Worst American Birthdays, vol. IV

Had an aggressive glioblastoma not gobbled his brain in 1991, the late Republican political strategist Lee Atwater would have turned 56 today. One of the most vile political figures in the pre-Karl Rove era, Atwater was especially skilled at adapting white ressentiment to the post-civil rights landscape.

For several years as a young child in Aiken, South Carolina, Atwater lived down the street from Strom Thurmond, from whom the young Lee must have absorbed by osmosis a certain racial sensibility. Although Atwater was widely known as an R&B musician — having played with Percy Sledge in the 1960s and BB King in 1990 — he was renowned for exploiting the racist sensibilities of white Americans, apparently following the time-honored principle of appreciating black cultural production while throwing the mass of African Americans under the bus. Among other things, he is credited with coining the “welfare queen” term that enabled Ronald Reagan to confect an elaborate fable about race and social programs that proved vital to those programs’ dismemberment in the 1990s.

Alexander Lamis’ Southern Politics in the 1990s includes Atwater’s account of the evolution of such race-baiting from the early years of the Civil Rights movement through the acsendance of Ronald Reagan:

You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’

Altwater’s most notorious moment came while managing the 1988 campaign for George H.W. Bush, whose election as president he helped secure through an ingenious and despicable television spot known merely as the “Willie Horton ad.”

Had Atwater survived the first term of the Bush administration, the mind can only wonder at the depths to which he would have taken the elder Bush’s re-election campaign. As it happened, however, the inoperable mass inside Atwater’s skull gave him cause to reflect on the harm he had done to the world. He spent his last months of coherence writing letters of apology to people whose careers and reputations he had once sought to destroy.