March 2004

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A Ripping Good Yarn

I'm 2/3 through the Richard Clarke book, which I was too busy following to actually read last week. It's a page-turner, and possibly unique as far as I can remember.

I'll be back with comments on it in a day or two, but for now help me out with this question of the day:

Has any comparable insider political memoir ever been published this close in time to the events described, or at so pivotal a time politically?

I can't think of what it might be. Can you?

Tell me.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 29, 2004 2:10 PM

 

If Condi Rice Were a Movie Villain

My colleague Corey Anderson over at American Idle has uncovered startling evidence regarding the the president's national security adviser. Take a peek.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 24, 2004 10:24 AM

 

Karl Rove's Moment

How "Bush's Brain" hijacked Washington DC and politics-as-usual

 

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 the White House was caught in 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 lock-step 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 in 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.

By late 2002, the New York Times was calling his operation "one of the most powerful White Houses in at least a generation," wielding "what even Democrats say is a stunning degree of authority." But nobody said Rove got his way just by being smart. Colleagues and observers speak of the Mark of Rove--the trail of dirty tricks (none ever formally connected to him) that extends from the fortuitous discovery of an electronic bug in campaign chief Rove's office in the waning days of the 1986 Texas governor's race to the various smears passed around regarding John McCain in the 2000 primaries. But opponents probably fear Rove less than his own people do. He has rarely let a Republican functionary step out of line without trying to exact vengeance--as publicly demonstrated last year when former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill suggested in a book that Bush had meant to invade Iraq all along. O'Neill soon found himself under threat of prosecution for brandishing supposedly classified documents on 60 Minutes. He apologized and reversed himself, as the objects of Rove's wrath often do.

But 2004 brought trouble, and for a time the White House seemed to have no idea what to do. Some of their problems were circumstantial, even mundane, normal waves in the cycle of election pageantry. When the primary season began in January, the media play given to Democratic attack rhetoric took a toll. (The only surprising thing was its brash tone: Democrats hadn't gotten so abrasive with a sitting Republican president since Nixon.) Coupled with job growth figures that lacked any pulse at all, the Democrats' campaign sent Bush downticking to the lowest approval ratings of his term.

Which in turn emboldened a press corps that had never exactly held Bush's feet to the fire. Reporters hectored the administration more urgently and regularly on a range of subjects. They came snooping after the president's National Guard record, and old questions--regarding pre-war intelligence fabrications, and the White House's outing of an undercover CIA agent for political revenge--continued to linger. It could have been worse; many other egregious failures and scandals remained effectively untouched by the Democrats and the media even during the brief siege on Bunker 1600.

What no one expected was that the worst damage would be inflicted by the White House's own hand. To no one's real surprise, Bush himself sprung the first leak. In January he unofficially kicked off his campaign with a shapeless State of the Union address that critics aptly likened to a laundry list. Then, reportedly at his own insistence, W signed on for an unusual hour-long Meet the Press appearance in which he seemed so distracted and nearly catatonic that you half-expected him to wander out of the room before it was over. It was unquestionably the low point in Bush's scant number of unscripted encounters with TV cameras, and only its effective burial on Sunday morning television kept it from becoming a major public embarrassment.

It wasn't just Bush. The whole White House apparatus sputtered. Under Rove's direction, Team W had always responded to criticism in shrill, peremptory, and brutally unified fashion. Besides O'Neill, another critic it sought to punish was Joseph Wilson, a key figure in establishing that the administration knew its prewar claims about Iraqi WMD were false. White House operatives repaid the offense by leaking to numerous reporters the identity of Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative whose cover was blown for good when Bob Novak published the information. Just one problem: As political dirty tricks go, this one happened to constitute a felony, and a grand jury is currently showing signs of exploring the matter aggressively.

Well, everyone knew they were bullies. But few if any of the Great Minds paid to discuss such things ever believed that Rove's legendary command of "message," and of the foot soldiers charged with putting it across, would desert him. But suddenly there was the president on Meet the Press, offering what looked like an unplanned, impromptu pledge to release all relevant National Guard documents, and here was the White House spinning and fretting for days before coughing up the file. Other gaffes soon followed. They were nothing if not eclectic: Education Secretary Rod Paige compared America's unionized teachers to a terrorist band. The use of WTC attack footage in Bush/Cheney campaign ads elicited a bitter response from many survivors of 9/11 victims. And the New York Times reported on page one that the White House was cranking out "video news releases" in which actors hired to portray journalists read pro-Bush scripts--crypto-campaign commercials, that is, designed to air in newscasts as straight reportage.

But the administration's most potent screw-ups came in one of the areas it could least afford: the economy. First the White House released an obviously unvetted Economic Report of the President that called the outsourcing of American jobs a positive development. Then the White House planned the appointment of Anthony Raimondo to the Commerce Department as Bush's new manufacturing czar--proof the president was serious about keeping jobs here at home. But before they could even name Raimondo to the post, Democrats were already crowing over what they had learned from a simple search of the Nexis news database: Raimondo's own company recently built a plant in China. The appointment was scuttled.

