"In the final months of his life, when it was clear that he wouldn’t recover, Atwater lamented the dirty, divisive campaigns he’d run, and apologized far and wide for them."

"His memoir calls on politicians to instead follow the Golden Rule. Roger Stone, who formed an early consulting and lobbying firm in the Washington area with Atwater, along with Paul Manafort and Charles Black, remains unconvinced about Atwater’s spiritual awakening. 'Lee was a great storyteller,' Stone told me in a recent interview. 'But, in the end, he was just grasping at straws. The Atwater family disagrees and has no doubt that he became a Christian. But at that point he was also Buddhist, Hindu, and everything else.'... In Stone’s view, however, Atwater was more of an opportunist. 'We both knew he believed in nothing,' Stone told me. 'Above all, he was incredibly competitive. But I had the feeling that he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil took it.'"

Writes Jane Mayer in "The Secret Papers of Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized/An infamous Republican political operative’s unpublished memoir shows how the Party came to embrace lies, racial fearmongering, and winning at any cost" (The New Yorker).

Gah! Why don't I have a "Lee Atwater" tag? I have about 10 old posts with his name. I'll bet every time I thought something like: No, he's a secondary character from a bygone age, not likely to come up enough to deserve his own tag. Meanwhile, I've got hundreds of tags for individual names that I've only used once. Atwater comes up a lot because his name is synonymous with "dirty tricks" and because he supposedly regretted it all when he came face to face with Death.

So that explains why I'm blogging this snippet from The New Yorker: It casts doubt on the deathbed conversion story. But it's just Roger Stone. We never actually believe Roger Stone. Then again, does it matter? Does it matter that a man regrets his evil deeds when he's no longer in a position to benefit from them? He took all his advantages when it worked in his favor, but he tells you to follow the Golden Rule. What's the basis for believing him?

FROM THE EMAIL: Richard writes: 

The New Yorker headline of "Lee Atwater, Who Invented the Scurrilous Tactics That Trump Normalized" is ironic in so many ways. First, "Scurrilous Tactics" rather well describe the Democrat attacks on Trump, beginning with the Russian Collusion myth and the Impeachments. Second, the Daisy Nuclear Holoucast ad that the Democrats ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964- an ad that ordained Baptist minister Bill Moyers approved- points out once again that Democrats are not unfamiliar with using "Scurrilous Tactics" themselves.

Consider the Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton was a convicted murderer, in prison for life without parole. He committed rape and armed robbery in Maryland while on a weekend furlough from prison in Massachusetts. First, Governor Dukakis vetoed an addition to the inmate furlough program that would have prohibited convicted murderers from being eligible for weekend furloughs. Second, Al Gore was the first to bring up the furlough program during the campaign, though he didn't mention Willie Horton.

Finally, while The New Yorker and assorted Democrats may disagree with this point, "soft on crime" was a valid description of Dukakis. Willie Horton wasn't the only example. In one of the debates, Dukakis stated that he opposed the death penalty for someone that had raped and murdered his wife.

And Shane writes:  

Without excusing whatever was done or believed to have been done in 2016/2020, I just don't understand the "Trump normalized" nasty politics and racial fear-mongering thing. "Put y'all back in chains"? "Binders full of women"? the stupid high school forced haircut? Bork and Clarence Thomas? Biden saying his wife and child were killed by a drunk truck driver, when by all other accounts the truck driver was heroic and suffered for Biden's lies. Politics at a local level can be nasty, but once you reach the statewide, let alone federal political arena, its bare knuckles as it has been for centuries. Jefferson/Adams, Grover Cleveland, Harding, FDR and JFK personal lives cover up. Trump only normalized the media exposing their blatant taking of sides, and then only after they dumped him as a useful foil that backfired on them.