Saul David Alinsky was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing and has been compared in Playboy magazine to Thomas Paine as being "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left." The right wing has demonized Alinsky, but he seems to be mild compared to Lee Atwater, "
Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater was an American political consultant and strategist to the Republican party. He was an advisor of U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Atwater's political stock rose during the 1970s and the 1980 election in the South Carolina Republican party, working on the campaigns of Governor Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond. During his years in South Carolina, Atwater became well known for running hard edged campaigns based on emotional wedge issues.
Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican incumbent Floyd Spence in his campaign for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed.
Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by "independent pollsters" to inform white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP.
He also sent out last-minute letters from Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm America and turn it over to liberals and Communists.
At a press briefing, Atwater planted a "reporter" who rose and said, "We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment."
Atwater later told the reporters off the record that Turnipseed "got hooked up to jumper cables" - a reference to electroconvulsive therapy that Turnipseed underwent as a teenager.
"Lee seemed to delight in making fun of a suicidal 16-year-old who was treated for depression with electroshock treatments", Turnipseed recalled. "In fact, my struggle with depression as a student was no secret.
After the 1980 election, Atwater went to Washington and became an aide in the Ronald Reagan administration, working under political director Ed Rollins.
In 1984, Rollins managed Reagan's re-election campaign, and Atwater became the campaign's deputy director and political director. Rollins tells several Atwater stories in his 1996 book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms.
Rollins states that Atwater ran a dirty tricks operation against vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro including publicizing the fact that Ferraro's parents had been indicted of numbers running in the 1940s. Rollins also described Atwater as
"ruthless", "Ollie North in civilian clothes", and someone who "just had to drive in one more stake".
During his years in Washington, Atwater became aligned with Vice President George H.W. Bush, who chose Atwater to run his 1988 presidential campaign.
Atwater on the Southern Strategy
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to Political Scientist Alexander P. Lamis about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South.
Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.
You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[6][7]
Atwater's most noteworthy campaign was the 1988 presidential election, where he served as campaign manager for Republican nominee George H.W. Bush.
A particularly aggressive media program included a television advertisement produced by Floyd Brown comparing Bush and Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis on crime.
In 1976, Massachusetts passed a law to similarly ban furloughs for first-degree murderers and Dukakis vetoed the bill. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for first degree murder for stabbing a boy to death during a robbery.
Horton while on weekend furlough kidnapped a young couple, torturing the young man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. . . The Horton ad campaign only re-enforced the public's general opinion that Dukakis was too liberal, which helped Bush overcome Dukakis's 17-percent lead in early public opinion polls and win both the electoral and popular vote by landslide margins.
During the election, a number of allegations were made in the media about Dukakis' personal life, including the unsubstantiated claim that his wife Kitty had burned an American flag to protest the Vietnam War, and that Dukakis himself had been treated for a mental illness.
In the film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Robert Novak reveals for the first time that Atwater personally tried to get him to spread these mental health rumors.
The 1988 Bush campaign Bush overcame a 17-point deficit in midsummer polls to win 40 states. Atwater's skills in the 1988 election led one biographer to term him "the best campaign manager who ever lived."
During that campaign, future president George W. Bush, son of Vice President George H.W. Bush, took an office across the hall from Atwater's office, where his job was to serve as "the eyes and ears for my dad," monitoring the activities of Atwater and other campaign staff.
In her memoir, Barbara Bush said that the younger Bush and Atwater became friends.
RNC Chairman
After the election, Atwater was named chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Shortly after Atwater took over the RNC, Jim Wright was forced to resign as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and was succeeded by Tom Foley. On the day Foley officially became speaker, the RNC began circulating a memo to Republican Congressmen and state party chairmen called "Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet."
The memo compared Foley's voting record with that of openly gay Congressman Barney Frank, with a subtle implication that Foley was himself gay. It had been crafted by RNC communications director Mark Goodin and House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich.
In fact, Gingrich had been trying to get several reporters to print it. The memo was harshly condemned on both sides of the aisle. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole, for instance, said in a speech on the Senate floor, "This is not politics. This is garbage."
Atwater initially defended the memo, calling it "no big deal" and "factually accurate". However, a few days later, he claimed he hadn't approved the memo. Under pressure from Bush, Atwater fired Goodin, replacing him with B. Jay Cooper.