A couple of days later, a Republican whisper campaign that had been growing in volume since January made the front pages of the Washington Post. Under the headline "Missteps on Economy Worry Bush Supporters," a former member of the administration was quoted as saying, "Somebody over there has to take complete and utter responsibility for everything that is publicly released from that White House. And no one is doing that." The story went on to note that "Democrats are drawing scrutiny to errors and inconsistencies that might have passed unnoticed a few months ago. 'This is a hyper-charged political environment, and they have not adapted,' the former official said."

A Republican attached to the Bush campaign offered this absurdly diplomatic rendering of the dilemma: "They've populated the place with an absence of ideas guys"--a feat, if you think about it, akin to covering a wall with an absence of paint--"which is fine if you think you can put it on autopilot and win. But it doesn't look like it's working."

What went so wrong so quickly? It was as if these notorious practitioners of hardball, smash-mouth politics had never even considered the prospect that they might have to absorb a punch at some point themselves.

After all, they never really had. And watching their façade crack in seeming slow motion, you might have been tempted to wonder if the myth of Karl Rove's genius, and George Bush's invincibility, owed as much to everyone else's failings as to their side's successes.

 

For such a mysterious figure, Karl Rove has been a remarkably unchanging commodity. Since childhood, politics and the Republican party have been his sole concerns. (Asked a few years ago when he first started weighing a presidential campaign, he named the day he was born, December 25, 1950.) And his entire career, spanning some 30 years, is bound together in large measure by his professional ties and personal devotion to George Bush the father and George Bush the son.

Which is to say, Rove is not quite the puppetmaster that the Bush-is-stupid crowd supposes. The history of his relationship with W is fraught with tensions, contests of ego and will, and occasional political disagreements that Rove did not always win. One token of the ambivalent undercurrent between them is the invariably withering series of nicknames Bush has applied to Rove: Boy Genius, Mr. Big Shot, Turd Blossom. (In west Texas, you see, desert flowers sometimes sprout from cow manure.) Rove may be the man with big ideas, but he is also, like everyone else around W, a subordinate--at best, an honorary member of the Bush clan.

You don't have to be a psychohistorian to see in it an element of compensation. Rove's family life as a child sounds fairly dismal. His father, a mineral geologist, was gone from home for long stretches, and finally walked out for good on Christmas Eve, 1969, which was also the eve of Karl's 19th birthday. A few years earlier, the family had uprooted from Nevada to move to Salt Lake City just as Karl was entering high school. According to Bush's Brain, Wayne Slater and James Moore's biography, the whole experience left Rove hungering for images of permanence, legitimacy, and authority. "In a city where the prevalent influences were political and religious," they wrote, "his family was neither. He grew up in an apolitical household, without religious mooring. Friend Mark Dangerfield told a reporter that it seemed to bother Rove that 'he was raised in a completely nonreligious home.'" (Though Rove may never have caught the religion bug himself, it figured prominently from the start in Rove's service to his one true god, the Republican party.)

Rove's ties to Bush the Elder commenced in 1973, when Poppy was the Republican national chairman and Karl aspired to be the president of the College Republicans. It was a post Rove could not win by the numbers. To circumvent them, he claimed that the organization was not adhering procedurally to the College Republican charter, and mounted credentials challenges to supporters of his opponent, Robert Edgeworth. In the end Rove essentially declared himself the winner of a separate election. The controversy got kicked upstairs to Bush, who awarded the election to Rove.

Later, in retaliation, Edgeworth leaked to the Washington Post that Rove was teaching dirty tricks seminars to young Republicans--and fresh off the humiliation of Watergate, no less. Bush promptly excommunicated Edgeworth from the Republican party for his disloyalty in leaking the story. Rove, along with his friend and College Republicans ally Lee Atwater, became favored Bush protégés. Rove moved to Texas in 1977 to toil as a fundraiser on George Sr.'s failed presidential-exploration PAC, the Fund for Limited Government. A year later he worked on an unsuccessful primary run for the Texas legislature by George W.

If his efforts on behalf of the Bushes didn't come to much at first, Rove's own career took off in Texas, where he would engineer a complete Republican takeover of the state's elective offices in a little over a decade's time. After working for a while as Governor Bill Clements's chief of staff, he started his own business in 1981: Karl Rove + Co., direct-mail specialists. Nicholas Lemann's May 2003 New Yorker profile of Rove is one of the few sketches of his career to appreciate the significance of this move:

"That Rove got his start in the direct-mail business, a technical and unglamorous political subspecialty, is important in understanding the way he thinks and operates today.... Media consultants tend to think of raising money as somebody else's job, but direct-mail consultants are fundraisers--there's that little envelope in each letter--and are more closely attuned to where the money is. Most important, direct-mail consultants are in the business of narrowcasting rather than broadcasting. They have to be on perpetual patrol for new groups with intense opinions about politics."

In politics there is nothing more useful than knowing where the money is, but Rove knew more than that. A voracious student of electoral history--and one of those people possessed of a seemingly eidetic memory for numbers and statistics that bordered on the freakish--Rove always knew where the votes were, too, and could, if you cared to listen, parse them in a dozen different ways on the spot and tell you how to woo each sub-segment of voters. Yet he wasn't just a numbers geek. As Rove made the transition from producing direct mail to running political campaigns, he proved quite good at concocting sturdy, simple campaign themes for general consumption. Rove could broadcast as well as narrowcast; he had the makings of a fine minister of propaganda--the intuitive facility for adducing that single, simple, forceful idea that would win the most people to your side, and the force of personality to repeat it over and over even if it was absurd.

