“This Is Exactly How Karl Rove Works”: Doing The Same Things He’s Done Before
If you consumed any political news at all Tuesday, you likely know that Karl Rove, former political guru for George W. Bush, reportedly suggested during a conference last week that Hillary Clinton suffered a “traumatic brain injury” recently.
Rove quickly denied the charge, and told The Washington Post later in the day that “of course she doesn’t have brain damage.”
But the idea that the former first lady and possible future presidential candidate is brain damaged is already all over the media. Elsewhere in the Post, one can find over a thousand words from the ever-credulous Chris Cillizza on the subject of Clinton’s health, pivoting off Rove’s remarks. (Cillizza isn’t entirely sure if Rove’s bizarre charge is wrong: he actually begins a sentence “Putting aside the ‘brain damage’ debate, which seems like a bit of a red herring….”)
You could believe Rove’s denial—but you would have to ignore virtually his entire political career. For decades Rove has been circulating nasty, personal rumors about political opponents and placing them in the public conversation, all while obscuring his fingerprints, making the rumors become the opponent’s problem, not his. It’s page one of his playbook.
Take for example the tale of Mark Kennedy, a Democratic candidate for Alabama Supreme Court in 1994, as recounted in James Moore and Wayne Slater’s book on Rove, The Architect. Rove was working for Harold See, Republican and law school professor backed by the Business Council of Alabama.
Kennedy was “not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man,” Moore and Slater noted. A central feature of Kennedy’s campaign ads was the private nonprofit he founded for abused and neglected children.
That seems like an entirely benign, harmless résumé point to offer—but as Moore and Slater note, Kennedy “had never been in an election against Karl Rove.” This is what began to happen:
“[W]ord began to spread along the loose network of University of Alabama Law School faculty and students that Kennedy was a pedophile. The whisper campaign moved with a kind of ruthless efficiency from the hallways of the law school to folks back home, to big cities and small Alabama communities, everywhere students lived. [Kennedy’s campaign manager] said he heard about the whisper campaign directly from friends inside the law school, and as he studied polling data, he saw that it was working. But what to do about it?”
Kennedy couldn’t exactly call a press conference and announce he wasn’t a pedophile, as the authors note. He managed to win the election, but narrowly, and did not seek re-election.*
Rove is a master at forcing his adversaries to address vicious personal rumors that were never true in the first place. I could go on and on, but a brief highlight reel:
During the 2000 presidential contest, when Rove was working for Bush, the campaign “featured a widely disseminated rumor that John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, had betrayed his country under interrogation and been rendered mentally unfit for office.”
When Bush was running against Ann Richards for governor of Texas in 1994, a persistent rumor circulated that Richards was a lesbian, helped in no small part by a push poll asking voters if they would be “more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians.” In fact, a regional Bush campaign chairman was quoted criticizing Richards for “appointing avowed homosexual activists” to state jobs.
Sometimes Rove doesn’t even restrict this tactic to political campaigns—he uses it for himself. Josh Green in The Atlantic in 2004: “In 1986 [John] Weaver and Rove both worked on Bill Clements’s successful campaign for governor, after which Weaver was named executive director of the state Republican Party. Both were emerging as leading consultants, but Weaver’s star seemed to be rising faster. The details vary slightly according to which insider tells the story, but the main point is always the same: after Weaver went into business for himself and lured away one of Rove’s top employees, Rove spread a rumor that Weaver had made a pass at a young man at a state Republican function. Weaver won’t reply to the smear, but those close to him told me of their outrage at the nearly two-decades-old lie. Weaver was first made unwelcome in some Texas Republican circles, and eventually, following McCain’s 2000 campaign, he left the Republican Party altogether.”
Many of these techniques actually come from Lee Atwater, who tutored Rove. “A supposed slip of the tongue that in fact gets some truly nasty tidbit on the record—that tactic is straight from the Atwater manual,” The New York Times noted in 2008. And the strategy has been reworked and refined by Rove in the ensuing years. (Note the echoes between his ageist attack on McCain’s mental health, and Tuesday’s broadside on Clinton’s brain.)
It’s only a matter of time until some reporter asks Clinton if she’s really suffered brain damage, and her response will revive the story once again, leaving legions of voters wondering if there really is something to all this brain damage talk. Rove knew exactly what he was doing by invoking that specter and then walking away innocently, twiddling his thumbs. It’s the same thing he’s always done.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, May 13, 2014
“He’s Just Not That Smart”: Karl Rove May Be Evil, But He’s No Genius
When I sit down someday to write my memoirs and try to characterize this era, I will note three salient political features. One, and obviously, the increasing wingnuttery of the Republican Party. Two, the ever-increasing ownership of our political system by the top 0.1 (or even .01) percent. And three, the continuing and mind-boggling overestimation of Karl Rove’s brilliance.
