1988 george bush vice president8/28/2023 ![]() In early 1987, the Hart campaign had an air of likelihood if not inevitability that is difficult to imagine in retrospect. As the campaign for the 1988 nomination geared up, Strother planned to play a similar role. Strother was Hart’s media consultant and frequent traveling companion during his run for the nomination in 1984, when he gave former Vice President Walter Mondale a scare. During the early Reagan years, when Atwater worked in the White House, Strother joined the staff of the Democratic Party’s most promising and glamorous young figure, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado. S trother, 10 years older than Atwater, had been his Democratic competitor and counterpart, minus the gutter-fighting. He apologized to Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the Willie Horton ad.Īnd in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, he told Raymond Strother that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president. He told Tom Turnipseed, the object of his “jumper cables” attack, that he viewed the episode as “one of the low points” of his career. ![]() In the last year of his life, Atwater publicly apologized for tactics like these. The implicit message was the menace posed by hulking, scowling black men-like the Willie Horton who was shown in the commercial. The explicit message of the commercial was that, as governor of Massachusetts, Dukakis had been soft on crime by offering furloughs to convicted murderers Horton ran away while on furlough and then committed new felonies, including rape. Bush in 1988, when he defeated Michael Dukakis in the general election, Atwater leveraged the issue of race-a specialty for him- by means of the infamous “Willie Horton” TV ad. In South Carolina, where he grew up, he helped defeat a congressional candidate who had openly discussed his teenage struggles with depression by telling reporters that the man had once been “hooked up to jumper cables.” As the campaign manager for then–Vice President George H. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality. In a year he was dead.Ītwater put some of that year to use making amends. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Illustration by Paul Spella Paul Liebhardt / Corbis 'National Enquirer' / Getty Associated Press
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