And he was ruthless in chasing his goals, especially when it came to rivalries or power struggles with his own Republican cohorts. One of his foes, Tom Pauken--a Christian conservative who, as state party chair of Texas Republicans, stood in Rove's way for a time--characterized him this way in Bush's Brain: "Lee [Atwater] was the kind of guy who'd say, hey, you were against us here but you can be for us the next time. Karl is very different. If you cross him, you're on the list. And the more you cross him over a period of time, the higher you go on the list."

A Texas Medical Association lobbyist was more terse: "It is in Karl's nature to engulf and devour and control and to rule." Rove's tendency to make every fight personal, and to the death, may yet undo him. (Remember that he and his staff are still parties to an active criminal investigation over the leak of Valerie Plame's identity.) But Rove's rage for control is inseparable from the qualities that make him excel at what he does.

In outlook, one word seems to sum up Rove best: interloper. As a non-Mormon in Utah, a nondescript middle class kid who identified with political royalty, and more generally a conservative throughout the tumultuous '60s, Rove defined himself against the grain repeatedly. He seems to have learned two things in the process: what it feels like to count yourself part of a besieged but noble minority (which may be one reason Rove and the Republicans have been so good at crafting folksy, anti-elitist images on behalf of GOP elites), and how to rise up above any crowd and turn its attention to you.

Regarding the latter, it should be noted that geeky gentile Karl won the presidency of his largely Mormon high school class before he was through. In so doing, he must have seen the lesson that would shape his future, and punch his ticket out of Salt Lake City for good: You do not have to play by the rules, or respect the prevailing order of things, if you do your homework right, do the little things thoroughly, and--most important--act with absolute audacity when the time is right. This was quite literally how he came to the head of the College Republican class, and therefore to the attention of GHWB. (Later Rove found a Napoleon quotation that summed up his philosophy: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.") Finally, it was no doubt a great boon to Rove to hone his craft in Texas, a setting where few pretended to stand on rules or balk at cronyism, and many openly admired his kind of zeal and inventiveness in the screwing of enemies.

Along the way, Rove kept up his ties to the Bush family, working on Sr.'s successful run for president in 1988. When it came time to launch the political career of George W., every pol in Texas knew that Rove--if not, necessarily, Bush--had one eye on the White House from the start. But not even Mr. Timing himself could have anticipated how ripe the world inside the Beltway would be for his style of politics by the time he arrived.

 

Recently the Rove machine has started performing like its old self again, cranking out positioning ads and anti-Kerry ads and regaining control of the daily news agenda. A New York Times/CBS poll last week showed Bush creeping back ahead of Kerry, 46-43, though W's negatives remained high (54 percent said the country was headed in the wrong direction, matching Bush's all-time low). Last Wednesday a freshly poised Rove spoke to a group of conservative activists and fundraisers convened by anti-tax guru Grover Norquist. According to the AP account of the meeting, "Rove assured [the group] that Bush planned a nimble campaign able to counterpunch even before Kerry opens his mouth. The White House adviser pointed with pride to the Bush camp's response Tuesday, when it got word that Kerry planned a national security speech to veterans in West Virginia. Less than 24 hours after learning of the speech, the Bush campaign produced an ad criticizing Kerry for his Senate votes on military spending. It also dispatched volunteers to hand out pro-Bush material to West Virginians, and started radio ads in the state.

"The Bush campaign has material ready to go on Kerry based on his votes and speeches, said a Republican who attended the session. Whenever Kerry raises an issue, the Bush-Cheney campaign will be prepared to hand out leaflets, and run ads on TV and radio."

Rove is never without detailed attack strategies, but he always keeps the master plan simple. He once summed up the entire Bush 2000 campaign thus: Character, not issues; and play on the other guy's turf (that is, target and take away a few Democratic strongholds, as Republicans did in West Virginia and Al Gore's home state of Tennessee). The plan for 2004 is not hard to infer. Where issues are concerned, say that tax cuts stimulate growth and the president is tough on terrorism. But once again, make the main issue character--which really means personality. Make Bush look steady, likeable, strong. Make Kerry look feckless, self-serving, cynical. Include in the mix some tough-but-sentimental ad spots that function more or less like video yule logs burning in the electronic hearth: They encourage comfort with Bush. And raise enough cash to outspend God if it comes to that.

Now every school child knows that modern political campaigns revolve around cash, but that does not begin to express the Zen of Money as Rove practices it. His famous historical obsession with the election of 1896 holds some clues. The victory of Republican William McKinley over the free-silver Democrat William Jennings Bryan represented the first time that a candidate had been packaged so much like a product, or marketed to so many discrete corners of the populace. The Republicans' success in targeting the new urban immigrant working class helped them prevail, but at unprecedented cost. To finance it, the architects of McKinley's campaign, Mark Hanna and Charles Dawes, raised the unheard-of sum of $3.5 million by direct and urgent appeal to the captains of industry.

Rove's first rule of politics is to know where the money is. His first rule of governance is to keep one's political base mollified while setting about the serious work of assuring the commanding allegiance of big political donors in the next election cycle. In 2001, when the Bush administration made cutting taxes on the highest marginal rates its first order of domestic business, the implications for future fundraising could not have been lost on Rove. In this White House, it might have been the main impetus for starting with tax cuts. In any case, Rove expects to have something in excess of $200 million to make Bush's case to the people. (In case you don't plan to watch, here it is: Go back to sleep.)

