Pierce: The Roots of Donald Trump's Candidacy Lie in a South Carolina Cemetery

[phantom power]

By 1988, of course, Atwater was the acknowledged master of the political knife-fight. George Bush was running for president after eight years in Reagan's shadow and, like the true patrician that he was born to be, Bush needed to hire out the dirty work of politics. (Among other things, Bush was still dogged by "the wimp factor" which the Reagan people had used to great advantage on him in 1980.) Atwater was more than happy to oblige. He promised to "take the bark" off Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, and Atwater was as good as his word. The campaign degenerated into nasty squabbles about black criminality and the Pledge of Allegiance. (Later, as Sidney Blumenthal noted in his fine book, Pledging Allegiance, on how rotten that campaign really was, we learned that, while these two were fighting over whose kabuki patriotism was the most genuine, the freaking Soviet Union was falling apart. This never came up in the campaign.) Bush declined to get his hands dirty in the project—My dear young man, it simply is not done—but Lee Atwater demolished Dukakis as a candidate and as a public figure.

Not long after that campaign, of course, Atwater was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He spent his last days in public atonement for all the damage he had done to our politics. (He offered a public apology to Dukakis, which Dukakis graciously accepted.) In 1991, they brought Lee Atwater out to Greenlawn for the last time. He was barely 40 years old.

What Atwater did was more than inject into Republican politics a modern form of strategic viciousness. With it, he injected an entirely new form of strategic unreality. From that has come the party's inability to recognize or acknowledge the empirical. By creating an entirely new Dukakis in which his voters could believe, Atwater showed them how to build the bubble and to armor it against reality. The combination of strategic viciousness and strategic unreality has come full flower this year. We have Donald Trump, who is one ring of the circus all to himself, calling his opponents liars and Mexicans rapists, and threatening to sue Ted Cruz, who responds by telling Trump to bring it on, and that he, Cruz, would be happy to depose Trump in discovery personally. And Marco Rubio is telling people that the United States is at the edge of the abyss and that only he can restore it to its former glory. What seemed crude and nasty in 1980 has become sleek and edgeless and as common as milk now.

When I got to his grave on this bright morning, the vase of plastic flowers atop it had fallen over from its niche in the metal plaque. I placed it back upright and crossed myself and looked again across the pond and decided that here, right here, was the essential explanation for how Donald Trump had come to be and here, right here, was the explanation for how he, a New York real-estate tycoon, probably will win the votes of enough rednecks and gentlemen and good ladies to win the 2016 South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Here, right here, I thought, was the place and the man that the Republican party had been moving toward since Harry Dent and Lee Atwater saw American politics turning itself on its head. Here, right here, as the place where the soul of the South Carolina Republican Primary forever would abide—by a gentle pond raucous with honking geese, fierce and territorial over the smallest things, halfway between the grave of Lee Atwater and the tomb of the Fabulous Moolah.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42254/lee-atwater-grave-south-carolina/

[grasswire]

1. kick for Pierce.

Beautifully written.

[COLGATE4]

2. Absolutely spot on! Pierce gets it right.

Atwater began this 'meeting the lowest common denominator' strategy and it has been assiduously practiced by the Rethugs ever since. Wasn't it Rove who said something along the lines of "we create our own reality"? He had it right. We've been forced into being on the defensive again and again, defending our candidates against whatever boogeymen the Rethugs have spent millions of dollars and millions of manhours their non-thinkers believe IS our candidate.

Atwater should burn in the hottest flames of hell for his assault on our electoral system. Brain cancer was too good for him.

[AwakeAtLast]

3. Wow, what a piece.

I'm 46, so people my age and younger know nothing about what really went on then. I was ten in 1980, and information was not as available.

[Gabi Hayes]

4. Inside Lee Atwater

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jake-whitney/inside-lee-atwater_b_145859.html

http://www.boogiemanfilm.com/

the first person in the Boogieman clip is Ed Rollins, who wrote a book about his time as a high level political operator (National Campaign Director for the Reagan-Bush '84 campaign, and co-manager of Ross Perot's 92 campaign---for about a month, until he realized how insane Perot was, among other things).

He was very close to Atwater, see his book, Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics , in which he discusses what an utter, backstabbing scum the man was.

here's an example:

Ed Rollins, however, stated in the 2008 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 (Matalin), '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."

Rollins' book is a must read, as it goes into GREAT detail about what dregs of the earth most of the leading figures in the Republican party were from the eighties on, and how their legacy survives to this day.

It also really dishes the dirt, and infuriated a lot of people when it came out.

One of my favorite political reads, alongside Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

[certainot]

5. the rw radio monopoly allowed them to take atwater to every state

and with 1200 coordinated radio stations ignored by the left working 24/7 they have gotten us to this point- where dumb AWOL chickenhawk silver spooners and beat intelligent veterans, where palin and cruz and trump lead the republican party.

that is the difference and the left's total ignore-ance of rw radio is why trump can channel atwater so publicly