What’s up with Lee Atwater’s firewall?
by digby
I wrote about Jebbers in South Carolina for Salon this morning:
With the losses last week of Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, and now Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie after New Hampshire, the GOP clown bus has been traded in for a nice sedan and the whole troop has moved down to South Carolina.
If past Republican primaries in the Palmetto state are anything to go by, we are in for some fireworks.
Everyone no doubt recalls that in 1988 George H.W. Bush had a notorious campaign manager from South Carolina by the name of Lee Atwater. He had been a consultant for both winning Reagan campaigns who specialized in dirty tricks; by 1988 he was ready for the big time. He’s probably best known for the Willie Horton ad (which he didn’t produce but which had his fingerprints all over it). Much more important, however, was his creation of what became known as the South Carolina Firewall.
As Earl and Merle Black’s book “The Vital South” recounts, Atwater understood that his home state’s political culture was so traditional and machine-dominated that it would inevitably support the conservative party establishment’s choice for president. Therefore, the party would schedule the South Carolina primary immediately after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, where reform-minded candidates often appealed to more independent electorates, thus stopping them before they could really gain traction.
He first put this strategy into effect on behalf of the presumptive nominee, Bush senior, in that 1988 campaign. Bush lost Iowa to Bob Dole, and came uncomfortably close to losing in New Hampshire, so Atwater turned Bush into a Holy Roller, gathered every establishment figure in the state and went ruthlessly negative. It worked. Bush won handily and went on to destroy all comers on Super Tuesday. South Carolina became the state where insurgencies were strangled in their cribs.
Atwater died in 1991, but his strategy has remained in place ever since. In 1996, when Pat Buchanan took New Hampshire and threatened to win with his nativist pitchfork army, it was Bob Dole’s turn to use the firewall and Atwater’s machine to stop him. But it was most famously employed in service of the Bush family once again in 2000, when George W. Bush had every establishment player in the party lined up and then John McCain unexpectedly trounced him in New Hampshire by nearly 20 points. McCain was a darling of the political press corps, holding court all hours of the day and night, generously allowing the boys on the bus to bathe in his macho “authenticity.” He was a serious threat.
Bush’s campaign manager, of course, was Karl Rove, who studied at the knee of Atwater and was well schooled in his dark arts. They unloaded everything they had on McCain, including whisper campaigns about his adopted daughter from Bangladesh being a “black baby,” along with harshly negative ads and a full court press from the political establishment. Once again it worked. McCain never knew what hit him. (It didn’t stop him from hiring the same smear merchants for his own campaign eight years later.)
Now it’s 16 years later and the Bush family is back in South Carolina. And his supporters seem to think that even though he has been down in the polls for months, finished at the bottom of the pack in Iowa and took a fourth place finish in New Hampshire, that the firewall will work one more time.
Per USA Today:
“He needed to be in the game, and last night, he was able to do so,” said Barry Wynn, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman, who is raising money for Bush. Although Donald Trump tops GOP polls in the Palmetto State, Wynn denounced the billionaire’s “Kardashian-style vulgarity.”“I don’t think that sells as well in the South, as it does in New England,” he said. “You may find that South Carolina corrects some of the mistakes of New Hampshire.”
We know what kind of “corrections” those tend to be, don’t we?