Lee Atwater Changed the Game

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Political success is based on a deep understanding of human nature, and Lee Atwater was one of the best at understanding human nature. His mentor Strom Thurmond, the famed South Carolina politician, started out as a Democrat, but the civil rights movement didn't align with his beliefs in segregation and those trying to upend Jim Crow laws.

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Many Southern Democrats declared themselves Dixiecrats to distinguish themselves. But in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for president. The Southern Dixiecrats began their transition to the Republican Party. In a book titled Killers of the Dream, Southern writer and activist Lillian Smith described a grand bargain, a deal that sustained white supremacy bolstered by paternalism and evangelicalism Done to maintain a social status as better than the black man.

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It was this grand bargain that Republicans would exploit to gain power in a South that had been exclusively Democrats since reconstruction. The roles of racism, sexism, and religious fundamentalism were used as levers that were exploited to shift the power base from presidential candidate Barry Goldwater's 1964 Operation Dixie.

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To Phyllis Schlafly's fierce campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, through her pro family rallies, to the rise of the Christian Coalition and the Moral Majority, ultimately sowing the seeds for where we are today, with the Freedom Caucus, Christian Nationalism, and MAGA. Over time, the Republican Party became the party of the South, not necessarily in terms of its place.

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But in its vision, in its demands, in its rhetoric, and in its spirit. And that has fundamentally changed South Carolina's politics, not to mention the politics of the country. Strom Thurmond lived a few doors down from Lee Atwater's childhood home in Aiken, South Carolina. He gave out Snickers bars for Halloween.

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And Lee Atwater, then a kid, was taken with the politician and would later in life go on to become his intern. When Lee was nine, his family moved from Aiken to Columbia. Political success like real estate. is off in location. Lee began what would be a compulsive street fighter and manipulative career in his Columbia high school.

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He took this one guy and ran him as president of the SCO. Nobody had ever had a campaign manager in high school. And they won, you know. He figured out early on that maybe I don't want to be the candidate, but the behind-the-scenes guy. His willingness to distort positions, smear opponents, and use racial and ethnic messages literally changed the game in how politicians campaigned.

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He didn't really care about policy. He only cared about winning. There have been many successful political strategists over time, but South Carolina lays claim to Lee Atwater. And he literally changed the game. He first came to national attention at the age of 29, when he helped Ronald Reagan win the 1980 Republican presidential nomination as the campaign's political coordinator.

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Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues, he said. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy. There are reasons to hate things about the South and still love the region and its people.

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I'm not aware of any Democrat paying attention to what Lee really learned in his early races. They existed up in some elite layer of the clouds that had nothing to do with what moved people to feel.

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They slept while Lee outmaneuvered. Atwater was the first of an era of young, driven campaign pros who saw no end and no limits to the permanent campaign. He had five rules of politics that are still in play today. Number one, be for what is going to happen, meaning only work with the winner. Again, policy doesn't matter, only who can win.

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Number two, never kick a man when he's up. Atwater always thought to do so would be stupid. When somebody is riding high in Washington, leave them alone. Number three, suck up to big shots. Always be in the room. Number four, take total credit. Take credit for the good things that happened around you, even if you had nothing to do with them.

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And be silent or play dumb when things don't go according to plan. Rule number five, at last resort. Deny the obvious. It may produce a moment of confusion and you'll catch a break. It's the, that's my story and I'm sticking to it no matter what, which created today's formulaic revelation of denial, admission, and then twist the words to create confusion.

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He came out months later and admitted. I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not. There were some renegades in the White House. He acted like, you know, he didn't know who was working in the White House.

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I didn't know about any diversion of funds to the Contras. He deserves our support, not, uh, Monday Morning quarterbacking from people who were not faced with the decisions he had to make. You have the President and the Vice President lying to the American people in the Congress, documents being shredded in the White House.

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Atwater's tactics were a leap from the old Republican Party of the Nixon era, when dirty tricks were considered a scandal. He brought us a loose relationship with the truth, racial fear mongering, and winning at any cost. That became what is now our new political norm. Anything goes. Tell them what they want to hear.

