Karl Rove is the ultimate partisan operative who guided a career underachiever with a checkered past to the White House. He is credited with keeping the 2000 election close enough, through dirty campaigning and still dirtier election engineering and fraud, to allow the Supreme Court to step in and gift wrap the presidency for his boss. Suffice to say no one uses dirty tricks more effectively or more often than Karl Rove. As such, many Americans who care about the Constitution, Democracy, the rule of law and plain decency, long ago concluded that Karl Rove sucks.
But winning the White House was not enough for Rove who “dreamed of creating a 'permanent Republican majority'”. Such a partisan is Rove that he played a central role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame and the firing of eight US Attorney's who refused to help him illegally create his permanent majority.
In part because of Rove's despicable tactics, the Republican party enjoyed years of success and Rove earned labels like...
“Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential” (James Moore, Wayne Slater)
“The Architect” (James Moore, Wayne Slater)
Rove loved the praise bestowed upon him from his friends and foes alike. But then everything came crashing down around him and now his “genius” moniker is in serious need of repair. In an astonishing turn of events, Republicans lost both the House and the Senate in 2006 despite Rove's repeated assurances to the contrary:“I’m looking at all of these [races] and adding them up. I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I’m entitled to the math” - Karl Rove (10/24/06)Meanwhile, George W. Bush's approval ratings have been on a steady decline and now rest at 30%, 1% above their all time low.
It is hardly surprising that all of the GOP presidential candidates continue to distance themselves from Bush's body. Worse, Rove's permanent majority has been replaced by a public that favors the Democratic Party over the GOP by a whopping 50% to 35% margin. And independents favored Democrats in 2006 by an even larger 57% to 39% margin. It seems that the politics of hate, racism, division, war, war-mongering, propaganda, cheating, lying and stealing can only take a party so far.
But Rove will not go down without a fight. And thankfully propaganda rags like the ridiculous Newsweek magazine have given Rove a platform to win back his genius (In Newsweek's defense, it is not Time magazine). Despite the new gig, Rove proved to be every bit the partisan with his first column: “How to Beat Hillary (Next) November”:
“And so the question to John McCain from a woman at a town hall in South Carolina last Monday was tasteless, but key: ”How do we beat the [rhymes with witch]?“ Right now, Republicans are focusing much of their fire on Senator Clinton. Criticizing her unites the party, stirs up the unsettled feelings many swing voters have toward her and allows each candidate to say why he is best able to beat her.The truth is that Karl Rove and the entire Republican Party are salivating at the opportunity to face off against Hillary Clinton and her “high negatives”. And why not, in a Zogby Poll released last week, Hillary now loses in the general election to all five GOP frontrunners while Barack Obama handily defeats the same five:For now, that's enough. But when a GOP nominee emerges, he needs to remember no Republican is as well known as Hillary. The Republican has room to grow in the polls as voters get a better sense of who he is and what animates him. Here's what he needs to do.”
“Not that you have asked for advice, but here it is anyway: Iowa is your chance to best her. If you do not do it there, odds are you never will anywhere.”And Rove's stellar advice:
First, stop acting like a vitamin-deficient Adlai Stevenson. Striking a pose of being high-minded and too pure will not work. Americans want to see you scrapping and fighting for the job, not in a mean or ugly way but in a forceful and straightforward way.Please! Could Rove give any worse advice than to turn the nice-guy, above the fray, uniter that is Obama into, well, Karl Rove? All can plainly see that Rove is rightfully scared of Obama whom he admits has “the buzz” and could very well win the nomination and upset Rove's plans to keep the White House in GOP hands. And as Frank Rich so ably points out, facing off against Obama would be a far more difficult task than defeating Hillary:Hillary may come over as calculating and shifty but she looks in control. You, on the other hand, often come over as weak and ineffectual. In some debates, you do not even look at her when disagreeing with her, making it look as if you are afraid of her. She offers you openings time and again but you do not take advantage of them. Sharpen your attacks and make them more precise.
But much like the Clinton campaign itself, the Republicans have fallen into a trap by continuing to cling to the Hillary-is-inevitable trope. They have not allowed themselves to think the unthinkable — that they might need a Plan B to go up against a candidate who is not she. It’s far from clear that they would remotely know how to construct a Plan B to counter Mr. Obama. The repeated attempts to fan “rumors” that he is a madrassa-indoctrinated Muslim — whether on Fox News or in The Washington Post, where they resurfaced scurrilously on the front page on Thursday — are too demonstrably false to survive endless reruns even in the Swift-boating era.So the polls emphatically prove that Hillary would be far easier prey for Republicans in the general election than Obama. And if statistics aren't your thing, commonsense clearly dictates the same. And finally, just about every political pundit from Karl Rove to Frank Rich have written as much. So what does Wolf Blitzer of the Clinton News Network wonder about Karl Rove's latest advice column?:Part of the Republicans’ difficulty in countering Mr. Obama, should they have to, is their own cynical racial politics. For the most part, race has been the dog that hasn’t barked in this campaign despite the (largely) white press’s endless fretting about whether the Illinois senator is too white for black voters and too black for white voters. Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.) But the G.O.P., by its own doing, is nonetheless saddled with a history that most recently includes “macaca” and Katrina, Mr. Bush’s appearance at Bob Jones University in 2000 and the nonexistent black population of its Congressional delegation.
As the Republican leadership knows, this record is an albatross, driving away not just black voters but crucial white swing voters, too. Ken Mehlman, the former G.O.P. chairman, and Mr. Rove, as recently as in that Newsweek column, have implored their party to reach out to minorities. So have Newt Gingrich and Jack Kemp. But not even conservative leaders of this stature could persuade their party’s top 2008 presidential contenders to show up for a September debate moderated by Tavis Smiley for PBS at the historically black Morgan State University.
OMG! He is actually taking Rove's words at face value! LOL! Could Wolf really believe that Rove has forsaken his legacy as the greatest partisan political operative of the last 20 year in order to go legit and is now an uninterested, outsider, merely commenting on the political landscape? ROTFL! Yeah, that's the ticket, Rove couldn't possibly have ulterior motives.
The way I see it, there are two possible explanations for Wolf's comments: 1) he is an imbecile, or 2) he wants Hillary to get the nomination. Either way, he should be laughed out of his job. Of course, this is nothing new from Wolf or the Clinton News Network which showed its true colors at the last democratic debate in Nevada:
All of which makes Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency all the more remarkable. He continues to rise in the polls and threatens to win Hillary's “inevitable” nomination despite having to fight against Karl Rove, the entire Republican Party, the Clinton machine, CNN, Wolf, ABC, George and most of the mainstream media.
If the Illinois Senator can overcome those long odds he certainly has what it takes to lead the country.
“The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” (Barack Obama)
“Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” (Barack Obama)