The first two things I get. They happen to be real and true. But Karl Rove I do not. I never have, really, not even in 2000. I mean, his candidate didn’t even really win. Then came 2004. OK, I’ll give him that one, but all he did then was (barely) reelect an incumbent. Just two incumbents going back to FDR lost their reelection bids while eight won them, so that’s a pretty low bar for genius.
Then came the truly dark period, the one that should have pulverized his reputation forever, when Rove told his president to go out and promote Social Security privatization, which sank like a stone. This while Rove was talking up a “permanent conservative majority” and world-historic realignment, even though all he and his president’s failures managed to do was turn the Senate and the House Democratic in 2006 and then pave the way for the country’s rejection of John McCain and embrace of Barack Obama. Rove is a so-so political strategist, a corrupt trickster going back to college, and a venal and wholly unprincipled man who once orchestrated a whisper campaign that an Alabama judge who did admirable work with youngsters was a pedophile. And on top of all that, he’s just not that smart, as proved on Election Night 2012, when he made a world-class asshole out of himself over Ohio.
This week, everybody is going around saying, “Oh, this Hillary thing; typical unprincipled Rove, but you’ve got to give the devil his due. It works. The evil genius is at it again.” Let’s hold on to our hats here. What’s the proof that him suggesting that Hillary Clinton has brain damage is “working”? Because the media are talking about it, because people like me are writing about it, because it’s been Topic A on cable? Please. Since when are those indicators of anything? If cable-news controversies dictated politics and life, Obama never would have survived about a dozen little cable scandals in 2008, and Solange Knowles would be the world’s most important human being.
This is just the media thinking that because they’re chattering about something, all of America is. But there is certainly no evidence that regular Americans heard what Rove said and are drawing precisely the conclusions he wants them to draw. We won’t know for a long time whether Rove’s gambit about Clinton’s age and health worked. But I confidently place my dime on the square that says it won’t. Here’s why.
If you look back over his track record a little more closely, you see that Rove’s type of deceitful treachery has worked best in Republican contexts, or at least in conservative ones. The Rovian whisper campaigns—about that poor judge’s devotion to children, or John McCain’s love child, or Ann Richards’s sexuality—are all about sex, and they tend to take root in Christianist citadels (Alabama, South Carolina, and Texas, respectively) where the populace is awfully fire-and-brimstone-ish about such matters. So Rove—I will give him this much—knows the workings of the fearful, reactionary mind.
But the minds of the rest of us, not so much. Let’s hypothetically transfer the above three whisper campaigns to New York. The New York response to the defamed judge would have been: Get that obvious smear job outta our faces. To McCain’s love child it would have been: So what? And to suggestions of a candidate’s lesbianism: I had a feeling she was more interesting than she seemed.
I’m exaggerating for effect, but I’m making a serious point. Rove does not know how non-conservatives think about these things. Non-conservatives don’t hate Hillary Clinton. In fact, they rather like her, dare I say it about five, six, or seven times more than they like George W. Bush. And while non-conservatives do have fair and reasonable concerns about her health and age, they will parse them fairly and reasonably, and they’ll make fair and reasonable judgments.
Ultimately, Rove won’t have a thing to do with how voters assess Clinton on these fronts. She will, based on how she comports herself. And so far I see scant evidence that anything changed after she suffered a blood clot in December 2012. I’ve seen her speak since then. She’s the same speaker she always was. We all saw her on TV answering those questions at that Senate Benghazi hearing. She was plenty sharp that day. And that was three weeks after she got out of the hospital, and while wearing her eyeglasses with the supposed secret powers!
A campaign is, as we know, unbelievably hard. Either she’ll hold up to it or she won’t. People will be able to tell. My guess is she will. And voters outside the Rovian circle will have long since concluded that the brain damage gambit was just one more act of dishonesty and desperation by a man who has been, really, a loser for several years now, ever since the elections of 2006. Over the top? I ask you to recall his 2012, when his American Crossroads spent $103 million and didn’t win one single race, and was judged the worst—not one of the worst; the worst—return on investment in electoral politics.
I look forward to Election Night 2016, and the moment when Clinton tops 270 electoral votes—which may well come early in the evening—and a stumbling, bumbling Rove tries to offer up some explanation for it all, making excuses for the third presidential election in a row. Maybe by then the world will agree with me, that when they say “evil genius,” they’ll know they’re only half right and auto-correct.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 15, 2014
“How Karl Rove Plays The Game”: ‘Turd Blossom’ Has A Well-Earned Reputation For Sleaze, Dishonesty, And Ugly Campaign Tactics
In December 2012, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fainted, suffered a concussion, and was hospitalized with a blood clot. Because her injury delayed her congressional testimony on Benghazi, conservative media quickly launched a conspiracy theory: Clinton wasn’t really injured, Fox News and others said, she was merely faking it to avoid talking about the attack.
