Yes, Atwater was the guy. You have to give him some credit for being so influential, even if you hate the results. Of course there were others before him but he was the one who turned attack politics, by paid professional staff, into common practice. The Willie Horton ad may have been sleazy, and wildly misleading, but it helped doom Michael Dukasis and elect Bush 41. (The tank photo op didn't help Dukasis much, either).

>I was reading something that showed charts of federal govt money spent on infrastructure of the US in the last 20 yrs. You can tell when the president at the time was a repub by these charts.
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>In some cases, programs that were praised, even won awards for their success had their budgets cut to almost 0 when bush/reagan took over.
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>One of the chapters specifically addressed how the guy who was to Reagan as rove is to bush, he died not too long ago, apologized for what he had wrought on his death bed. He was the one who initially came up with the gameplan of framing values over hot-button issues.
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>Just googled "karl rove mentor".....Lee Atwater is the guy:
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>http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=188&name=Karl-Rove
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>>>Yes, but in Dragan's experience, there's always a conspiracy involved :o)
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>>In case of non-mixed marriages, they can't possibly look like a conspiracy. The people of the same sort were adamantly against mixed marriages 40-50-60 years ago. Now they are against the non-mixed ones. They are notorious flip-floppers and they should get their stool together or just remain looking like fools they are.
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>>There was a conspiracy, but can't qualify it as such, because it's already published in several books ("Nixonland" is the latest). It was the strategy of the GOP to build a majority by dividing the country over religious hot-button issues (abortion, gay rights, immigrants, whatever was felt as hot for the season), because they had nothing to offer to the masses on the issues that count - employment, gov't accountability, reining in the corporations (where they actually keep cutting the reins for decades now), a health system, incarceration rate, urban decay...