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Tuesday, September 05, 2006
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 IS KARL ROVE FINISHED?
As hard as it is to believe, there was a tme when there were no political consultants or professional strategists in politics. Yes, politicians actually had to plan their own campaigns. Some, like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were very good at it. Harry Truman was exceptional at it. The 1948 presidential campaign is a textbook campaign for the sexless geeks like me who care care about such things.
But Truman, Johnson and Nixon all campaigned in the days before television had assumed the importance it has today. Because of its technical demands, and entire industry of people who have never run for anything themselves has sprung up to service it. Some, like the Democratic operative Bob Shrum have become multi-millionaires, despite losing seven out of seven presidential elections. In 1994, the celebrated James Carville lost 14 out of 14 races and retired to the lecture circut where he makes $25,000 a night. In politics, it seems that you actually can win for losing. Just ask Shrum and Carville.
Back in the old days, if a president or any other elected office-holder did something stupid, they paid for it with their careers. Nearly half of America's presidents were turfed out of office after a single term. But like I said, those days are long gone. Now if a politician fucks up horribly, his staff takes it in the collective neck. Following the Democratic debacle in '94, President Clinton fired the very people who got him elected two years earlier. It had to be bad political advice that put the Democrats where they were, because no one considered the possibility that gays in the military and socialized medicine wasn't the direction the country wanted to go in.
There was a time not very long ago when the sun couldn't rise over the District of Columbia without the written permission of Dick Morris. Now he's a Fox News blowhard and writes books about campaigns that most serious adults know instinctively won't happen. This isn't just because Morris sucked some whore's toes. Well, not entirely, anyway. Power is a fleeting thing in the Age of the Big-Time Consultant. You're only as good as your last election and if you can't destroy someone, no one will respect you. People used to fear and despise Dick Morris. Now people just mock and despise him. What's Morris going to do about it, tell Bill O'Reilly that you're a meanie? Make no mistake, twenty years ago, he would've boiled your stomach until your fucking pancreas exploded, but he's now an empty joke of what he once was. He's politically impotent, a limp dick in a Celias world.
President Bush's principal political advisor, Karl Rove, might be learning how this phonomenon works. While he hasn't lost a major race yet, GOP candidates across the country are beginning to smell death in the air. This concerns them as they are highly suspicious that the death they smell might just be their own.
In a wonderful example of reporting the obvious, Saturday's edition of the New York Times contained an overwrought and poorly written study in how Republican candidates are running as fast and as far away as they can from Rove and his boss.
No shit? You mean that if you'd like to keep a career in politics the best way to do that is to avoid being seen with a highly unpopular president? And here I was thinking that a 39% approval rating was a pretty good thing. And that 61% of the villagers disapproving of the war that you say will be the legacy of your presidency is hard to beat. I sure am glad that the front page of The New York Times was there to set me straight. I don't know where I'd be without them.
That Republicans are abandoning the sinking ship of Bush 43 is hardly a surprise to anyone who isn't retarded. What does continue to shock intelligent people everywhere is that Republicans supported him in the first fucking place. Even before 9/11 Mr. Bush's answer to everything was a massive new government program. The Department of Education, which Republicans had spent over a decade trying to abolish, has seen its budget doubled since 2001.
 During the 2000 campaign, Bush promised a truly massive tax cut and said he would only consider raising taxes in the event of war or natural disaster. Within 9 months, the United States was at war and he responded by passing another round of giant tax cuts. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the president continued his push to make those temporary tax cuts permanent. He won't tell you this now, but he originally sold the tax cuts as a temporary economic stimulus, set to expire in 2011 and 2012. They were not intended to be a permanent fixture of the American economy. Unless of course he was lying.
All of this has lead to the largest deficits in American history by far and a truly freightening level of borrowing from the People's Republic of China - something that, in the long-term, might be a much greater threat to national security than al-Qeada can ever hope to be be. The only remaining question about Mr. Bush's fiscal policies is whether they will destroy the American government with the same shocking efficency that his military policies destroyed Iraq's.
Despite a pledge to renounce "nation building" as an essential component of American foreign policy, President Bush has committed Amercan boys and girls to Iraq for a generation, lest the entire Middle East go up in flames, which it might anyway.
In a moment of true Churchillian majesty, he told the American people that they could best fight the scourge of international terrorism by buying themselves something nice.
Just what does this president have to show for his nearly six years in the Oval Office? Well, there's his continuing commitment to states rights. This was amply demonstrated when he returned to Washington from Crawford because Terri Schiavo's next of kin and every single court of competent jurisdiction - both in Florida and the federal system - decided that she should be allowed to die with a little dignity. The president was apparently convinced that, if given some time, Mrs. Schiavo would be on the starting line-up of the Miami Dolphins or something. This is doubly impressive when you remember that the same president once received an intelligence brief in Crawford headlined "bin Laden Determined to Strike Within the United States" and he chose to stay home. Strength. Leadership. Priorities.
President Bush is also a committed constitutionalist. In fact, he loves the Constitution so much that he wants to re-write for you. Prohibitions on gay marriage and flag burning would be included in a document that strictly limits the freedom of the government instead of the people if he had his way. And he would have had his way were it not for that goddamned, obstructionist Republican Senate. President Bush has talked about gay marriage so much that it isn't unreasonble for people like me to question his unhealthy obsession with it.
Oh, and George Bush beat back the single most incompetent challenger ever in John Kerry. Barely. And he beat Al Gore. Sort of.