It's said one quality that sets Rove apart is his ability to see the whole playing field in politics. So let's talk about the playing field that Rove seems to see.

Start with the people: They are tired, overworked, and scared--about their own livelihoods and threats from without. More important, they are woefully ignorant, and easily worn down, concerning the details of any political subject. They are acclimated to political races in which the main differences revolve around personality, and comfortable making almost entirely emotional decisions about candidates. This is an overgeneralization, but to date a viable one. Presidential elections are mass-culture phenomena, and the majority of voters in any election know very little of substance about the candidates or issues involved.

The media: On a mass basis, the medium that matters most by far is television. According to a 2003 Pew Research Center study, over 80 percent of Americans claim to get most of their news from TV. And if you take the further step of looking at TV news viewership numbers, you will find them pretty underwhelming. The only sensible conclusion is that a great many Americans consume political news in sporadic, sidelong fashion if at all. Many others try to follow events, but lack the time for anything but a few minutes of cable news and glance at their newspaper's front page.

Two things follow. First, the relative impact of political ads versus news coverage is much greater than a casual observer might think. Second, and more important, if you can keep bad news off the front page and off TV news, most people will never even know it happened. There are only a handful of media organizations in charge of what Americans see on the national TV news, and they are always looking over their shoulders at each other. They're not just pack animals; they're an exceptionally small and manageable pack. Give them interesting things to take pictures of, toss them an emotionally charged sideshow like gay marriage occasionally, and they will show the public whatever you want them to see.

The political opposition: Please. They were pathetic to start with, and September 11 paralyzed them completely. The Democrats have been chasing Republicans' fumes since Reagan. For the past generation they have not disagreed with the GOP in principle on any of the important points of empire, capital's prerogatives, or economic austerity at home; they just fuss more and go slower. To them, elections have been battles over market share more than the direction of things. In the process, the Democratic party has gone soft. It's politically unserious, no longer capable of putting up a sustained fight. This is nothing new. Republicans got away with Iran/contra in the '80s, and Bill Clinton was nearly booted from office for illicit blowjobs. George Bush I got little flack for pardoning Iran/contra conspirators on his way out of office; Bill Clinton let a sleazy financier named Marc Rich off the hook, and Republicans kept the issue in play for weeks.

 

All of which brings us to Karl Rove's radical insight, his claim to true genius if he has one. He arrived in Washington knowing that the vaunted institutions of democracy were bankrupt, that the whole civics-class edifice of checks and balances, reasoned political debate, and a vigorous, impartial press amounted to a paper line you could just walk through. (The terms of his boss's 2000 win proved that: Whatever might be said about fraud and chicanery in Florida, no one can dispute that it all came down to a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in which two of the justices who voted for Bush had family members who worked for his campaign.) If it wasn't quite as simple as that formulation makes it sound, the project proved no less feasible in the end. It involved the two central virtues invoked by Napoleon: audacity and an "extremely circumspect defensive." For Bush/Rove in 2004, the latter means a massive effort to divert attention from the facts of Bush's record.

But the totality of their successes can't be put down to running slick campaigns. For a good three years, the Bush gang had its way with "the political process" without being called to account for much of anything. The autocratic prerogative they've enjoyed is so glaring that a line of apologetics has already been constructed for posterity: The whole political system rolled over for Bush because it was the patriotic thing to do after 9/11.

Aside from being largely untrue, this explanation also fails to explain anything. If the post-September 11 world was suddenly defined by a war against terrorism, then surely any great, or halfway-sound, democracy would have indulged in vigorous debate over the course of the fight. Voices surely would have risen up to question the wisdom of invading a nation whose terrorism threat looked--and, shockingly, turned out to be--fictitious. All the while, a free press would have dug in its heels and sought to illuminate the underlying issues (the range of them, mind you, not just the officially sanctioned ones) to a concerned citizenry. But none of this ever happened, unless you count the lonely, stately protests of Robert Byrd as an "opposition."

So there you go. To speak of Karl Rove's successes is to speak of the failures and corruptions of American politics and public life. They are two expressions of the same thing. Since January and the start of the Democratic presidential campaign, there has been some hint of life in the loyal opposition and the press; American newspapers, led by the big three (New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times), have turned notably more critical in their Bush coverage. Any one of numerous potential scandals still might return to haunt the administration. (One of the figures reportedly implicated in the criminal investigation of the Plame leak is Rove underling I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.) There are also signs that Democrats aren't the only ones in the Washington political establishment feeling anxious about Bush's brazenness and his reckless, sloppy management of economy and empire. This circle is not a great power in electoral politics, but they could lend fuel to a media feeding frenzy, if one arose.

The president could lose this election, as I'm guessing Rove surmised early on. In crafting a campaign that is half poison-pen note, half Hallmark card, he and George W. are wagering against a lot of things: real, and serious, competition from John Kerry and the Democrats. Sustained criticism of Bush in the media. These aren't bad bets. The news media has proven that it does consist mainly of deadline-driven trained seals, most of whom don't know much about the issues in question themselves. But they do know the rules of political theater, and that is what they write about. Rove and the Republicans understand this so much better than the Democrats that in terms of hand-to-hand political combat, it's a little like the Democratic National Committee beer-ball team against the New York Yankees.

