Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story
Crit
OK, what's wrong with this amateurish doc is easy: a complete lack of awareness of history. Not only is there no hint that American political dirty tricks are literally as old as American politics (and racist dirty tricks almost as old, dating to Adams vs. Jefferson 1796), there's not even a nod to the "ratfucking" of the Committee to Reelect the President in 1972. You'd think from this film that Atwater invented the genre.
On the other hand, this is a useful reminder of what we do owe the late hatchetman: not only Bush I, via the Willie Horton ad and the Dukakis-in-a-tank ad and others (without which, as Dukakis half-jokes, Bush II would have withered in utero), not only the education of Karl Rove, but maybe even, as one talking head suggests, the wingnut godfather himself, Ronald Reagan, who was foundering in 1980 until the thirty-year-old Atwater led the effort to derail John Connally in the South Carolina primary. The rest is depressing history.
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