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Lie, cheats, too. Make it up. Making up stuff. He used to go back in the room, make up these polls. I tell you, he'd come back with a poll in about a half an hour. In 1980, the Reagan primary campaign was in trouble. He'd lost Iowa and didn't fare well in New Hampshire and needed to win South Carolina. Reagan won the primary and went on to win the nomination.

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Go back and look at Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign for president. Where does he begin? In Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered. By the Ku Klux Klan and the local sheriff's department. So this is where Lee Atwater's real influence began to move the party. In addition to sneaky maneuvers like leaking false stories to the media or planting a completely false narrative, he realized that race could be the great divide.

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And remember, this was 1981, not that long ago. Reagan speaking to an exclusively white audience appealed to their most base instance. In an interview he had in the early 80s, he explained that it used to be n s. You can't say that anymore. We had Ronald Reagan talking about welfare queens, coded language.

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Republicans never suffered consequences for this turn on electoral politics. And this has remained embedded in the soul of the party and code, like the war on drugs, welfare queens, poisoning the blood, or even the word woke. It's all right there. They're all just ways of telling white people, we're here to protect you from the lazy or greedy or criminal people of color.

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The game is transparent. He used questions to get white voters to feel like they were reasonable and not racist. But planting seeds, nonetheless, making political questions into statements like, do you agree that if black people would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites? Or do you think lack of family structure is what keeps black kids from succeeding?

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Atwater was cunning. He wrote that there was a secret to screwing everything up successfully. He always understood the line that he needed to stay within in order not to get caught. The number one lesson was to be so subtle that they can't nab you for anything. When you're back on your heels and you're defending yourself constantly, uh, it kind of looks like you're in the wrong and therefore, uh, Lee's candidate usually comes out looking like he's in the right.

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Atwater also relied on character assassination, distorted information, and made for TV spectacles to manipulate crowds into hating Democrats. He was the original version of owning the libs. Chaos was always a good thing. Roger Stone and Paul Manafort formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in Washington with Atwater.

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Karl Rove considered Atwater his mentor. Atwater loved quotes and mantras, and one in particular, the advice of Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese philosopher. All warfare is based on deception. One of his favorite weapons? The politics of aggrievement. The grievance Atwater first tapped into with Southerners was the political elite.

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They think they're better than us and they want to tell us what to do. Doesn't that make you mad? At its heart, they're about learning lessons of defeat. The South is the only part of United States ever thoroughly defeated and humiliated in war. It does create a very visceral backlash and Atwater was adept at tapping into that.

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It was a backlashing of people who think they're better than you are. It's this cultural resentment that people in the South feel because these liberals, these smartasses run everything and we have nothing but contempt for them. Lee's friends said, you guys all think we're dumb. You have the same kind of prejudice against us that you accuse us of having against black people.

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The big boys trying to push us around. Trying to remind us how much greater they are. We'll show them. Well, Lee had a we'll show them kind of strain through him. It was about as wide as his backbone.

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Atwater believed the best political operatives make friends with the press because if what he said got printed, then it became true because as he loved to say, perception is always reality. The best political operatives make friends with the press. It's easy if you don't watch yourself to fall into that, particularly if you're dealing with someone that you like.

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Personally, because they like you. He created a new political art form he called strategic misrepresentation. Plant stories that were completely false. He didn't say they were fact, he just insinuated they could be true. And put the other side in the position of defending outright lies to distract the actual things that voters should be hearing from the candidates.

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Lee understood that emotions ring stronger if you talk about things like patriotism and the flag more than money. People vote their fears and not their hopes. They existed up in some elite layer of the clouds that had nothing to do with what moved people to feel. Lee believed that whoever wins the election is who tells the story and makes it the truth.

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He could get reporters to ask questions he knew were not true, but could then create a narrative based on a lie. After Reagan, he then helped George H. W. Bush into the White House and was made RNC chair, and his mode of operation became the playbook for the future of the Republican Party. In 1991, at the age of 40 and dying from a brain tumor, Atwater apologized for the campaigns and reportedly called those he'd harmed to make amends.

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But his words came too late. His campaigning style became the template for current day GOP. At the end of his life, he was deep into many religions, but there was a Bible verse that seemed to resonate with him. So I'll leave you with that. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?

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There's more stew today. Make sure to listen to my interview with Matt Moore on the history and current state of the upcoming Republican primary in South Carolina. It's a double episode Wednesday.