John Kerry has been slowly dematerializing in the public imagination since his wrapup of the nomination came into view. He has made some trenchant criticisms of Bush, but he hasn't made any of them stick. He doesn't know how. It's still possible that Kerry and the Dems could put the White House back on the defensive, force them off their game--but they've been losing that battle for a month now, and can't afford to keep losing it much longer.

It doesn't mean Bush is home free. No matter how well you do political campaigns, there is always the faint chance that too many people will already have seen through you. The amazing thing about 2004 is not that a radical, reckless president has the chance to be reelected; the amazing thing is that, in the face of a political establishment and a news media that rarely said boo to George W. Bush, millions and millions of people have his number anyway. Where the people are concerned, therefore, Karl and W. are forced to make a dicier bet--against public memory, decency, and self-interest. It isn't clear yet whether terror fears and "wedge" issues like gay marriage, guns, and religion will once again divert sufficient numbers of people from more pressing matters, such as their own livelihoods. Maybe not.

On the other hand, Karl Rove has never lost a race yet by underestimating the integrity and rationality of American electoral politics.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 21, 2004 7:23 PM

 

Kerry's VP: An Immodest Proposal

Remember this guy?

He's the one.
(JohnEdwards2004.com)

That ol' debbil conventional wisdom now holds that since the Midwest has the greatest concentration of battleground states, Kerry will and should select a running mate from that region. The names advanced most regularly are Dick Gephardt, Evan Bayh, and Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, three of the whitest (or maybe that should be least colorful) men in these United States. I am from Iowa myself, and I've barely registered an impression of Vilsack or of Hoosier favorite son Bayh. Dick Gephardt would make people everywhere long for the grace and dynamism of Al Gore. Regardless of origins, none will be big Midwestern vote getters (unless Kerry wants to shoot the moon on Missouri, and nothing else).

I would humbly make a case for the old CW choice, John Edwards. Remember his showing in Iowa, and his exit poll numbers among independents in the states that allowed them to participate. Jobs are the central issue in most of these states, and Edwards has already demonstrated he connects very well on that issue. It's missing the point to think of him as a Southern candidate who would be superfluous in the Midwest. Quite the contrary: Consider him the issues candidate who gives the Democrats an opening that John "Special Interests" Kerry will not get very far pushing by himself.

Yes? No? Tell me what you think.

At Long Last...

I've finally finished a draft of "Karl Rove's Moment" (aka "The Goddamn Thing"), which will appear next Wednesday (3/24) in City Pages. I'll post it here over the weekend after I've had a chance to do some rewriting.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 19, 2004 6:51 PM

 

Monday Notes

I'm not a Bush backer, but I play one on TV

Ever practical, BC04 has uncovered a new means of building a successful press event: Stage it with actors.

The smoking gun in Major Dick's secret energy policy deliberations?

This weekend I finally read Jane Mayer's February 16 New Yorker piece on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, which contains this passage:

In Ron Suskind's recent book The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges that Cheney agitated for US intervention [in Iraq] well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level NSC official, concerned Cheney's newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the NSC staff to cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the "melding" of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: "the review of operational policies toward rogue states," such as Iraq, and "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."...

Mark Medish [a Clinton-era NSC staffer]... said, "People think Cheney's Energy Task Force has been secretive about domestic issues," referring to the fact that the Vice-President has been unwilling to reveal information about private task force meetings that took place in 2001, when information was being gathered to help develop President Bush's energy policy. "But if this little group was discussing geostrategic plans for oil, it puts the issue of war in the context of the captains of the oil industry sitting down with Cheney and laying grand, global plans."

Posted by Steve Perry at March 15, 2004 9:51 AM

 

BC04: Bereft and Bamboozled

Bush/Cheney and their campaign guru keep on floundering: why?

Despite recent attacks, the president remains resolute
in his principles: pro-flag, pro-photo op
(from the BC04 photo gallery)

Republican functionaries continue to stew about the White House's prolonged bout of political aphasia. In today's Los Angeles Times, a few of them are quoted:

"We've seen a lot of mistakes and, frankly, some degree of incompetence out of an operation that, up to now, was closing ranks and executing very well," said a GOP strategist who sometimes advises the White House....

"I worry about Ohio," said one outside campaign advisor, who also requested anonymity. "We've got a real vulnerability on the jobs issue if we can't get that discussion going in a different direction."...

"We need key states in the Midwest, where the whole outsourcing [of jobs] is a big problem, and we don't have an answer," said a GOP strategist on Capitol Hill who requested anonymity. "This White House that seemed to be so disciplined, so political, doing such a good job, looks awfully bumbling to me."

Read the rest.

Where is the genius Karl Rove in all this, and what's got him so hog-tied? I've already discussed a couple of the factors in past posts: the White House's very real shock at finding itself the recipient and not the dispenser of frontal assaults; the fact that Bush really has no record of unimpeachable accomplishments to sell--which is further complicated by the various messes his administration has made in putting politics over policy at every turn. (To the extent the "bipartisan" political establishment shows signs of turning on Bush, it is not an issue of ideology but of managerial competence; even if no one remembers it at the moment, former adviser John DiIulio's line about "Mayberry Machiavellis" who obsess over political control while disdaining the pedestrian details of governance is haunting the Bushmen in spirit.)

