The Political Legacy of Baaad Boy Atwater

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For all the nastiness of this year’s presidential campaign, the downward spiral into ever-meaner electioneering really started about 20 years ago. The political Magus who ushered in our new muddier era was Lee Atwater, best known for engineering George H.W. Bush’s win in 1988. Mr. Atwater became such a mythic figure in American politics that he was praised at his funeral in 1991 for being Machiavellian “in the very best sense of the word.”

As many Democratic victims could attest, Mr. Atwater was Machiavellian in the actual sense of the word. “Boogie Man,” a new film by Stefan Forbes, details Mr. Atwater’s impish, strangely seductive charm, his mean boogie guitar and mostly his political chicanery. A lot of the latter sounds very familiar to anyone following the 2008 campaign.

For starters, Mr. Atwater knew how to seduce the news media. He could wink and laugh and drop a fake story on the best of them. Lee Bandy, a respected political journalist for The State newspaper in South Carolina, recalled the time that he accidentally helped one of Mr. Atwater’s candidates, former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Later, Mr. Bandy recalled that “Lee laughed and said, ‘Bandy, you got used.’ ”

Using the news media apparently was not the hard part for Mr. Atwater. The real trick was finding the way to get inside peoples’ heads.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/20/opinion/20sat3.html?th&emc=th