Analysis: Is Karl Rove the Next Joe Trippi?

[kskiska]

By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst

WASHINGTON, March 8 (UPI) -- Is Karl Rove the new Joe Trippi of U.S. politics: a supposed genius who turns out to be just a disastrously unrealistic dreamer when the real campaign starts? It's starting to look that way.

Even Democratic Party insiders and Kerry campaign strategists have been bewildered at the passive silence and blundering slowness of the massive Republican Attack Machine to crank up and start countering their own powerful and highly effective blasts.

Through late January and all of February, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts rapidly closed enormous credibility and popularity gaps with President George W. Bush as he vaulted to the head of the Democratic presidential pack. Yet as Kerry's star rapidly rose on the fires of his withering attacks on the president -- and the Trippi-led campaign of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean collapsed -- the Bush campaign sat on its colossal $150 million campaign chest and did nothing.

Kerry strategists were delighted by the silence but also puzzled and even un-nerved by it. They took it for granted that it was only a matter of time before all the GOP guns starting blasting away at them.

Last week, the much-feared attack finally came: and it turned out to be a damp squib. The new $10.5 million Republican ad campaign focused on symbolic shots of Bush at Ground Zero, the remains of the World Trade Center after its "9/11" destruction. And while many of the families of the more than 2,800 people who perished there found the footage in perfectly fine taste, many others of course did not. The issue became a controversy. The Kerry campaign and its own Attack Machine eagerly seized on it and the president's champions and spokespersons suddenly found themselves playing on the defensive and caught off balance.

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http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040308-062601-8759r

[KittyWampus]

1. Perhaps Rove Is Over Confident The Trial Of Saddam

or the possible capture of Osama
or the use of NYC and 9/11 will work

Perhaps they have some nuclear option

Perhaps they feel like saving much of those millions for making Kerry's life miserable AFTER he gets elected

[still_one]

2. What do you mean

He is going over to the Kerry campaign?

I certainly hope not

[DinahMoeHum]

3. No. There's nothing to indicate that Trippi is/was a dirty trickster,

unlike Rove.


:kick:

[virtualobserver]

4. I never felt that Rove was particularly skilled.....

But neither Gore, nor the media elite ever called him on the nonsense that he was spewing out.

Rove is not used to playing on a level playing field.

[belle]

5. Rove's "genius," such as it is, is sheer chutzpah.

He, and most of the Bush administration, have basically gotten by on two prinicples: go so low that people will be so stunned that you're actually stooping to that degree that they don't react in time to stop it; and what I call the "I'm a Loud Dog!" principle. As in: Dilbert cartoon wherein Dogbert goes to the boss' office and yells: "I'M A LOUD DOG! YOU MUST GIVE ME A JOB BECAUSE I'M LOUD!" and the boss goes, "okay, okay! Just stop yelling!" and Dogbert thinks: "Hm, too easy" and then yells for something else.

[RamboLiberal]

7. I wonder if Rove read too many of his own press clippings

I really think his tactics will backfire against a candidate and an enraged electorate like us who will fight back.

[tom_paine]

6. No. He's the new Josef Goebbels

Do not be fooled by the snake's current quiescence into petting it. You'll get a venom-filled bite that way.

[randr]

8. Rove and his "strategy" are from a past century

We have real issues such as terrorism, global warming, an economy heading off shore, and social issues that the right have brought to the table to deal with. Now that some of the public are waking up and engaging themselves in the political process Rove and his ilk have no clue what to do. The "fright wing party" will be in pieces because their inept,indecisive leader will be focusing his eyes on the train light headed his way.

[JPZenger]

9. Rove

Rove is from a past century - he models himself after Mark Hanna - the political boss who controlled President McKinley. That is a very strange person to consider your role model. When Teddy Roosevelt took office, the first thing he did was kick Hanna back to Ohio.

It will be a long hard battle with many surprises yet to come. So far, the attacks against Kerry have been very predictable. However, they always save the worst for last.

Just look at what Karl Rove did to John McCain in the 2000 Primary. There were all kinds of vicious things going on behind the scenes, plus slander using anonymous telephone "push polls", plus attempts to use technicalities to kick McCain off the New York State ballot.

[PATRICK]

10. Maybe the New Charm campaign

was as much about rehabilitating Rove as Bush. EVERYONE has focused so much on Rove that any "dirty" campaign would automatically be laid to his doorstep and make him an early, exposed and controversial commodity detracting from Bush.

Instead of doing what Bush needs to do, his hardest working hit man tried to seize the "high road" in the only way he knows how to. The Big Lie as upbeat triumph. Now, just as when Cheney pops up and makes himself a nuisance, Rove is actually a self-serving liability and Bush has no other and certainly no acumen like Kerry to reorganize with anyone else even if you gave him a trillion dollars to blow on the election.

Like Dean, Bush will find it easy to burn the money in a campaign askew of his real needs and a dependency on his campaign genius harder to kick than a heroin addiction.

I am not comfortable in comparing Dean to W in any way but in the one demonstrated way of campaign meltdown, we may be seeing a more spectacular, more exaggerated repeat. The only trouble is that it is very early and the props holding up Bush have not decided to totally let him down(Media, party, beholding business support). Dean did not have the time or the supports- to put it mildly, but he certainly had a more substantial case and public record that Bush can ever have.

And Bush is a lousy speaker, dependent on broad delegation of activity, weak under pressure, with more negatives and hardened opposition than any figure on the political scene.

Bush has hung on uncritically to practically every liability in his organization. He has to, otherwise by that kind of thinking he'd have to step down himself.