None of this is necessarily insurmountable, but I wonder if BC04's missteps are predicated on more fundamental mistakes in reading the political terrain--a plight from which they really might not be able to recover.

Based on what we've seen to date, Rove's tactical sensibilities seem not to have changed one whit. As he frequently did in Texas, he is leaning heavily on emotionally charged political sideshows--"wedge issues"--in an effort to retain working class voters who have gravitated to the Republicans in the past 20 years. The fabled NASCAR Dads targeted by Bush/Rove are not a new, adaptive factor in the equation; they used to be known as organized labor, and they are essentially the Reagan Democrats the party has courted in every election since 1984.

But Rove's wedge issues, gay marriage being the main exemplar, have a lot less traction so far than BC04 needs from them. Most working people this year are thinking harder about their own prospects than about stopping sodomy in its tracks. Gay marriage ranked 23rd out of 24 policy issues in a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center a couple of months ago. No doubt the number now would be marginally higher, given the media spotlight, but it still isn't clear that the Bushmen will be able to do anything to divert the Great Middle from the subject of its own pocketbooks.  

Posted by Steve Perry at March 12, 2004 6:23 PM

 

Tenet Trips Up Cheney

It appears CIA director George Tenet is causing trouble for the White House again. As chronicled in this New York Times piece, Tenet told Congress yesterday that he repeatedly corrected Bush/Cheney's public utterances about Iraq intelligence leading up to the war. 

I think this sort of thing helps make sense of why the White House is so off-kilter these days. For about three years they commanded an essentially fabulist regime in which there was no necessary connection between a) their statements and reality, or b) their statements yesterday and their statements today. I think the wave of scrutiny that's descended on them in the past few months has absolutely shocked them. They're masters of smash-mouth politics, but they have no idea what to do when they get smashed in the mouth. It's a new experience.  

Posted by Steve Perry at March 10, 2004 11:47 AM

 

Plame/Novak: Rove Goes on Record

What did Karl say, and when did he say it? 

The forehead that launched
a thousand ships

Murray Waas is reporting at the American Prospect website that Karl Rove was questioned last fall by the FBI in its investigation of the leak of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. (The backstory, if you aren't already familiar with it, is partly sketched in my Monday post.)

According to Waas, Rove's line was that he had indeed spread the story about Plame--but only after it appeared in Bob Novak's infamous dispatch, which of course was fed to Novak by some underling of Rove or Dick Cheney.

Don't go thinking that Rove will be deposed. Like Cheney, he is there for the long haul. But Waas's report does threaten to put Rove in breach of one of his own cardinal rules--never become an issue in your candidate's campaign. For that reason, Kerry et al. ought to make it their business to point fingers at Rove wherever possible. The better he's known, the less he and his boss will be liked.  

Posted by Steve Perry at March 9, 2004 7:30 PM

 

Developing: Drudge Even Lamer Than Usual

Sleuth of Sleaze falls on hard times

Since that golden day six years ago when he beat the world to the disclosure that a White House intern had wrapped her lips round the First Knob, Matt Drudge has been left behind by the breaking-news game. The past couple of months have seen him tumble to new lows. If you're keeping score at home, the intrepid Drudge--I said once that he wanted to be Rush Limbaugh's dog, but I underestimated him; he wants to be Roy Cohn--has so far loosed these fusillades against John Kerry and the Democrats:

John Kerry (actually, one of his campaign operatives) may have had sexual relations with an intern (actually, an AP stringer)!

John Kerry stood near Jane Fonda one day over 30 years ago! (Except that the picture in question was actually a Photoshop collage.)

His latest, and I think finest, work:

There are swear words on the discussion boards at John Kerry's website!

The last one is true, at least. Maybe he's on an upswing and we just don't recognize it yet.

The amazing thing is that Drudge and the other right-wing bleaters get away with being so patronizing so consistently. Can't his readers, some of them at least, see how stupid he thinks they are?

We may as well make this into a

Question of the Day

What will Drudge's next scoop be? 

Developing: Kerry once invited to Neverland Ranch...

Report: Kerry has "seen pornography on numerous occasions in his life"...

Exclusive: Kerry frowns, spits out cookie baked by supporter....

Needless to say, you can do better than this. Send 'em here.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 9, 2004 3:48 PM

 

Tuesday Notes

 

Oops. Wrong JFK. (From Duke Univ collection)

 

Kerry Finally Cites 9/11 Stonewalling

On Sunday, the same day I wrote my column lamenting John Kerry's failure to go after W's abysmal national security record, JK finally spoke up on the subject, accusing the White House of stonewalling the Kean Commission's September 11 investigation. It's a start, but he buried the lede, as it were, by raising the subject in a Mississippi appearance that revolved mainly around the question of--just guess--gay marriage. He needs to do a lot better than that, and there is plenty of ammo for a sustained attack, as Dan Eggen intimates in today's Washington Post.

The Polls

Kerry leads Bush by 8 points nationally in the latest Gallup survey, but the Washington Post puts the margin at 4, and includes a number of details that ought to be unsettling to both sides.

The bad news for Bush: a stagnant 50 percent approval rating accompanied by new lows on several key issues: the economy (39 percent approve), Iraq (46 percent) and the deficit (30 percent).

