Turnipseed
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wiki boogie
:{:{Atwater's aggressive tactics were first demonstrated during the 1980 Congressional campaigns. He was a campaign consultant to Republican incumbent Floyd Spence when he ran for Congress against Democratic nominee Tom Turnipseed. Atwater's tactics in that campaign included push polling in the form of fake surveys by so-called independent pollsters, to inform white suburbanites that Turnipseed was a member of the NAACP.[9] He also sent out last-minute letters from Senator Thurmond telling voters that Turnipseed would disarm the United States, and turn it over to liberals and Communists.[10]}:
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On the cover of its June 2, 1987 edition,[16] the celebrity tabloid National Enquirer published a photograph of Rice sitting on Hart's lap. The pair were pictured on a dock during a yacht trip to Bimini that Hart, Rice and others took before he announced his campaign for President of the United States.[17] Hart is wearing a T-shirt bearing the words Monkey Business, the name of the yacht. The photo was published alongside the headline "Gary Hart Asked Me to Marry Him".[16] It was published weeks after Hart suspended his campaign, but has been subsequently collectively confused as the reason for Hart's exit.[15][18] There are allegations that the photo was a set up by Republican operative Lee Atwater to discredit Hart.[19]
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lee Atwater was the dark master of the dirty trick and he more than deserves an entry all his own. He got his start in his home state of South Carolina, working on the 1978 Senate campaign for notorious segregationist Strom Thurmond. But it wasn’t until 1980 that Atwater’s cutthroat tactics truly came to the fore, when he served as campaign manager for Republican Congressman Floyd Spence in his race against Democrat Tom Turnipseed. Atwater discovered that Turnipseed had undergone electroconvulsive therapy as a teenager to treat a case of severe depression. From then on, when Atwater was asked about Turnipseed at press conferences, he would reply, “I’m not in the habit of responding to people that were hooked up to jumper cables.” Turnipseed tried to direct the focus to the policy differences between the candidates, but by then Atwater had caused enough voters to question Turnipseed’s mental health that he lost the race.}:
But Atwater’s most ruthless play—one that would ultimately earn him widespread condemnation from Republicans and Democrats—came when he managed George H.W. Bush’s 1998 presidential campaign. Bush’s Democratic opponent was Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, and by the middle of 1988 Dukakis was polling a few points in the lead. It was then that Atwater decided the gloves needed to come off, leading to the infamous Willie Horton commercial.
While governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had overseen a program that granted weekend furloughs to convicted felons. One of those felons, convicted murderer Willie Horton—who happened to be African-American—was on furlough when he raped a white woman and stabbed her boyfriend. Atwater worked with several outside groups to develop an ad about the furlough program that displayed Horton’s face immediately after an image of Dukakis. The racist overtones of the ad were so apparent that Atwater knew it would be political suicide for the Bush campaign to air it directly. Instead, he contacted several wealthy Republican donors to create a front group called the National Security Political Action Committee, which then “independently” aired the commercial. Atwater’s goal, in his own words, was to “make Willie Horton Dukakis’s running mate.”
When the ad aired, it had the desired effect of linking Horton with Dukakis in the minds of many voters, and when the inevitable charges of racism were leveled against the Bush campaign, they vehemently denied any connection to the ad. The Horton ad made it impossible for Dukakis to shake the label of being “soft on crime” and his campaign went into a death spiral. Come the election, he lost to Bush in a landslide.
Atwater was rewarded for his efforts by being made chairman of the Republican National Committee. However, after only a year in the position, he was stricken with incurable brain cancer. Before the cancer claimed him at age 40, he expressed regret for his ruthless tactics and even sent letters of apology to Turnipseed and Dukakis, though some former Atwater associates have questioned the sincerity of his remorse.