This is the guy that the GOP establishment has been holding to their collective bossom since 1994? George Bush is the ultimate RINO. Not only has he not fought for very many Republican principles, he's destroyed as many as he could. Not only is John McCain three times the conservative President Bush is, so was Lyndon Johnson. If nothing else, Johnson at least privately admitted that everything he knew about Vietnam was wrong. Fiscal conservatives everywhere long for the days of a more traditional Republican presidency ... like Bill Clinton's.
George W. Bush is the kind of Republican that real warriors like Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater humiliated for sport. He's Nelson Rockefeller and John Lindsay with a cooler job and a funnier accent. The wonder isn't that the Grand Old Party is abandoning him now, it's that they nominated him in the first fucking place. George H.W Bush is a good and great man who I would support in an election tomorrow, but his son has devoted his life to repudiating everything the father stood for. The fact that Gerald Ford can be in the same room as this president without weeping astonishes me.
The fact that Mr. Bush was twice elected governor of Texas and president of the United States is a testement to the professional skill of Karl Rove. Before Bush was lured into politics by Rove, he was a dry-drunk with good baseball tickets and a history of corporate bankruptcy. Basically, he was Bill Simon with a more famous dad. But Bush had Rove and Simon didn't, so Bill Simon was crushed like a beer by that professional loser, Gray Davis, in the horrible summer of 2002.
It wouldn't do for a scion of the Bush dynasty to be slaughtered like a hog. It wouldn't do at all. And Rove mounted the most impressive head on Bush's wall that he could find: That of the incumbent governor, Ann Richards.
When he announced his candidacy in November of 1993, the only thing Bush had been elected was "least likely to succeed" at family reunions and Richards was the wildly popular governor who had earlier dazzled the 1988 Democratic National Convention. She was a good 30 points ahead of Dubya.
President Clinton's truly titanic unpopularity in 1994 didn't exactly hurt Bush or help Richards. What the '94 campaign did was highlight two important qualities that would would take Bush and Rove to the pinnacle of American politics.
The first was that no one exceeds low expectations quite like George W. Bush. Like Al Gore and John Kerry afterward, Ann Richards made the mistake that the younger Bush was a paler, dumber version of his father. The first President Bush's biggest political problem was that he was a very nice man and often found doing what was needed to win distasteful. He was a product of the much-despised Eastern Establishment and had the antiquated notion that a sense of decorum was something to proud of in politics.
As Richards, Gore and Kerry would all find out, the younger Bush would do what was needed and he would do it very well. As the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman has pointed out, Kerry worked with a sledgehammer while the president operated best with a stilletto. Because no one expected Bush to excel at politics, he worked twice as hard at it as everybody else. No matter how much I disagree with his policies as president, I have the highest esteem for his skill as a campaigner.
 Secondly, like Bush, but to a much more professional extent, Karl Rove will do anything to win. Rove learned his craft at the feet of the late, great Lee Atwater. In professional circles, Atwater is remember as something of a patron saint of attack politics. Atwater wasn't satisfied with merely defeating an opponent, he wanted them thouroughly destroyed. People like Michael Dukakis will never forget the way that that the dark embrace of Lee Atwater changed their lives.
Rove is just as vicious as Atwater was, but much more subtle. When Atwater did something ugly, it was on the AP wire in about 10 minutes. The ugly things Rove does have never been conclusively tied to him personally.The only way that some of his seamier tactics can be connected to him was the fact that they happened in so many of his campaigns and have benefitted only his clients. But he doesn't leave his fingerprints on anything.
As Rove himself has pointed out, he started as a direct mail specialist. Direct mail is something that the media pays no atention to whatsoever, so it can be used to say whatever you want without consequence. As he matured professionally, Rove turned direct mail tactics to other media with devastating effect.
As both Ann Richards and John McCain learned, Rove is the grand master of the push poll. Push polling is the levelling of unsubstantiated accusations disguised as questions. Some of the questions asked in the '94 and 2000 polls were "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for Ann Richards if you knew that she had given several lesbians powerful positions in state government?" and "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had a black daughter out of wedlock?" Republicans loved getting all indignant about the rumours of Bush's cocaine use and paying for the abortion of a girlfriend, but the remain very quiet when asked about some of the truly disgusting things that Karl Rove has said about others on George Bush's behalf.
I began this little essay by asking a question. Is Karl Rove, as The New York Times seems to think, finished? I shouldn't even have to ask that question, because the people who work at the Times are degenerate idiots who have no idea how politics is really run.
A lot of Rove's future depends on what happens this November. If the GOP loses one or both houses of Congress, his options are limited. But despite all of the polling to the contrary, I don't think that's going to happen. At least not yet. Say what you will about the Republicans, but they are cold, hard professionals, and the Democrats campaign far too often as helpless little girls. And helpless little girls don't win many elections. Winning requires holding a knife to the other guy's throat, and the national Democrats still can't resist the urge to drive the blade into their own backs.
I could be wrong about that - and the polling suggests that I am - but I've seen people like Harry Reid self-destruct far too often to have learned to expect them to do anything but change their ways. Losing elections is like smoking, everyone says that they'd like to quit, but they lack the requisite desire or discipline to actually go through with it. The Democrats are the guy who quit smoking in 1997, but sneaks a Lucky in the can when he thinks no one is looking. Until I see concrete evidence to the contrary, I expect them to fuck up a sure thing every time.
Besides, you never count someone as smart and mean as Karl Rove out until you're positive that he's actually stopped breathing. And then you keep a close eye on the corpse. Karl Rove is the Jason Voorhees of politics. He's gotten through tougher campaigns than this before and I have a sneaking suspicion that he'll do it again.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Johnny's Gonna Die By: The Replacements From: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash
PermalinkLabels: Fun With Politics, The Serious Side of skippy
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