The bad news for Kerry: Despite Bush's being at an all-time low ebb in popularity, the race is still quite close and Bush's support is more solid. Nine of 10 Bush backers are bullish on their guy; only two-thirds of Kerry partisans say the same. And six of 10 prospective Kerry voters say their vote will be against Bush, not for Kerry.

That isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it does suggest that the best way for Kerry to build support is to keep on attacking the Bush record, as suggested here the other day. Kerry's plight flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that says negative campaigning dries down public interest and voter turnout: In a country polarized on the question of Bush, the Democratic swing voters had better include the Bush-resenter who is so disaffected he/she doesn't usually vote anymore.

So naturally the Dems are out doing

Voter Registration

Actually, as far as I can tell, they aren't even making noble-sounding noises about it. The Republicans, however, are--they are exhorting members via email to do grassroots registration of family, friends, and co-workers, and they have dispatched an 18-wheel semi rig (dubbed "Reggie") to travel the country signing up those much-prized NASCAR dads.

Who Killed Howard Dean

Even as the Democrats were descending upon Howard Dean en masse, there were those party apologists who claimed that there was no party "establishment" as such, and thus it could not possibly be working to overthrow Dean's candidacy.

Now, courtesy of this Charles Lewis (Center for Public Integrity) report posted at Counterpunch, we know that Americans for Jobs, the front group that ran the most virulent anti-Dean ads--including one that used a picture of Osama bin Laden--was a creature of the party establishment through and through. Its principal support came from backers of John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and Wes the Weasel Clark, and it got $50,000 from the campaign war chest of vanquished and disgraced New Jersey Senator Bob Torricelli, whom Lewis fingers as a Kerry 2004 fundraiser as well.

No, there's no Democratic party establishment. The Dems are just a lot of good friends who think alike.

When He Says "No Child Left Behind," You Know He Means It

Via Drudge, we learn that John Ramsey--yes, that John Ramsey--is weighing a GOP run for a Michigan congressional seat. I'm going to take a wild guess that Karl Rove will not approve.    

Posted by Steve Perry at March 9, 2004 7:24 AM

 

Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush

Time to go after Bush/Cheney Ground Zero: national security

 

We are barely a week into the general phase of what is touted as an epic, epochal battle for the White House, and already I suspect the Democrats would be mortified if some pollster dared to ask the two most obvious questions: Do you find the campaign so far engaging, or dull? Are you tired of it yet?

 

The Republicans are another story. A campaign in which the Great Middle does not see much of a stake is their fondest wish. And in the past couple of weeks, with John Kerry's complicity, they are herding the "public dialogue," meaning the White House press corps, back in that direction. It doesn't much matter that they are widely criticized over gay marriage or the use of 9/11 footage in their first campaign ads--any day that the Bush gang keeps the public mind off the many messes it's already made is a good day.

 

Kerry, meantime, has spent the two or three weeks since his nomination became inevitable merely coasting along, offering up the same stump-tested applause lines wherever he goes and giving every appearance of turning back into the stolid, charmless retail campaigner he's always been. As Ron Brownstein wrote in the LA Times, "the Massachusetts senator stands as the presumptive nominee with many unsure whether he intends to steer the party to the left or back toward the centrist themes associated with Bill Clinton--or impose no distinctive direction at all."

 

But Kerry and the Democrats' most glaring weakness is not ideological. It's their failure to keep going after Bush's record in a concerted way. Kerry's people were said to be angry that DNC chair Terry McAuliffe brought up the Guard issue "too soon." That's just daft. There is wreckage enough in Bush's wake to keep the White House off-balance on a regular basis throughout the campaign season, and Kerry loses ground (invisibly, for now) every day that he keeps quiet about the particulars.

 

There's only one logical place to start, and that is where Bush has staked his claim to reelection. Speaking to the New York Times, one highly placed Republican dismissed the flap over Bush's 9/11-themed ads this way: "Are we on the Democrats' issue of health care, or are we on the Republican issue of national security? On Wednesday we rolled out the [TV ads]--we changed the tone fundamentally. [The Democrats] missed the opportunity to tell the American people what the campaign is about. This is how the president has framed the question before the American people."

 

One could go further than that. National security isn't just Bush's main issue; it's the only one he's got. And even there he is hugely vulnerable on numerous counts. There is more than enough bad news to keep Scott McClellan sputtering into his lapel pin from now to November, if the Democrats have the stomach to push matters.

 

Osama. International wire stories have reported for the past month that the US has redoubled its pursuit of bin Laden and may have him pinned inside a 10-mile-by-10-mile stretch of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. There's a good chance that he or his carcass will be produced before the election. Kerry needs to air a few questions before he's drowned out in the fanfare. Why did the Bush administration drain resources away from its offensive against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan to invade Iraq? And what additional damage has been wrought or planned in the meantime by people left on the loose? The Taliban is resurgent and so is al-Qaeda, which in the past year has taken credit for attacks in Saudi Arabia and assaults against US troops in Iraq. And that is to say nothing about the additional recruits drawn to bin Laden's cause by the prolonged US chase after him.

