Rove has an op ed in yesterday’s WSJ and what he’s up to (in this piece and in all else he has written and said recently) is made transparent in the following sentence:
Yet by discarding so much of what people found appealing in him, Mr. Obama may change that.
Rove, as Republican party operative and propagandist, has a very specific goal. That is, to do or say whatever he can which will work to decrease Obama’s popularity in the mind of Americans. He must, as his sentence indicates, isolate (through polls and focus groups) what personal characteristics and policy ideas people found appealing about Obama and then present a narrative which works towards refuting those things. If people saw Obama as ‘brave’, then Rove’s strategy would be to portray Obama as ‘cowardly’. It is that simple.
Thus we see the constant attempts from Rove and others playing the same game to portray Obama as not bipartisan but highly partisan. So we get the following, entirely predictable attack from Rove in the op ed:
Candidate Obama vowed to end “the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics.” Yet his administration geared up MoveOn.org to lead a left-wing coalition to pressure Republicans and centrist Democrats, organized a daily conference call to coordinate liberal attack dogs, and strategized with Americans United for Change on ads depicting the GOP as the party of “no.”
Rather than working with Republicans on the budget, the administration attacked them as mindless obstructionists. Yet the administration’s policies are not nearly as popular as one might suppose.
Everything else in the op ed is of a similar nature and has the same or related goals (ie attempting to make the Republicans appear superior in integrity and policy wisdom).
As I said yesterday, Rove plays a game which has nothing at all to do with the truth of things. He is as amoral a player on the American political scene as one can find. He is not to be trusted in anything he says. He is merely to be predicted and he is very predictable.
Would Rove be much bothered (or bothered at all) if people starve as a consequence of his operations? Probably not. There are now hundreds of thousands of people dead and many more maimed, at least partly as a consequence of Rove’s understanding that the mantle of “a war President” would likely aid Bush and other Republicans’ electoral efforts. Or, one could ask the mainly black citizens of New Orleans how much Rove and his operation in the WH cared about their suffering during Katrina.
Again, to quote John DiIulio, who worked in the Bush whitehouse, where Rove worked the political machinery of that administration:
“There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus,” says DiIulio. “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
update: Appearing on Fox’s O’Reilly show two nights ago, Rove attacked Gibbs for his comment on Cheney “Rush Limbaugh was busy so they picked the next most popular member of the Republican cabal”. Rove said:
What surprised me was frankly the tone of Mr. Gibbs, who sounded like some wise-cracking junior high smart mouth. And it would have been better both for Obama and for the country if Mr. Gibbs had, if he felt it necessary to respond, responded on the merits of the issue rather than, you know, putting such a heavy emphasis on his little sarcastic flip comment. Because these are real issues. These are real issues.
Sure, Karl. Your personal integrity is beyond reproach in this sort of thing so no wonder you are surprised and offended. As when you called Obama “almost Marxian” and referred to Sen Joe Biden as a “big blowhard doofus” and when you labelled critics of your president Bush as “elite, effete snobs”. Not to mention spreading rumors back in Texas that Ann Richards was a lesbian. Or the rumors that McCain’s wife Cindy abused drugs and that McCain had an African-American “love child”.
You’re a despicable and truly unprincipled individual and you are a signal cause of that which is ugly in American politics. I expect, and I do hope, that your actions over the last eight years will land you behind bars.
h/t Think Progress
