Film: Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

Director Stefan Forbes recaps the Republican strategist’s greatest hits—and hit jobs.

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Boogie Man kicks off with a musical montage, intercutting footage of legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater exuberantly jamming on guitar with clips of the presidents he helped elect taking the oath of office, all while a chugging blues backbeat runs underneath. But don’t let this biopic’s terrific soundtrack (including tracks by Gov’t Mule, Buddy Guy, and Curtis Mayfield) distract you; Atwater’s short life was more about rifts than riffs. He loved the blues, but wasn’t afraid to exploit racial divides; he grew up middle class in South Carolina, yet spent his career getting millionaires like Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. into office.

With interviews with journalists and political insiders like Tucker Eskew and Mary Matalin, director Stefan Forbes recaps Atwater’s greatest hits—and hit jobs, like the 1988 primary ad for Bush that dubbed Bob Dole “Senator Straddle,” and the Willie Horton spots that helped Bush Sr. crush Michael Dukakis. As liberal pundit Eric Alterman notes, “People vote their fears, and not their hopes, and Lee understood that.” Atwater didn’t just master the dark arts of wedge politics and dirty-tricks campaigning; he also taught the current Republican leaders what he knew. Karl Rove studied under him in college; George W. Bush worked with Atwater on his father’s 1988 campaign.

Atwater loved to win, and Boogie Man shows him having a hell of a good time doing it. Yet Atwater, who died from brain cancer in 1991 at age 40, had some regrets. Dukakis reads from the Life magazine article in which Atwater apologized for the “naked cruelty” and race-baiting he’d deployed against the Massachusetts Democrat.

Superbly shot and edited, Boogie Man is a raucous hidden history of modern politics, revealing how Atwater’s behind-the-scenes work tipped elections—and taught Republicans how to win at any cost.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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