Modern conservatism is "search for a superior moral justification for selfishness"...

[madfloridian]

4. Some of Lee Awater's nastier stuff. From New Republic 1989.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115254/tom-foley-gay-baited-lee-atwater-newt-gingrich-aide

Strictly speaking, I suppose, the Esquire picture doesn't belong on this list of items, since it has no obvious connection to the closet memo. I include it as a relatively benign sample of Atwater's frat-boy, gross-out sense of humor, which is more often cruel. A famous instance was his crack about Tom Turnipseed, a populist Democratic candidate for Congress in South Carolina in 1980, who as a teenager had undergone electroconvulsive therapy for depression. Turnipseed accused Atwater, no doubt accurately, of engineering a bogus “poll” in which white voters were called and asked if it would change their opinion of Turnipseed to know that he was a member of the NAACP. Atwater didn't bother to deny it. Instead he said he wasn't about to answer charges from someone who had once been "hooked up to jumper cables."

Whatever his role in the closet memo, there's no doubt it's the sort of thing he'd think was funny. After all, when he was managing Bush's campaign last year he thought it was funny to play on racial fears by using the Willie Horton case against Michael Dukakis, and he got many a chuckle out of impugning Dukakis's patriotism with the Pledge of Allegiance "issue."

Even though the backlash turned out to be unexpectedly severe, the fact remains that the memo worked

Sounds like he was Karl Rove's mentor.