Karl Rove's Moment

[gristy]

This was just published today. It's a long article (4900 words and 8 pages when I pasted it into Word). I'm still reading it.



By Steve Perry
Minneapolis CityPages

When the Bush gang gets around to writing its memoirs, one year or five years from now, you can be certain no one will wax nostalgic about the winter of 2004--a time when several things went wrong at once, and when the White House was caught in a what looked like a long, white-knuckled skid, overtaken not just by events but by its own mistakes and disarray.

Nothing like it was ever supposed to happen on Karl Rove's watch. Since taking power three years earlier, the Bush administration had grown renowned for its lockstep political precision. Its messages were always kept simple, and the president's men and women all stayed on message. Whatever the talking point was this week, the White House would have a new way to underscore it each day. It was without question the single quality for which the White House received most universal praise among the press corps. (The fact that the Bush crew was widely admired by journalists precisely for making journalists perform like trained seals may be significant in assessing the Washington world Rove inherited.)

The maniacal micro-manager Rove, known to many as "Bush's Brain," was thought to oversee every detail. The evidence of his achievement was not just anecdotal. Rove drew the Senate under closer White House control by engineering the ouster of Trent Lott and installation of Bill Frist as Senate Majority Leader. And he kept America hearing what he wanted it to hear, in part by designing events that played well in 30 or 60 seconds of TV airtime. Karl Rove was made out to be a genius, a one-man repository of everything worth knowing about contemporary political practice.

More (lots more): http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1216/article12006.asp

[MikeG]

1. You can't polish a Turd Blossom.

[Maat]

3. Wow...that was both an awesome and very scary article.

Hope the Democratic Party/John Kerry get a hold of some excellent strategists. I, however, will steadfastly work to restore democracy to our government.

[jrthin]

2. This article needs to be emailed

to Kerry's campaign headquarters, and everyone in his campaign should read this article.

[gristy]

4. Done

Well, I sent it to them, anyways.

[Atman]

5. Amazing article. Thanks! n/t

,

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

6. That's what happens....

...when you let someone else do your thinking for you.

[Jade Fox]

7. Depressing. Good, but depressing...

Is there anyway to get Americans to stop voting with their emotions instead of their
brains? As long as a large segment of our population does that we will be forever
vulnerable to the most manipulative campaign with the most money. Republicans,
in otherwords.