The Political Chase

Clinton models Atwater stategy not his death-bed wisdom

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton

Yesterday I wrote about how the Democratic presidential candidates are not focusing on the issues that matter. Instead, the two candidates are fully engaged in a mudslinging fight. Hillary Clinton is a master at slinging mud and Barack Obama leads a well-organized fire brigade around the country hosing himself and everything around him off. And if Hillary doesn’t formally initiate it, she is equally masterful at franchised mudslinging. She has digressed from the politics of personal destruction that Bill Clinton made famous, to Lee Atwater’s notorious and despicable strategy of demonizing the opponent.

Lee Atwater was Karl Rove’s mentor and the politics of the current administration are just a few examples of the destruction Atwater left in his wake. If elected, Will Hillary be as destructive as president as she is a candidate?

Atwater also taught Geraldine Ferraro how to play the dirtiest politics humanely possible, but she had to learn the hard way as an opponent. The country was recently reintroduced to Ms. Ferraro and her well executed strategy of demonizing Barack Obama and his campaign.

I realize focusing on Atwater’s tactics may seem instructional, but I believe it will help put things in the proper perspective and provide some critical insight.

This is how Wiki describes Atwater.

He was a campaign consultant to Republican candidate 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…

… Atwater ran a dirty-tricks operation in 1984 against vice-presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro. This included the allegation that Ferraro’s parents had been indicted for numbers running in the 1940s. Ferraro disappeared for a few days to ‘recover’ from the accusation.

Atwater’s disgraceful tactics skyrocketed him to the top in 1988 when he successfully ran George H. W. Bush’s presidential campaign. Former Mass. Gov. Michael Dukakis was Bush 41’s opponent and unfortunately the object of Atwater’s notorious Willie Horton ad. (See video here; Horton info here).The ad and tactics Atwater orchestrated like these, literally knocked Dukakis out of a 17-point lead over Bush and destroyed his political career and seriously damaging his personal life.

During the election, a number of false rumors were reported in the media about Dukakis, including the claim… that Dukakis’s wife Kitty had burned an American flag to protest the Vietnam War, as well as the claim that Dukakis himself had been treated for a mental illness. Although Atwater was accused of having initiated these rumors, there is no proof that he did so.

Sound familiar? Need a reminder? Last week Team Hillary sent out a statement to reporters and bloggers titled “Keystone Test: Obama Losing Ground.” Hillary isn’t debating the issues, she’s debating her opponent. Knock Obama off, lie to the people about her experience and plans – when she might talk about them – ignore the rest, and get the Lincoln Bedroom back. This is a despicable tactic, however it did give Obama’s team a great opportunity to thoroughly run Clinton through the blender.

Hillary’s campaign has all the bells and whistles of Atwater’s and the constant micro-explosions (viz. Mark Penn) that discombobulates and causes dissembling. When combined, the Clinton campaign has a very calculated strategy to achieve a complex objective – divide and conquer. A simple-three-word strategy that can be hard to discern, control, and its long-term effectiveness can be easily underestimated.

Hillary’s purveyors of racism, scandal, fear, and personal destruction, are not merely playing hardball politics. They are literally fighting a war. A psychological war. It’s hearts and minds, but they’re not overly concerned about winning hearts and minds. They just want to instill doubt in many and crush a few. Winning them ultimately will take care of itself if their conquer and divide strategy is successful.

Team Clinton is effectively generating a national conflict and disturbance that has negative global media exposure and changes rapidly, which insures continuous high-profile coverage in news cycles. the appropriate. Just consider how many news cycles were dedicated to thoroughly analyzing which Hillary show up at the last debate? Manic Hillary? New voice Hillary?

Each racist remark, each negative innuendo, each association with fear, is not any different than dropping relatively small bombs from 40,000 feet. They cause relative damage, generate a loud boom, but do not create, by and within themselves, mass destruction. However, if repeated frequently over time, they create, for all practical purposes, mass destruction.

Ask Winston Churchill or Colin Powell. It is no different from Europe in World War II or Vietnam.

The objective is to inflict damage on every Obama “front” possible, so that it will: (1) stop or seriously impede the masses from flowing to Obama; (2) cause just enough existing supporters to abandon ship - it doesn’t have to be a high volume — just enough to disillusion others whether coming or staying; and (3) wound enough current Obama supporters that won’t exit regardless of the circumstances, but become disaffected — “boil all the hope out them.”

Obama’s opponents hope (how ironic) they can inflict enough systemic psychological damage on his campaign, and over time be able to convince pledged and superdelegates, directly or indirectly, that Obama will not survive a general election.

The Clinton campaign started their strategy long ago and put it in overdrive last week when Mark Penn conveniently announced, but did not announce to the world that Obama could not win Pennsylvania, and thereby absolutely could not win the general election.

Think about how Hillary maneuvered through the debates. When there were eight candidates, she floated around like a social butterfly and just wore her inevitability façade. However, from the very moment when the candidates began challenging her legitimately, and fairly, over N.Y. drivers’ licenses, she and Bill Clinton cried foul across the universe.

The “boys were ganging up on her”, treating her unfairly and mean because she was a woman and the former president’s wife. After that, she turned her “unfair, rude, and dirty old men” switch on and off whenever she needed it. As other Dems dropped out of the race, and the scrutiny and challenge became more intense, she progressively increased the volume and added switches. Ganging up on the gentle lady morphed into racist slurs, native-attire photos, eight years of White House experience that have proven to be misleading at best, just words, endorsed John McCain, etc.

Sending Atwater-trained Geraldine Ferraro out to exploit race and generate widespread division among Obama’s supporters (existing and potential) across the country was classic and executed perfectly. As I said earlier, inflict systemic damage, which is exactly how others have characterized it as well.

Georgetown law professor Emma Coleman Jordan, an Obama supporter who sat on the fence for a long time because she so admired Hillary Clinton, sees the Ferraro episode as “part of a systematic project” to raise Obama’s negatives. “It is so sad that we’ve come to this,” she said, “that a Democratic Party liberal [Clinton] has chosen to pick up the dirtiest tool in the political box to win. I’m sad. You can put that in a quote. But it’s no longer possible to avoid the conclusion that this string of events is not an accident.”

This is where the nexus of constantly dropping small bombs – create the systemic damage – and not having to win hearts and minds today, becomes so important. Damage the tens of millions of voters and it doesn’t matter. All that must be done is ensure delegates, and superdelegates perceive disaffected constituents. More importantly are how supedelegates are led to perceive the environment, because they instinctively have loyalty to Party first and country second. The most important thing superdelegates are going to consider is, who can put the Party in the White House? And they’ll nominate Mike Gravel if they think he is the only person who can and will win the White House.

For weeks, Hillary’s campaign hasn’t given winning the nomination legitimately a moment’s thought. The question is how can she get it, not how can she win it. Break the Party apart, tear it down, literally destroy Barack Obama in the process, and have superdelegates do what they have always done best – take care of the well-established Washington political machine.

Since Clinton repeatedly claims she is basing the foundation of her presidency on profound change and a new order, why does she base her campaign on the Lee Atwater’s incredibly destructive strategy, which ultimately did nothing but cause great heartache for Atwater.

In March 1990 – one year and one month after Bush 41 was inaugurated – Atwater was diagnosed with a brain tumor. One year later he died. He was 40 years old.

A few months before he died, a repentant Atwater wrote to Tom Turnipseed:

“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.”

And in an interview with Life magazine just days before he died, Atwater said:

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.