In 1989, Atwater was appointed as a new member of the historically black Howard University Board of Trustees. The university gained national attention when students rose up in protest against Atwater's appointment.
Student activists disrupted Howard's 122nd anniversary celebrations, and eventually occupied the university's Administration building. Within days, both Atwater and Howard's President, James E. Cheek, resigned.
On March 5, 1990, Lee Atwater collapsed during a fundraising breakfast on behalf of Senator Phil Gramm.
Doctors searching for an explanation to what was initially thought to be a mere fainting episode discovered a grade 3 astrocytoma, an unusually aggressive form of brain cancer, in his right parietal lobe.
Atwater underwent interstitial implant radiation, a then-new form of treatment . . . The treatment for the brain tumor left him paralyzed on his left side, robbed him of his tone discrimination, and swelled his face and body due to steroids. He spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.
In the months after the severity of his illness became apparent, Atwater said he had converted to Catholicism, through the help of Fr. John Hardon and, in an act of repentance, Atwater issued a number of public and written letters to individuals to whom he had been opposed during his political career.
In a letter to Tom Turnipseed dated June 28, 1990, he stated, "It is very important to me that I let you know that out of everything that has happened in my career, one of the low points remains the so-called 'jumper cable' episode," adding, "my illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have.
So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.
In a February 1991 article for Life magazine, Atwater wrote:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most.
But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
This article was notable for an apology to Michael Dukakis for the 'naked cruelty' of the 1988 presidential election campaign.
Ed Rollins, however, claimed in the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, that "[Atwater] was telling this story about how a Living Bible was what was giving him faith and I said to Mary,( his wife), ‘I really, sincerely hope that he found peace.’
She said, ‘Ed, when we were cleaning up his things afterwards, the Bible was still wrapped in the cellophane and had never been taken out of the package,’ which just told you everything there was. He was spinning right to the end."
Atwater's political career is the subject of the feature-length documentary film, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Democrats hsould watch Boogieman: the Lee Atwater Story. As Sun Tzu has stated:
If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.
source: Wikipedia
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Atwater's political stock rose during the 1970s and the 1980 election in the South Carolina Republican party, working on the campaigns of Governor Carroll Campbell and Senator Strom Thurmond. During his years in South Carolina, Atwater became well known for running hard edged campaigns based on emotional wedge issues.
Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican incumbent Floyd Spence in his campaign for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed.
Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by "independent pollsters" to inform white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP.
He also sent out last-minute letters from Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm America and turn it over to liberals and Communists.
At a press briefing, Atwater planted a "reporter" who rose and said, "We understand Turnipseed has had psychotic treatment."
Atwater later told the reporters off the record that Turnipseed "got hooked up to jumper cables" - a reference to electroconvulsive therapy that Turnipseed underwent as a teenager.
"Lee seemed to delight in making fun of a suicidal 16-year-old who was treated for depression with electroshock treatments", Turnipseed recalled. "In fact, my struggle with depression as a student was no secret.
After the 1980 election, Atwater went to Washington and became an aide in the Ronald Reagan administration, working under political director Ed Rollins.
In 1984, Rollins managed Reagan's re-election campaign, and Atwater became the campaign's deputy director and political director. Rollins tells several Atwater stories in his 1996 book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms.
Rollins states that Atwater ran a dirty tricks operation against vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro including publicizing the fact that Ferraro's parents had been indicted of numbers running in the 1940s. Rollins also described Atwater as
"ruthless", "Ollie North in civilian clothes", and someone who "just had to drive in one more stake".
During his years in Washington, Atwater became aligned with Vice President George H.W. Bush, who chose Atwater to run his 1988 presidential campaign.
Atwater on the Southern Strategy
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to Political Scientist Alexander P. Lamis about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:
Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South.
Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.
Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?
Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.
You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."[6][7]
Atwater's most noteworthy campaign was the 1988 presidential election, where he served as campaign manager for Republican nominee George H.W. Bush.
A particularly aggressive media program included a television advertisement produced by Floyd Brown comparing Bush and Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis on crime.
In 1976, Massachusetts passed a law to similarly ban furloughs for first-degree murderers and Dukakis vetoed the bill. Willie Horton was serving a life sentence for first degree murder for stabbing a boy to death during a robbery.
