Guest Voices: And Atwater Begat Rove, who Begat Schmidt...

And Atwater Begat Rove, who Begat Schmidt...

For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and lose his own soul?
-- Luke 7:47

At the height of his influence, when he had "gained the world," the late political kingmaker Lee Atwater would have been flattered to have been likened to a hockey mom without lipstick. When his opponents - whose positions he would deftly distort and whose character he would gladly impugn - referred to him with such unbecoming sobriquets as a "happy hatchet man" and the "Darth Vader" of American politics he didn't run from the moment so much as relish it. And at no time did he feel more vindicated (or rewarded) for his efforts than when he got George H.W. Bush elected president in 1988 with his thinly veiled racist appeal to white fears in the so-called "Willie Horton" ads. (Horton was an African-American prisoner in Massachusetts who, while on a weekend furlough under a plan instituted by then-governor Michael Dukakis, committed armed robbery and rape.) Said Atwater that year in reference to Dukakis, "I'll strip bark the little bastard and make Willie Horton his running mate."

Atwater died young; he was 40 years old when cancer claimed him in 1991. But for better or for worse his spirit lives on, most notably in the strategies of his protégés Karl Rove (who directed George W. Bush's presidential campaigns) and Steve Schmidt.(who apprenticed under Rove and now heads the McCain campaign). Though examples of Rove's ethically questionable political practices are legion, the one that has come to define the depths to which he is willing to sink occurred in the 2000 primary season when he used racist innuendo with absolutely no foundation in truth to suggest to South Carolina voters that Bush's chief rival, John McCain, had fathered a black child out of wedlock. It was Rove's Willie Horton moment, as despicable as it was effective.

As for Schmidt and the question of whether he has followed in his predecessors' muddy footprints, it's hard to say definitively., However, ads have already appeared drawing tenuous links between Barack Obama and three highly controversial African-American leaders; former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and (yet again) Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He has also done nothing to discourage the hate-filled screeds that have been heard from the audiences at recent Republican rallies, or the veiled references by his candidates to Obama "not being like one of us."

I don't know if Schmidt's tactics will succeed but while both he and Rove are quick to credit Atwater for their mastery of wedge politics, they're even quicker to forget his final legacy. Knowing death was near, Atwater converted to Roman Catholicism and repented his sins, going so far as to write letters of apology to rival politicians - including Dukakis - whose careers he had irreparably damaged. In one particularly eloquent note Atwater reached out to Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina democrat who lost a congressional race to Atwater's candidate in large part because Atwater gleefully let it be known that Turnipseed had been "hooked up to jumper cables" when he was a teenager (Turnipseed had undergone electroshock therapy for depression.). Atwater wrote "It is very important to me that I let you know that out of everything that has happened in my career, one of the low points remains the so-called 'jumper cable' episode." He then added, "my illness has taught me something about the nature of humanity, love, brotherhood and relationships that I never understood, and probably never would have. So, from that standpoint, there is some truth and good in everything." As he was losing his world, Atwater was gaining his soul.

Later, in an essay in Life magazine, Atwater succinctly summed up his regrets about where he had helped steer American by writing: "My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood." If Willie Horton was Atwater's moral nadir, this may well have been his summit, for as Oscar Wilde wrote, "A man's very highest moment is, I have no doubt at all, when he kneels in the dust, and beats his breast, and tells all the sins of his life."

We will never know how pure Atwater's confession was; that is between the man and his God. But if the likes of Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt ignore this final lesson that their mentor sought to impart and seek to win for their party the highest office in the land with the lowest tactics in their arsenal they do so at their own moral peril. And ours.

Erik Kolbell is a United Church of Christ minister, formerly on the staff at The Riverside Church in New York City. He is a licensed and practicing psychotherapist. He is the author of three books: "What Jesus Meant," "Were You There," and "The God of Second Chances."

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And Atwater Begat Rove, who Begat Schmidt...