Even for the right, this was bizarre. Clinton’s injury was not only real, she also had no incentive to mislead – her committee testimony was simply rescheduled.
In a curious twist, Republicans have shifted gears. Arguing that Clinton’s injury was faked is now out; arguing that Clinton’s injury was extremely serious is now in. Karl Rove is leading the way.
He said if Clinton runs for president, voters must be told what happened when she suffered a fall in December 2012.
The official diagnosis was a blood clot. Rove told the conference near LA Thursday, “Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury? We need to know what’s up with that.”
Rove repeated the claim a number of times to the audience.
The man George W. Bush affectionately referred to as “Turd Blossom” has a well-earned reputation for sleaze, dishonesty, and ugly campaign tactics, and this fits nicely into his established pattern of behavior.
We can note, for example, that Clinton was in the hospital for a few days, not 30. We can also note that Clinton wore glasses because of the temporary “double vision” she suffered after she fainted, not “traumatic brain injury.”
But this isn’t about reality. This is about Karl Rove playing a game – one that he thinks he’s good at.
As reports about his comments generated chatter throughout the political world. Rove told Karen Tumulty, “Of course she doesn’t have brain damage.”
Of course.
Rove added that he believes Clinton suffered “a serious health episode” and she’ll “have to be forthcoming” about the incident if she runs for national office again.
But why say any of this? Every major presidential candidate releases medical records, just as a routine part of the process, so if the former Secretary of State throws her hat in the ring, Clinton already knows her health background will be scrutinized, just like every other candidate.
So why bring it up? Because Rove wants to raise doubts about the Democrat widely perceived as the strong potential candidate in the race.
Rove could go after Clinton’s record, but substantive debates aren’t his style. He could go after Clinton’s agenda, but she isn’t even an announced candidate, so there is no platform to attack.
And that brings us to targeting Clinton’s fitness for office. The next time she forgets a detail or flubs a word during a Q&A, we’re supposed to think about the seed Rove planted in the political world’s mind: an older candidate with a brain injury.
It’s cheap and politics at its most obnoxious, but then again, those are adjectives Rove is probably accustomed to hearing by now.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 13, 2014
“Divorced From Reality”: Fewer Debates Won’t Save The GOP From Itself
Jonathan Martin reports in the New York Times that the RNC has moved aggressively to reduce the number of debates Republican candidates for president will have to endure.
The Republican National Committee moved Friday to seize control of the presidential primary debates in 2016, another step in a coordinated effort by the party establishment to reshape the nominating process.
Committee members overwhelmingly passed a measure that would penalize any presidential candidate who participated in a debate not sanctioned by the national party, by limiting their participation in subsequent committee-sanctioned forums.
The move represents the party’s effort to reduce the number of debates and assert control over how they are staged.
In making the case for adopting the new rule, party officials repeatedly criticized the moderators and format of the 2012 primary debates, appealing to the suspicions that many Republican activists have about the mainstream news media. “The liberal media doesn’t deserve to be in the driver’s seat,” said the committee’s chairman, Reince Priebus, addressing committee members here at their spring meeting.
This means that underdog candidates will have to weigh the advantages of appearing in unsanctioned forums versus the disadvantages of being blocked from sanctioned forums. Of course, that’s an easy decision if you haven’t been invited to the sanctioned forums in the first place.
It’s smart for the Republicans to do this, but their distrust of the mainstream media is just one more manifestation of their divorce from reality, which really took place no later than Sarah Palin’s appearance on the national stage.
When being asked what papers you read is too hard of a question, mistrust builds up in a hurry. If the Republicans are hoping to go through debate season without anyone ever puncturing their right-wing media fantasy bubble, these reforms are not going to be fully productive. And, in any case, if the candidates are cheering the death penalty and talking about the sanctity of marriage and how “severe” their conservatism is, and the wisdom of a self-deportation immigration policy then it won’t matter who the moderator happens to be.
It’s true that the Republicans had too many debates, but so did the Democrats. And it didn’t appear to hurt the Democrats at all. It made Obama a better debater.
It says something that the GOP wants to have a primary season without allowing anyone to watch or question what they are doing.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 10, 2014
“Beirut Barracks Vs Benghazi”: GOP Partisans In Heat
One of the most maddening things about this Benghazi nonsense is the way Republicans have gotten a lot of Americans to go along with the idea that 10 investigations of something is normal; that as long as there’s one unanswered question, one area where the administration’s position is ambiguous or where its cooperation has been anything other than the immediate handing over of any conceivably related document, we still need to get to the bottom of matters.
People believe this because—first of all, partisans in heat believe it because they want to pin some kind of blame on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But even some people who aren’t diehard partisans believe it because, well, it seems to make sense. That’s what we do. We get to the bottom of things.
