Somewhere, Lee Atwater must be smiling.
The 2020 Republican campaign will be built on the foundation that Atwater created.
Atwater, a South Carolina Republican and former rock-n-roll-loving frat boy, was one of the fiercest campaign consultants ever to enter the business. The “Babe Ruth of negative politics” started out as an intern for the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond and moved his way up to Ronald Reagan’s political director in 1984.
Atwater was to campaigns what Newt Gingrich was to Capitol Hill. As Gingrich elevated his smash-mouth partisanship to the highest level of congressional politics in the same period, Atwater began to mainstream his vicious brand into the highest levels of electoral politics. He compared politics to professional wrestling. He relied on character assassination, distorted information and made-for-television spectacle to manipulate the crowd into hating Democrats. Chaos was a good thing.
When politicians like Richard Nixon had used dirty tricks in an earlier period, the guardrails in American politics forced them to do so secretly.
Atwater, however, threw out the rule book. While he understood the value of coded language, he urged clients to say almost all of the silent parts out loud.
In 1988, Vice President George H.W. Bush, a scion of the party establishment, hired Atwater to run his campaign, assigning his son George W. Bush to monitor this young renegade. Michael Dukakis, whom voters perceived as a scandal-free public servant, the embodiment of the immigrant story, initially held a steady lead over Bush. The vice president — trying to win an elusive third term for his party in the White House — struggled to overcome perceptions that he was “wimpy” and tarnished by the Iran-contra scandal.
To redefine the campaign, Atwater zeroed in on a controversial Massachusetts program put in place by a Republican governor that granted incarcerated people weekend furloughs. Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) had raised the issue during the primaries. Bush hammered away at it as evidence that Dukakis was weak on crime.
Atwater picked up on the story of an African American named Willie Horton. During a furlough in 1987, Horton escaped to Maryland, where he brutally raped a woman after stabbing her fiance.
Although Nixon advised Bush to avoid the low road and let surrogates do his dirty work for him, the vice president didn’t listen. On the campaign trail, Bush frequently mentioned Horton, whose photo hung on the wall of the GOP headquarters.
Atwater told a group of Republicans, “Willie Horton, for all I know, may end up being Dukakis’s running mate.” Upon passing a prison during a boat ride on the Boston Harbor, one reporter asked Bush whether any of the people in the facility had received a furlough. Only one, Bush replied, “Willie Horton.” Bush reminded voters that Dukakis, “the Furlough King,” had vetoed a bill banning first-degree murderers from the program and never apologized to the victim’s family.
Over 28 days in September, the National Security Political Action Committee, an independent organization headed by Larry McCarthy, a former associate of Bush adviser Roger Ailes, aired an ad highlighting an ominous image of Horton. “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty,” the narrator tells viewers, “he allowed a first-degree murderer to have weekend passes from prison.”
Critics contended that the Horton story attempted to tap the racial biases that roiled White voters. “Let’s face it,” said Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), “you don’t have to be a Democrat to know that is an appeal along racial lines.”
The Bush campaign feigned contrition but soon released a cleaned-up ad that featured White, Hispanic and African American prisoners walking through a revolving prison door.
Bush also relentlessly attacked Dukakis’s patriotism. In 1977, Dukakis refused to sign legislation that would have fined teachers who refused to lead the Pledge of Allegiance, after receiving an advisory opinion from the Massachusetts Supreme Court that it was unconstitutional. “What is it about the Pledge of Allegiance that upsets him so much?” Bush asked. This, too, became a major campaign issue flogged relentlessly by Bush and his surrogates. They added that his being a “card-carrying member” of the American Civil Liberties Union placed him on the far left of the political spectrum.
And these attacks weren’t unique; the barrage against Dukakis was unending. Atwater even tried to persuade the conservative columnist Robert Novak to write about Dukakis having “psychiatric problems,” which Novak rejected as “slander.” Practicing the art of what Atwater called “strategic misrepresentation,” the campaign shamelessly quoted Dukakis as saying, “I don’t believe in people owning guns, only the police and the military.” The quote, however, was reported by a gun-lobby representative, who met Dukakis once, in Gun Week magazine.
It worked. At a critical moment, journalist Sidney Blumenthal argued, the electoral campaign disintegrated into “dramatic irrelevance.”
Dukakis made a strategic error — trying to stay out of the mud and ignore the vicious and unfair attacks. The candidate listened to New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who advised him not to “pay attention to that stuff.” But taking the high road and not forcefully responding or counterattacking resulted in Bush winning 40 states and 53.4 percent of the popular vote.
In 1991, dying from a brain tumor, Atwater apologized for the campaign, but his words came too late. The campaign became a template for the GOP.
The Republican establishment kept embracing the most destructive version of partisan politics — Gingrich on Capitol Hill, Atwater in campaigns and a new breed of conservative media with little interest in facts. In 2004, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry was “swift-boated” with false accusations about his service in Vietnam. Four years later, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin embraced rhetoric about the radicalism of Democratic nominee Barack Obama and the dangers of the “lamestream” media that stoked crowds who chanted “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!”
McCain was so taken aback at what his campaign had encouraged that at one point during a town hall meeting, he grabbed the microphone from a woman who said she couldn’t trust Obama, whom she inaccurately described as an “Arab.” But in the end — as McCain did with Palin — even those Republicans who found this breed of shameless, often bigoted politics troubling elevated it anyway for political gain.
The result: In 2016, Republicans nominated Trump, who had no moral qualms about encouraging supporters to chant “Lock her up!”
The low-road tactics have proved to be effective. They play to the worst fears of voters, and they have succeeded in negatively shaping how parts of the electorate view Democratic candidates. To be sure, Democrats have bolstered their defenses against such attacks. Candidates such as Bill Clinton and Obama established war rooms that hit back hard when attacked and developed media strategies to counteract the smear.
But with the help of voter-suppression efforts and a favorable electoral map, Republicans have scored historic wins scorching the political earth. As a party less committed to the institutions of government, one that believes in the primacy of the marketplace, they have been more willing to take down the guardrails and risk inflicting the kind of damage to our political processes that has been almost impossible to repair. Asymmetric polarization has defined the past three decades.
Every four years, we begin a new steel cage match, with one side bringing illegal objects into the squared circle. Until voters demand more, we all will continue to be stuck in the muck.