 

The 9/11 investigation. Two simple, soundbite-ready talking points: Why did the White House ignore summer 2001 intelligence warnings that something "spectacular," probably involving airplanes, was on the way? And why has the administration stonewalled and dragged its feet in response to a congressional investigation and the current 9/11 panel? Hammer hard on the latter. Say that the administration's political concern over its own fate is being placed above the interests of homeland security, which demand that we understand exactly what happened in the interest of avoiding similar disasters in the future. Say, too, that Bush's actions are an insult to the memory of 9/11 victims.

 

If Kerry's instincts about the National Guard story are any indication, he probably intends to let this issue lie until the Kean panel releases its 9/11 report in late July. Big mistake. Put it out there and let it start percolating now, and you ensure that more people will be paying attention when the report eventually drops.

 

The Department of Homeland Security. Here's one of the most underreported stories of the war on terror: Tom Ridge's DHS is still pretty much the blank façade it was on the day Bush et al. conjured it into being. The department's ostensible purpose is to collect and examine intelligence about security threats from a multitude of sources and distill it all into something timely and useful. It's a joke. DHS still lacks a software-architecture plan for doing its job, much less the funding to implement one. There isn't much to the enterprise beyond a letterhead on stationery.

 

Iraq. The administration dummied up intelligence reports about weapons of mass destruction that Saddam no longer possessed, and sought to mislead the public about a fictitious bin Laden/Saddam connection--all to justify an invasion that has cost hundreds of American lives and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars before it's through. And they did so with no plan for administering postwar Iraq or returning it to native control. The continued fighting has rallied thousands of young volunteers from throughout the region to the cause of jihad against the American presence. How exactly does all this improved US national security for the long haul? Highlight the war profiteering by Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton.  

 

The Plame/Novak affair. The recurring theme in each of the previous cases is that politics always trump serious questions of national security in this White House. The outing of Valerie Plame makes the point manifest in a way that's eminently digestible on television. Plame's troubles started last summer when her husband, a diplomat named Joseph Wilson, revealed in a New York times op-ed column that the White House knew Saddam was not buying uranium from Niger well before Bush claimed he was in the 2003 State of the Union. Top administration staffers later leaked to several reporters that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent. GOP flack Bob Novak published it. But Plame was an undercover operative, and it happens to be a felony to blow the cover of a spy. Though the matter has barely registered in the news lately, a grand jury is investigating the matter. A few days ago, it subpoenaed telephone records from Air Force One. This could turn into a major legal prosecution, but meanwhile it's astonishing that the Democrats are not selling it more forcefully as political scandal.

 

Once again, Kerry seems content to play it cautious and hope that others will do his heavy lifting for him. Not bloody likely. If the candidate and the party don't start lighting into Bush soon--not only by public pronouncement, but by spoonfeeding provocative stories to the media as avidly as the Republicans do--Kerry's chance to define Bush before he is defined by Bush may dry up for good. 

Posted by Steve Perry at March 8, 2004 6:25 AM

 

Let's Talk About Rove

The "genius" factor

Right now I'm working on a column about where the Kerry campaign should attack first; it'll be posted here by Monday morning, maybe sooner. But meanwhile I'd like to solicit your thoughts on a new subject:

Tell me what you make of Karl Rove. What qualities does he possess that make him good at what he does? What are his greatest strengths? What are his weaknesses?

I have my own views on the subject, which I'll be writing about in City Pages on March 24 (or thereabouts). But I'll refrain from expressing them until I've heard what you've got to say.

So tell me. Novel theories will be credited, and possibly quoted.

Posted by Steve Perry at March 5, 2004 5:39 PM

 

Over the Cliff With JFK

Guaranteed to contain no mention of Mel Gibson or The Passion of the Christ

Dig that crazy bleat. (from johnkerry.com)

Now that Kerry has put away the nomination, let us pause today to remember the name of Lena Guerrero. At one time Guerrero was the rising star in the Texas Democratic party, an ambitious and demographically opportune figure first elected to the state legislature when she was only 25. At the urging of then-governor Ann Richards, whose 1990 victory Guerrero helped to engineer, she was tapped to speak in prime time at the 1992 Democratic convention. USA Today featured her on a list of possible female presidential candidates of the future.

That same year, Guerrero was running to retain a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission--a powerful body that regulates oil and gas interests in the state, and regularly serves as a springboard to higher political office. The commander of the Texas Republican party made it his business to end Guerrero's rise. He obtained a copy of college transcripts that proved she had lied about her academic resume--she had never graduated college or received a Phi Beta Kappa key, and she failed classes on Texas government and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest.

Then, according to Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl Cannon's book Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains Behind the Remarkable Political Triumph of George W. Bush: 

Rove waited. He waited until after the Democratic primary, when Guerrero was the only viable Democratic candidate. He waited until after Guerrero delivered the commencement speech at Texas A&M University, and told students: "I remember well my own commencement." He waited until after the Democratic convention, when Guerrero's profile was higher than it had ever been. And he waited until after his own candidate for the Railroad Commission, Barry Williamson, gave his midday speech to the Republican National Convention.....

"Karl had Lena's transcript," said an Austin political consultant. "But he held it until the right moment. The perfect moment. Then he screwed her."

Now we'll finally see what the Bushmen mean to throw at John Kerry. Will they really hew to the Massachusetts-liberal/Vietnam-radical line they've telegraphed, and if they do, how many people will care? And have they got any Kerry scandals more potent than his non-affair with a non-intern?

Posted by Steve Perry at March 3, 2004 9:37 AM

 

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