That’s what we do, that is, when it comes to the law. When there’s a question of legal guilt or innocence, of course we want all the facts needed to make the proper legal determination. But what about when there is no question of legal guilt or innocence, and it’s just a political matter? Of course we still want to know what happened, but in these cases it’s not chiefly to determine guilt or innocence, since there is none; it’s to get an honest accounting of what happened to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’m trying to explain as calmly as I can here, to readers with no allegiance to either party, why what the Republicans are doing with Benghazi is so out of bounds. They are turning a political situation into a legal case. They’re trying to impose the standards of the courtroom onto a place where they clearly don’t belong. It’s an awful, poisonous precedent, especially given that the incident in question was a tragedy. Using a national tragedy, the kind of event that used to unite Americans, to turn a political matter into a legal one is just a shocking thing to do, wholly outside the American tradition.
Which brings me to Beirut. If you read only one Benghazi piece this week (aside from mine of course!), read this one by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, which she called “Ronald Reagan’s Benghazi.” It was October 1983, and Mayer was a young Wall Street Journal reporter based in Beirut. Early on the morning of October 23, a blast went off in the U.S. Marine barracks compound. By the time Mayer arrived on the scene, “the Marine barracks were flattened. From beneath the dusty, smoking slabs of collapsed concrete, piteous American voices could be heard, begging for help.” The U.S. death toll was 241 that day.
A few contextual facts for you. The gate at the barracks through which the terrorist drove his truck was open. He drove through some barbed wire, but that was it. The guards were unarmed. Additionally, this happened a mere six months after militants had bombed the embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, 17 of them Americans.
There’s more. At the time, the Iran-Iraq War was going on. In addition to that, Iran had just created Hezbollah in Lebanon, giving the Islamic Republic a base of operations in that country. The United States was backing Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War. Iran warned that if America continued to back Iraq, it would suffer consequences. On September 26, the National Security Agency intercepted an Iranian communication that spoke of the need to “take spectacular action against the American Marines.” But the NSA didn’t pass that communication along to the Marines, according to Col. Timothy Geraghty, the commanding officer of the decimated unit, until later: “Word of the intercept,” he wrote, “stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack.”
Review with me the facts of those last two paragraphs. Open gates. Unarmed guards. Six months on the heels of 17 earlier American deaths. A month after a specific and dramatic warning. Which the NSA, in 28 long days, failed to pass on.
You know where I’m going here. Imagine that all that had happened somewhere in the world in the last three or four years. Just close your eyes and conjure in your mind’s ear all the bloviating bombast about the weak president who secretly wants to destroy America and so on. Obama would have been impeached immediately. Hillary Clinton would have been, too, or forced to resign in disgrace. Hell, I don’t think even Joe Biden would have survived it (which means John Boehner would be president). Neither would the NSA adviser, not the secretary of defense, nor probably a score of administration officials. Letting terrorists kill not four people, as happened in Benghazi, but 241—of our fighting men, no less—after missing a clear warning, and with gates flung open? The Obama era would have been over, simple as that.
Here, in contrast, is what happened in 1983: not much of anything. Then, as now, the opposition party ran the House of Representatives. Speaker Tip O’Neill did call for an investigation. But just one, not 10. And no one from the Reagan administration was subpoenaed. The committee charged with investigating the matter was designed not to prosecute, but to find out what went wrong. Mayer: “Two months later, it issued a report finding ‘very serious errors in judgment’ by officers on the ground, as well as responsibility up through the military chain of command, and called for better security measures against terrorism in U.S. government installations throughout the world.”
That was appropriate. It wouldn’t have occurred to anybody in those days to politicize or criminalize a tragedy like the Republicans have now. And it really hasn’t happened since either. Things have become more partisan, but there was no string of multiple investigations, no drawing matters out for months or years after the Black Hawk Down episode. Even Democratic oversight around the Iraq War wasn’t like this. Henry Waxman did subpoena Condoleezza Rice, and she appeared once, in the fall of 2007. Democrats could have held high-profile hearings on war profiteering or the pre-war intelligence failures until the last day the Bush administration was in office if they’d wanted to. Or later. God knows their base wanted them to. There’s always something to “get to the bottom of.”
The idea here, though, isn’t to get to the bottom of anything. It’s to try to make a criminal case out of a tragedy. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the new select committee, even saved us the trouble of having to do the usual decoding the other day when he said: “If an administration is slow-walking document production, I can’t end a trial simply because the defense won’t cooperate.”
Interesting. A “trial.” The “defense.” And we’re supposed to believe that we’re all just Americans looking for justice for Chris Stevens and the three others? This is sickening. We’ve had nine investigations and reports. They’re not going to learn anything new, and they’re not trying to. Democrats, do the American thing and have nothing to do with this charade.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, May 9, 2014
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