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Review: “Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story”
By Kyle | September 26, 2008
Kyle Smith review of BOOGIE MAN: THE LEE ATWATER STORY
1 star out of four
Lee Atwater, the wunderkind 1980s political operative who helped get George H.W. Bush elected, was guilty of smearing, fomenting racial antagonism and name-calling. Or so says “Boogie Man,” a documentary that uses against him images of lynch mobs, decades-old racist comments of his onetime boss Strom Thurmond and a clip of Bryant Gumbel calling him “the architect of the evil campaign.”
Atwater, who died at age 40 of brain cancer, is most famous for a “racist” ad that illustrated 1988 presidential candidate Mike Dukakis’s unfortunate habit of letting killers out on furlough with a revolving door motif cast with an almost entirely white group of inmates.
Atwater’s painful demise seems to delight the largely left-leaning pundits assessing Atwater’s legacy, which inspired Karl Rove among others. Howard Fineman of Newsweek, for instance, says, “Life gets even with you in the end,” an ugly comment that sounds a lot like the liberal equivalent of calling AIDS God’s punishment for gays. Other reporters complain that Atwater planted stories with them, which tells you more about the media than Atwater. In an unintentionally hilarious moment that’s like a parody of “JFK,” the revolving door ad is played in slo-mo so Sam Donaldson can huff that Atwater’s racism is unmasked by a glance cast at the camera for about one second by the only black prisoner shown.
More interesting are the anecdotes served up by Atwater’s fellow consultants and competitors, such as Ed Rollins and Roger Stone, who notes that Atwater poured hot sauce on everything, even ice cream. As for former Clinton operative (yes, Democrats have those also) Terry McAuliffe, who (apropos of nothing) calls Ken Starr “perverted” for publishing his truthful report, and Mike Dukakis, who to this day won’t apologize for letting Horton out to kill again, their motivations are evident.
Topics: Advertising, Movies, Politics |
September 26th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Can you imagine how much the republic would be changed if the media, as in 80 percent of the news media and virtually the entire movie industry, weren’t acting as organs of the Democratic party? Under no circumstances would they be running the first and third most liberal senators.
This is something that the Republicans don’t seem to grasp and if they do, seem helpless to do anything about it.
September 26th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I met the filmmaker who insisted he wasn’t setting out to make an unbalanced film. You can judge the film for itself, and the evidence you site speaks volumes, but I did find it all rather entertainingly packaged - unlike other lefty docs.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Liberal elites have a different conspiracy theory to explain how Republicans have stolen every election since 1980(With the probable exception of 1984).
If there were a “Fairness Doctrine” for Hollywood, this movie would be part of a double-feature, the latter titled “Klan Man - The Robert Byrd Story”.
September 27th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
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.
Yep, no fomenting of racial antagonism there!