1 Boring Old Man

The Return of Rove

^{John McCain has surrendered his campaign to the same political fearmonger who smeared him out of the race in 2000.}

^{Wayne Slater has known Karl Rove for 20 years. As the author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, he’s not easily shocked by the Republican strategist’s Gila-monstroid tactics. But even he’s been blown away by Rove’s latest political comeback…}

^{The actual evidence of Rove’s newfound influence on the McCain campaign is — like so much of the history surrounding this uniquely maddening personage — scant at best, part vapor and part legend, a thing mostly deduced and inferred from various factoids and ripples in the informational pool.}

^{We know, for instance, that Steven Schmidt, who was tapped to be head of rapid response during Bush’s 2004 campaign, is now a senior strategist in the McCain camp. Schmidt assumed a more central role in McCain’s run in June, shortly after the stammering, much-mocked "green screen" speech McCain gave near New Orleans on the night Obama claimed victory in the Democratic primaries…}

^{Sure enough, it was right after that dismal night outside New Orleans that McCain — whose campaign stumpery until then had been fairly predictable, focusing heavily on his personal story, the Iranian threat and his experience and patriotic bona fides relative to Obama — began a somewhat drastic rhetorical overhaul. Under Schmidt’s guidance, McCain’s tactics took on a darker and unmistakably Rovian character.}

^{The hallmark of the Rove campaigning method is the political act so baldly below the belt that it literally staggers you. Even the most hardened cynics find themselves continually surprised by the ability of Rove and his minions to always hit that evasive new low, coming up with things that would shock a 60-year-old Greyhound-station hooker.}

^{What American doesn’t remember Rove, after 9/11, saying that liberals wanted to "offer therapy and understanding to our attackers"? What Texan doesn’t recall fondly the "push poll" Rove reportedly commissioned for Bush, in which voters were asked if they would be less likely to vote for Gov. Ann Richards if they knew her staff was "dominated by lesbians"? And what veteran doesn’t remember Rove impugning the patriotism of Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, by running an ad showing the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein fading into the wheelchair-bound Cleland’s face? Suck on that, Mr. Silver Star!}

^{The first whiff of this kind of tactic in the current race came at the end of June, when the McCain campaign launched its new slogan "Country First," making McCain the first presidential candidate in history to make "My Opponent Is a Traitor" his rallying cry. Then there was the unveiling of a new ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Following that came a coordinated campaign to ridicule Obama for the somewhat bombastic décor of the stage for his convention speech, with the campaign issuing leaflets mocking the vertical columns as a "Temple of Obama"…}

^{First there were reports that Rove called Joe Lieberman before the GOP convention and told him to call McCain and withdraw his name from consideration for the VP nomination. Rove denied the report, but conceded that he had been in touch with the McCain camp, saying, "I receive calls from people who are friends over there, which I’ve said a million times." He described the interaction as mere "chitchat," a claim seconded by the McCain camp. McCain aide Tucker Bounds insisted Rove had no access: "He’s a Fox analyst."}

^{But after the surprising nomination of Palin — a move that fairly stank of Rovian thinking, with its 10-megaton brazenness, its blunt anti-intellectualism and its naked courting of Rove’s beloved electoral cattle, the evangelicals — Rove seemingly let it slip in a Fox broadcast that he did have inside info, saying during the teen-pregnancy flap that Palin was "carefully vetted. They knew all of it." An anonymous Republican source soon told a Washington newspaper that Rove had a consistent, "medium"-size role with the McCain campaign…}

^{Whatever his role in the campaign, Rove’s unique position as both a campaign adviser and a media figure has created new opportunities for informational self-dealing of a type that would have seemed unimaginable a decade or so ago. Now the McCain camp can watch Rove say that Sarah Palin’s nomination was "not a governing decision but a campaign decision" — and then have Schmidt tell Katie Couric that same night that Rove is "wrong" before going to whine that Palin has "been under vicious assault and attack from the angry left"…}

^{Nobody appreciates just how far Rove has pushed those boundaries more than Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama. While the rest of us spent the last year forgetting just what an evil, conniving bastard Rove is, Siegelman was taking the scandal-plagued last gasp of the George W. Bush era right on the chin. Successfully prosecuted by the Bush Justice Department on seven counts of corruption, Siegelman was chased from office and spent nine months in prison before a judge released him on bond. When he got out, almost the first words out of his mouth were about Rove. "His fingerprints," Siegelman said, "are smeared all over this case"…}

Rove is not a genius, or even very clever: He’s totally and completely immoral. It doesn’t take genius to claim, as Rove ludicrously did last fall, that it was the Democrats in Congress and not George W. Bush who pushed the Iraq War resolution in 2002. It doesn’t take brains to compare a triple-amputee war veteran to Osama bin Laden; you just have to be a mean, rotten cocksucker…

^{Rove’s comeback is evidence that the attack on our civic institutions in the Bush years wasn’t an isolated incident, something we can pin on a specific group of now-deposed politicians. It’s a trend, a thing that grows in direct proportion to our greed and ignorance. We may be a country at war, facing one of the greatest financial meltdowns of all time. But in the end, the thing that could be our undoing is the kind of generalized boredom with legality and honor that empowers Rovian behavior. If we let it.}

You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.