It was 20 years ago today that Lee Atwater taught the band to play

Lee Atwater was famous for many things. He was a restaurateur, an avid blues and jazz record collector (which is how I came to know him), and he was the architect and progenitor of the kind of character assassination politics that has come to define the Republican party over the last 20 years.

Karl Rove is Atwater’s most famous and successful protégé. In addition to carrying on the tradition of personal-attack politics, Rove also managed to establish a nefarious empire within the executive office that is rivaled only by Dick Cheney for the breadth of its reach and the depths to which it will sink in the name of a neoconservative supremacy.

John “Sidekick” McCain is continuing the Atwater/Rove legacy through Steve Schmidt – a Rove minion. McCain believes he must employ the same hateful, dishonest tactics, as did the two Bushes before him, to win the election. God forbid McCain would actually try to win on the issues. God forbid he would eschew the Atwater/Rove/Schmidt continuum since he himself was once a victim of Rove’s dishonest attacks. But what am I saying? This is a guy who spent years being tortured in a prison…and now condones America’s policy of torture. (For the record, he voted against it before he voted for it!) Well – I guess if John hadn’t been taken prisoner and tortured, he never would have become the iconic figure he indisputably is. Maybe he sees torture as a means to an end? Maybe some poor tortured Muslim will soon also reach the pinnacle of his personal political aspiration thanks to McCain’s pro-torture policy. But I digress.

Schmidt’s job is simple: sell the big lies! He will preside over the neocon smear campaign that will link Obama to everything from the Weathermen Underground, to being a “registered” Muslim. And the unified neocon Greek chorus will repeat these lies ad nauseum until people begin to accept them as fact.

While I find the conduct of the Atwater-Rove-Schmidt continuum to be utterly reprehensible and difficult to stomach – I am equally disappointed and mystified at the democrats’ tepid response to the vicious below-the-belt blows they’ve suffered over the last two elections (especially the swiftboating of John Kerry). Only James Carville seems to understand that if you get in the ring with a dirty fighter – you have to fight dirtier and smarter in order to win (it’s the Chicago way, after all). Crying out for the Marquis of Queensbury rules while your opponent is emasculating you doesn’t cut it. I’d hoped the Democrats would be better prepared to take the offensive during the ‘08 convention. But for the most part, the Democratic convention has been a giant love in. Newsflash: this isn’t the 60’s. The Dems are whistling past the graveyard if they think they can continue to take the highroad against the hooligan tactics of Karl Rove, Steve Schmidt and John McCain. To date, only John Kerry seems to have taken any serious shots at McCain. And his speech wasn’t even covered by many of the news networks!

John McCain offers no solutions. John McCain only offers more of the same shrill, hateful personal attacks that have turned so many Americans away from our democratic process. The question is this: What are the democrats prepared to do about it? If I were advising them – I’d insist that they focus on the key messages with the same tenacity as their neocon counterparts. Every time a democrat talks about the election he or she should remind their audience that the last eight years have brought us Enron, Attorney-gate, Plame-gate, the Iraq war, 9/11, record gas prices and record oil-company profits, Katrina, torture, Abu-Graib, a squandered budget surplus, a failing economy, an erosion of our stature in the world, unchecked aggression by Russia, the rise of Iran in the Middle East, a nuclear arms program in N. Korea, Halliburton and no-bid contracts for Bush/Cheney cronies, Guantanamo, waterboarding, cronyism personified by Harriet Meyers, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Larry Craig, the mortgage crisis, bank failures, airline failures, illegal wiretapping, no progress on immigration, no progress on the environment, no progress in health care, no progress in education, and the list goes on and on and on and on. This is the Bush legacy.

Every time a democrat talks about the election they should emphasize that John McCain is the new standard bearer for the same old Bush, Rove and Atwater politics. And then – say HELL NO! We won’t stand for another four years of this misery.