Forbes discussed the film for a half-hour with Elvis Mitchell on NPR show The Treatment [2]. There's some fascinating stuff if you'd like to trace the Southern Strategy [3] and a little bit of the Nixonland tradition through the 70s and into the 80s. A key line for me was that Atwater liked to "play dumb and keep moving." He enjoyed being underestimated, and while he tapped into Southern resentment as a political strategy, it also fueled him personally. His desire to show up Ivy-leaguers was positively Orthogonian [4]. Elvis Mitchell points out how Atwater approached political campaigns as entertainment, and Forbes adds that Atwater's specialty was hooking the press and making them spread the narratives he wanted.

Digby's previously [5] covered [6] how Atwater used charged code words like "forced busing" when outright racial slurs fell out of fashion. Atwater's probably most infamous for his role in the "Willie Horton" ads for George H.W. Bush in 1988. Here's one of them (alas, truncated):

One of the more interesting clips on YouTube is a 4 minute CNN segment [7] from 1988 on the Bush and Dukakis commercials. It shows more of the Horton ads, and also features a brief clip of Roger Ailes claiming "the Bush campaign had absolutely nothing to do with that ad."

You can also watch an old Bill Moyers segment [8] on Lee Atwater's repentance near the end of his short life. Forbes, however, claims in the The Treatment segment and in a Talk of the Nation [9] interview that Atwater's apologies were selective, and the redemption story has been over-emphasized because... the press liked the narrative. If that's so, it would fit what Forbes says was Atwater's core approach: "The truth doesn't matter; it's the story you tell."

John Powers [10] has a review of Boogie Man, and here's the trailer (with a flurry of bleeping at the start):