During national campaign seasons, it has been a longstanding American tradition to flood the media with ads and bury voters under an avalanche of fundraising mail. Once upon a time, these ploys were used to tout the positive virtues of candidates. In recent years, however, their senders no longer give a rat's ass whether a candidate is virtuous; they are all about demonizing the opposition.
Rather than offer a uniting vision to move the nation in a positive direction, candidates' ads and mail are vehicles by which to depict the opposition as a loathsome beast bent on emptying prisons and lunatic asylums of killers, rapists and molesters, forcing kids to have sex in public schools and putting Americans in the path of a nuclear fusillade. In case you haven't noticed, we are entering one of those seasons.
You have Lee Atwater to thank for the sudden darkness you may be experiencing. Atwater, dubbed the Darth Vader of the GOP, was the master of "going negative," and he successfully guided gutter campaigns for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. His favorite ploy was spreading false rumors about opponents, forcing them to play defense. He also fine-tuned "push polling," using phony polls to "prove" some dark stain on the soul of the opposition or to foment fear in undecided voters. Atwater's "Mona Lisa" of dirty tricks was Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who while on furlough in Massachusetts committed a rape. The racist ad campaign Atwater devised with Horton—suggesting that menacing black men would soon be lurking in America's back yards—was enough to nudge reluctant voters into the Bush column. (Believe it or not, the studiously inept Dukakis had a 17-point lead in the polls prior to the ads!).
Is it any surprise to learn that Atwater was a mentor to Karl Rove?
To Atwater's credit, he realized that what he had done as a political hack was wrong. In 1991, in the last throes of a fatal brain disease, he wrote in Life, "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… 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."
Neither Rove nor Bush, Jr. will be visited by such a Road to Damascus moment. Karl Rove is Lee Atwater without a conscience. Called Bush's Brain, he's more like Bush's bowels. And, though we may have thought we'd evacuated Rove from our own bowels when he resigned in disgrace earlier this year, he is back to his old tricks.
I recently came into possession of a RNC fundraising letter for 2008. The screed was signed by Rove. That alone is proof the GOP no longer has a soul. In all likelihood, Rove simply lent his name to the letter after proofreading it to make sure it contained the proper doses of fear, loathing and lies. Nonetheless, because the letter perfectly encapsulates everything that is pathological and wrong with the GOP, it shows that the Republican "brand" still has Rove's jowly face on it.
The letter is four pages of the thinnest gruel imaginable. It uses the same hackneyed buzz phrases ("Republicans share your values and principles; Democrats have a Liberal philosophy that's increasingly out of touch with mainstream America"). And it presents a vision of fear, divisiveness, anger, venality. Who knows? Maybe Rove is right. Maybe he has a Satanic gift for knowing how far America has fallen from grace.
Indeed, if Americans fall for Republicans again in 2008, it may be too late even for brotherhood to heal our wounds.
What do you think?
