1 Boring Old Man

Rove believed in his metrics. He miscalculated. How did Bush’s guru get the numbers so wrong?

How did the man they call Bush’s brain get it so wrong?

Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his "metrics" were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.

I’m in Dole’s general camp, "all of it." But I think that there are a few points being overlooked. Patrick Fitzgerald‘s Investigation of the C.I.A. Leak case has been going on for three years. While only one official was indicted, the investigation forced a lot of information into the open. First, the prewar Intelligence was not only wrong, it was known to be wrong before we went to war. Judith Miller was a conduit of very exaggerated reporting. Most people now know that. The Administration did "out" a C.I.A. agent to discredit her husband, Joseph Wilson, because he dared to quiestion that intelligence. Most people know that. The things that Bush and Rove said along the way were lies, though carefully framed to avoid reprisal – things like "I never named her" [Rove]. Most of us knew that and that Cheney was involved. The Downing Street Memos told us that the whole lead-up was a sham. Most of us know that Iraq has nothing to do with 911. So, Fitzgerald’s investigation got the nasty truth out there, even if he couldn’t indict all the "nasties" involved.

All of the revelations in that case started coming out after the election at the end of 2004, in the summer of 2005. That’s where Bush’s Approval ratings caved and never recovered.

The place I thought that marked the final straw" was the Chris Wallace interview with President Clinton this September. That was the best spontaneous temper tantrum in recent history. About the same time, there was that ridiculous Disney movie about 911, the National Intelligence Estimate was leaked. I wrote, is the Dam about to break? We all felt it. Then there was Hubris, and State of Denial. So, I think the relentless hammering to get the truth in the open by the bloggers, the Daily Show, Olberman’s Countdown, finally joined by the Press, the careful work of Patrick Fitzgerald, the Democrats like Murtha and Reid who jumped into the lead – all of those things – finally woke up responsible Americans to the fact that we were being conned by a bunch of unprincipled incompetents. So, I don’t agree with Dole totally. "All of it" had to get through a bunch of roadblocks, and there was an extraordinary effort mounted on multiple fronts to get that to happen.

So, what Rove got wrong was that the truth is what makes you free. He mounted a manipulative campaign that had worked before, but it was met with a series of truths that swamped him and his Blackberry numbers.  When it’s all said and done, it was Joseph Wlson’s whistle-blowing followed by the Administration’s "dirty trick" to discredit him that got a ball rolling that ultimately over-rode the Administration’s smoke screen.

Thanks Joe and Valerie! Thanks Patrick!