You start out in 1954 by saying, “N-----, n-----, n-----.” By 1968 you can’t say “n-----”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N-----, n-----.”The full audio of Republican operative and Karl Rove mentor Lee Atwater's infamous 1981 interview has been obtained and published by The Nation.
On Saturday night [23 Nov 1963, the day after Kennedy's assassination], after a twelve-hour working day, Johnson was having dinner at The Elms with Busby and Thornberry. At dinner, he was rather quiet, in a mood Busby recognised. "He was thinking things through," he says. "Very intense. You could smell wood burning." Going upstairs after dinner, he asked Busby to sit in his bedroom until he had fallen asleep, and after the lights had been turned out, Busby did that, until, after about a half hour of silence, he thought it was safe to leave, and started tiptoeing toward the door.It doesn't suggest that working for LBJ was much fun. But I think Caro wants to use the anecdote to make a point about Johnson's profound insecurity and craving for reassurance.
"Buzz," said Lyndon Johnson's voice out of the darkness. "Buzz, is that you?" And when Buzz said that it was, the voice said, "Buzz, I'm not asleep yet."
Returning to his chair, Buzz waited for a while longer, but again, when he tried to leave, Johnson asked, "Buzz, are you still there?" Busby assured him he was, and that he had just been walking over to the window to adjust a curtain. It took several more attempts, and several more "Buzz, are you still theres?" before he finally made it out of the room. He had done it before, when Lyndon Johnson found it hard to get to sleep. "Anything I could do to gentle him down," he says. "His mind just wouldn't stop working, working, working."
He was a cynic, no, a nihilist to the end.
Ed Rollins, however, stated in the 2008 documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, that "[Atwater] was telling this story about how a Living Bible was what was giving him faith and I said to Mary (Matalin), 'I really, sincerely hope that he found peace.' She said, 'Ed, when we were cleaning up his things afterwards, the Bible was still wrapped in the cellophane and had never been taken out of the package,' which just told you everything there was. He was spinning right to the end."posted by rewil at 7:14 AM on November 16, 2012 [31 favorites]
[Judge Mark] Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile.Your average campaign manager, no matter how ruthless, isn't going to try to head off an opponent's positives regarding his work with children and families by portraying him as a pedophile. But Rove was willing to do that, and that gave him a competitive advantage. Atwater was cut from the same cloth.
three blind mice:(stands, pauses, takes off hat and applauds slowly)
What Atwater is saying seems like a pretty honest assessment. The Republicans have been fighting a class struggle which according to strict Marxist ideology is the only legitimate basis for revolution. The trick has been to convince the white, working-class that their interests are aligned with those of the outsourcing 1% GOP establishment. The GOP have largely succeeded with this since Reagan. Reagan used the "welfare queen" rhetoric and that worked back then, but the GOP needed to make this a more inclusive message. This is what Atwater seems to be saying.
The use of a different n-word - "non-producer" - rather than being a racial dog whistle, is just a generic re-branding of the economic message. It is less off-putting and it seems also more honestly descriptive of the class-struggle which is really being waged by the GOP.
We will see it in the coming weeks as the tax cuts for the 1% are defended by the GOP to its rank and file along the lines of: "You're next. When they run out of rich people's money, the 'non producers' are coming for your money."
Funny that American Democrats are so imbued by race they can't see an honest class struggle in front of their eyes and thus do the Whites continue to beat the Reds at their own game.
Inspector.Gadget: While I tend to agree with this, it's worth remembering that there are millions of Christians who devoutly believe otherwise.Proof of assertion? AFAIK, most people believe in revenge, the wrongness of the "other", and that their own sins are explainable and thus forgivable (or unavoidable).
Why limit your comments? This is what most people believe, whether or not the "my bad" is religious in nature.
Mister_A: Plus elephants are notably memorious, unlike most modern republicans.Republicans use the ass as their symbol. Amusingly.
dogrose: Republicans use the ass as their symbol. Amusingly.Damn my memory!
Nope. That's the Democrats.
But even if whites at some point, in their sincerest hearts of hearts, want ‘we want to cut this’ to not serve any longer as an in-group/out-group marker (to use the nicest possible term for it) because 1) they have sincerely become less racist and 2) it hurts them at the ballot box, it’s totally unreasonable to expect that out-group members will stop hearing this as dog-whistle ethnocentric signaling, at precisely the convenient moment when it no longer serves the interests of white folks to have it be heard that way. The dog-whistle part doesn’t have an off-switch, so if ‘we want to cut this’ is a dog-whistle, you can’t proposing cutting without dog-whistling.posted by the man of twists and turns at 4:25 AM on December 2, 2012 [1 favorite]
« Older Cambodian Trees... | The origins and history of bro... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Man, I'm only a little way into this, and I'm not sure I've ever heard of Atwater before in any meaningful way... but he seems like a dick.
posted by Mezentian at 1:16 AM on November 16, 2012 [3 favorites]