KEY POINTS:
If you want to understand why United States presidential politics can be such a dirty business, and how Senator John McCain could yet turn around a White House race in which he is now the clear underdog, I have a suggestion. See a documentary called Boogie Man: the
Lee Atwater Story.
It is the best part of 20 years now since Atwater died of a brain tumour at the age of 40. But during his few years as a top White House political operative - for President Ronald Reagan and the first President George Bush - he was the monster that haunted Democrats' dreams, the mastermind of campaigns in which no blow was too low, no rumour too scurrilous if it helped you win.
Cinema verite style, without adornment, Boogie Man traces Atwater's career, from the devious strategist of Republican college politics to protege of Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from his home state, South Carolina, to the lowly job in the Reagan White House from which Atwater rose to become boss of George Bush snr's successful bid for the White House (and in the process a mentor of George Bush jnr).
The presidential campaign of 1988 has been called the dirtiest in a century. That year the Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, came out of his convention with a wide lead over Bush snr, a lacklustre campaigner struggling to shake off the Iran-Contra scandal. But that was to reckon without Lee Atwater.
Forget Iran-Contra - Atwater simply changed the subject with the infamous Willie Horton ads, featuring a convicted black murderer who was given a weekend pass under a Massachusetts prison programme. Horton didn't come back, and while on the run committed armed robbery and rape, for which he was sentenced to two life terms.
"I'll strip the bark off the little bastard [Dukakis], by making Willie Horton his running mate," Atwater boasted to a colleague. He did precisely that. The ads were a racist disgrace.
One, featuring the police mugshot of Horton, was produced by an independent pro-Bush group, so that the campaign could claim to have nothing to do with it (although Atwater most certainly did). But then the campaign ran its own spot, showing a revolving door of convicts entering and leaving a prison. The only one to stare into the camera was a large and menacing black man. The message was clear to a 6-year-old: he's the one you've got to fear.
The ad was perhaps the most effective in US political history. Entire focus groups would shift allegiance from Dukakis to Bush when they were shown it.
In its way, it was brilliant, proof of Atwater's belief that, for voters, raw emotion trumps facts every time.
Atwater was a master at using wedge issues, such as abortion and gun control, that turned socially conservative Democrats against their party, and of the dark art of "push"-polling, as in: "Would you still vote for candidate 'X' if you knew he was a closet gay/had fathered a child outside wedlock/was a secret paedophile?" Thus are disseminated rumours and downright lies which - left unanswered, as in the case of Dukakis - wreck campaigns.
Atwater's methods have become standard operating procedure for the Bushes when they enter what the father used to call "campaign mode".
Four years ago, the decorated Vietnam hero Senator John Kerry got the treatment with the Swift Boat ads, casting doubt on his war record. Like Dukakis, Kerry reacted too late and paid the price.
"When these guys get in a jam, they go back to the well of these tactics," says Stefan Forbes, who made Boogie Man, "and their opponents still haven't figured out how to deal with it."
And so to October 2008 and another Republican candidate in trouble.
In the McCain camp, many operatives must see Obama on track to becoming America's first black President and ask themselves, "What would Lee do?"
Atwater always insisted there wasn't a drop of racist blood in his veins - and played mean blues and hung out with James Brown and BB King to prove it. But in politics the truth did not matter. It was a world, he believed, in which lies could create a new reality.
It's hard to believe the cynic who made Willie Horton a household name would not have played the race card against Obama. Race has always been the great unknown of this election. Obama has tried to tackle the issue head-on, after the tirades of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, threatened to derail his campaign.
That controversy has since fallen quiet, but don't bank on it remaining so.
Then there's the "Bradley effect", named after Tom Bradley, the African-American former mayor of Los Angeles who lost the 1982 governor's election in California despite leading in every poll. According to this theory, surveys tend to overstate the vote of a black candidate because people are reluctant to admit to pollsters they are racially prejudiced.
Given the dire state of the economy, defeating Obama will be a tall order. But the original "Boogie Man" would surely have given it his very best - or rather, nastiest - shot.
- INDEPENDENT