Horton while on weekend furlough kidnapped a young couple, torturing the young man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. . . The Horton ad campaign only re-enforced the public's general opinion that Dukakis was too liberal, which helped Bush overcome Dukakis's 17-percent lead in early public opinion polls and win both the electoral and popular vote by landslide margins.
During the election, a number of allegations were made in the media about Dukakis' personal life, including the unsubstantiated claim that his wife Kitty had burned an American flag to protest the Vietnam War, and that Dukakis himself had been treated for a mental illness.
In the film Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, Robert Novak reveals for the first time that Atwater personally tried to get him to spread these mental health rumors.
The 1988 Bush campaign Bush overcame a 17-point deficit in midsummer polls to win 40 states. Atwater's skills in the 1988 election led one biographer to term him "the best campaign manager who ever lived."
During that campaign, future president George W. Bush, son of Vice President George H.W. Bush, took an office across the hall from Atwater's office, where his job was to serve as "the eyes and ears for my dad," monitoring the activities of Atwater and other campaign staff.
In her memoir, Barbara Bush said that the younger Bush and Atwater became friends.
RNC Chairman
After the election, Atwater was named chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Shortly after Atwater took over the RNC, Jim Wright was forced to resign as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and was succeeded by Tom Foley. On the day Foley officially became speaker, the RNC began circulating a memo to Republican Congressmen and state party chairmen called "Tom Foley: Out of the Liberal Closet."
The memo compared Foley's voting record with that of openly gay Congressman Barney Frank, with a subtle implication that Foley was himself gay. It had been crafted by RNC communications director Mark Goodin and House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich.
In fact, Gingrich had been trying to get several reporters to print it. The memo was harshly condemned on both sides of the aisle. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole, for instance, said in a speech on the Senate floor, "This is not politics. This is garbage."
Atwater initially defended the memo, calling it "no big deal" and "factually accurate". However, a few days later, he claimed he hadn't approved the memo. Under pressure from Bush, Atwater fired Goodin, replacing him with B. Jay Cooper.
In 1989, Atwater was appointed as a new member of the historically black Howard University Board of Trustees. The university gained national attention when students rose up in protest against Atwater's appointment.
Student activists disrupted Howard's 122nd anniversary celebrations, and eventually occupied the university's Administration building. Within days, both Atwater and Howard's President, James E. Cheek, resigned.
On March 5, 1990, Lee Atwater collapsed during a fundraising breakfast on behalf of Senator Phil Gramm.
Doctors searching for an explanation to what was initially thought to be a mere fainting episode discovered a grade 3 astrocytoma, an unusually aggressive form of brain cancer, in his right parietal lobe.
Atwater underwent interstitial implant radiation, a then-new form of treatment . . . The treatment for the brain tumor left him paralyzed on his left side, robbed him of his tone discrimination, and swelled his face and body due to steroids. He spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.
In the months after the severity of his illness became apparent, Atwater said he had converted to Catholicism, through the help of Fr. John Hardon and, in an act of repentance, Atwater issued a number of public and written letters to individuals to whom he had been opposed during his political career.
In a letter to Tom Turnipseed dated June 28, 1990, he stated, "It is very important to me that I let you know that out of everything that has happened in my career, one of the low points remains the so-called 'jumper cable' episode," adding, "my illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have.
So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything.
In a February 1991 article for Life magazine, Atwater wrote:
My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most.
But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime.
I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
This article was notable for an apology to Michael Dukakis for the 'naked cruelty' of the 1988 presidential election campaign.
Ed Rollins, however, claimed in the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, that "[Atwater] was telling this story about how a Living Bible was what was giving him faith and I said to Mary,( his wife), ‘I really, sincerely hope that he found peace.’
She said, ‘Ed, when we were cleaning up his things afterwards, the Bible was still wrapped in the cellophane and had never been taken out of the package,’ which just told you everything there was. He was spinning right to the end."
Atwater's political career is the subject of the feature-length documentary film, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.
Democrats hsould watch Boogieman: the Lee Atwater Story. As Sun Tzu has stated:
If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril.
source: Wikipedia
Subscribe to the Rightardia feed: feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/IGiu
Netcraft rank: 14896
http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://rightardia.blogspot.com
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