Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

Saw it. Very entertaining, but I'm a sucker for all inside baseball-type stuff. He crossed paths with Rove several times during the 1970s before Rove came under his tutelage in the Dukakis campaign. Matalin provided a few soundbytes, worshipping at Atwater's feet in a really weird way. Lots of implication that if Atwater hadn't died, Clinton would have gone down hard in 1992. A few notes:

- Young GWB is pretty awesome. He had a great Bushism during an interview in the midst of the '88 campaign: "...I would say that's a misadjective."

- Atwater got OWNED by cancer. Radiation blew him up to some sort of cartoon in Roger Rabbit.

- Atwater's brother died when he was a kid. The family owned a deep-fryer and, well, a deep-fryer's worth of scalding grease was spilled onto him. Not fun imo.

- Tucker Eskew (former Bush 2000 adviser, now Palin's aide) provided the bulk of the interviews. He's a real dirty trickster, a southern guy. Kept talking about how dumb the Democrats are to keep thinking that cultural issues won't work in presidential elections.

- Dukakis ran a pretty terrible rapid-response campaign. And by that, I mean he didn't run one.

- I didn't know that the constant GOP banter about "states' rights" evolved -- aside from the earlier federalist/anti-federalist debate -- from the Southern strategy and the development of code words (i.e., "government handouts," "welfare queens") to replace the blatant racism of earlier years.