Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story

"My God, what have I done?!"
--David Byrne

He bares his teeth like a rodent, stinks up the political discourse like a skunk, and attacks opponents with the ferocity of a wolverine (Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman's physical and temperamental analogy). So why is Lee Atwater so charismatic? I'd heard plenty about Atwater before seeing this documentary. I knew he masterminded George Bush's cleverly nasty '88 campaign, trivialized the political process by focusing on cultural non-issues, and was an eminent master of the art of (just barely) plausible deniability. I knew that he recanted his dirty tricks from his death bed, before succumbing to a brain tumor. I didn't know many of the details presented in this film, which I saw as an episode of "Frontline" (though it was created independently of the PBS series), but I knew the general contours. Yet I'd never seen Lee Atwater himself; oddly enough, despite my fascination with and knowledge of politics, I didn't even know what Atwater looked like. More importantly, I had never seen Lee Atwater in action, and the man's personality is as magnetic as his actions are infuriating. This is the fascinating story about a fascinating man. And the structure of his life is almost too neat, too diagrammatically perfect, so that when it's over it leaves us wondering if we've been had yet again.

The Choice

It is, among other things, a tale of two cities. Or at least, that's how it starts. Not Chicago, not Phoenix, not Hanoi, nor even Washington. "Frontline: The Choice 2008" begins with the party conventions in the late summer of 2004. The Democrats gathered in Boston, one of the birthplaces of America, to reinvent their party and, they hoped, the nation. They would fail, but in that failure, they may have planted the seeds of their eventual success. How much of Obama's famous convention speech was hype, created after the fact by a media looking for The Next Big Thing? All I know is that I missed it, but upon arriving at my family's house to catch some convention coverage, my mother turned to me and said, "I just heard the future president speak." Obama evocatively, and shrewdly, stepped outside the partisan framework of recent elections to declare, "there is not a liberal America, or a conservative America, there is the United States of America!"

Meanwhile, the Republican gathering in New York City - wounded city, site of 9/11, but also big, bellicose, haughty - contained the seeds of division. Republicans lit into their opponent, cast the other side as unpatriotic and weak, and cultivated a sense of Red America rising up to crush Blue America (ironically, this was in the heart of Blue America itself). But though the party seemed united and boisterous in its quest to re-elect President Bush, there were seeds of division in the GOP as well. These were best represented by John McCain, a figure immensely popular with the public, but doubted and disliked by other Republicans. McCain strode onstage to deliver a martial, impassioned defense of his president focused on national security, but one can see in the tepid, strained faces of the audience that there's a disconnect. Nonetheless, McCain is present for a reason. Despite his dislike of Bush, despite his differences with the Republican Party, he has decided he wants to become the party's nominee for president the next time around. This is the first step in that direction.

Frontline: The Al Qaeda Files

With the bogeyman spectre of Osama bin Laden lingering over the Western world's head, the threat posed by terrorism and Al Qaeda specifically - and Osama bin Laden even more specifically - sometimes seems almost metaphysical. John McCain likes to call it "an existential threat," which may be true in its own way, but also implies something unfathomable, almost abstract in its evil. What "Frontline" does, in this series of episodes aired between 1999 and 2005, is lift the curtain a bit and show us what lies behind the organization of Al Qaeda, the events of 9/11, and the terrorist attacks since then. It's a riveting, fascinating, and sometimes disturbing look at a culture often alien to Americans, and also sometimes weirdly familiar.

Frontline: The War Briefing

Ah yes, the "forgotten war." It's become less forgotten in 2008, as the candidates turn their attention from Iraq to Afghanistan, where a resurgent Taliban, an unstable Pakistan, and a weak Afghan government are reminding us of forgotten promises. This, the most recent episode of "Frontline," focuses on conditions in Afghanistan and Pakistan now, following soldiers in the line of duty, examining the tribal areas of Waziristan nominally under Pakistani control, and asking what we can do about it. Its title frames the issue as something the next president must focus on, and indeed after years of flirting with Iranian strikes, and dealing with the distracting mess in Iraq, we're back to square one: Afghanistan, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and Pakistan.