As I write these words, a black man is running for President of the United States. Not only running, but in fact, leading by several points in the polls; his opponent is an older white man firmly rooted in the Republican establishment. Somewhere, in one of the crustiest corners of Hell, the flames that constantly lick up around the feet of Lee Atwater are being extinguished by his copious tears.
Atwater was one of the founding members of the modern conservative movement. Perhaps best known for the Willie Horton attack ad, in which he implied that if Michael Dukakis were elected president, Negro criminals would roam the streets of America raping and stabbing good citizens of virtue true, he was one of the G.O.P.'s foremost dirty tricksters, and the mentor of an earnest young fellow named Karl Rove. He's also the subject of a fascinating new documentary called Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, described ably by the New York Times as "neither encomium nor hatchet job...a Gordian portrait of a man whose ability to do the splits exceeded the physical".
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