Screen Picks

Stefan Forbes' Boogie Man

by Sam Adams

Boogie Man (Fri., Oct. 10, 7 p.m., $10, Scribe Video Center, 4214 Chestnut St., 215-222-4201, scribe.org)

For Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the subject of Stefan Forbes' documentary, Boogie Man, professional wrestling was "the only honest sport," because the fight is just for show, and the winners are determined elsewhere. A master of subtext and misdirection, Atwater pioneered the postmodern political campaign: Perception is reality, and substance matters only when you say it does.

Like his protégé Karl Rove, Atwater was a ruthless competitor. When Rove lost the vote to succeed his mentor as the chair of the College Republican National Committee, they found ways to disqualify enough of their opponent's ballots for Rove to emerge the winner. In 1988, when Atwater was the manager of George H.W. Bush's presidential run, he was physically ill for days after losing the Iowa caucus to Bob Dole.

Raised in South Carolina, Atwater was an adept of the Republican Party's Southern strategy, exploiting racial and cultural resentments to bring down the opposition. In 1978, he instituted the first push poll, asking voters whether they would be less likely to vote for incumbent Mayor Max Heller if they knew he was "a Jew who did not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ."

Atwater's most notorious maneuver was linking Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis to Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who raped a woman after escaping from a weekend furlough program. Although Atwater was not directly involved in the ad that used an ominous shot of Horton's black face to stir racial fears, writer Ishmael Reed points out how the campaign's "revolving door" commercial employs the same tactic in a more insidious fashion. The prisoners filing out of prison are of varying races, but only one, a black man, raises his eyes to stare menacingly into the lens.

An avowed blues music aficionado who briefly played guitar for Percy Sledge, Atwater personifies the racial contradictions of the American South, which made him uniquely qualified to exploit them. In South Carolina in 2000 John McCain's hopes for the presidential nomination were dashed by a push poll alerting voters to his "black child" (actually an adopted Bangladeshi daughter). Before his death from a brain tumor in 1991, Atwater rebuked his own tactics, but his descendents have kept them alive. Hey, have you heard Obama's a Muslim?

(s_adams@citypaper.net)