The Karl Rove crush
"If I were them [Democrats], I'd be scared to death about November's elections."
-- Mark Halperin, director of ABC News' political unit, June 22, 2006
My favorite article from the just-completed campaign season appeared in the October 9 issue of Time, in which Mike Allen and James Carney wrote a detailed piece about why Republicans were not worried about the upcoming elections. "The G.O.P.'s Secret Weapon," read the bold headline. "You think the Republicans are sure to lose big in November? They aren't. Here's why things don't look so bad to them," read the subhead.
The article went on and on about how an "eerie, Zen-like calm" had fallen over GOP operatives who, despite a mountain of public polling data, did not fear big election losses. In fact, they coolly insisted their own prospects were "getting better by the day." Why the tranquility? Lots of reasons, according to Time, including the party's "sophisticated, expensive and largely unnoticed" campaign to identify likely voters. Time also gave the GOP points for playing the expectations game better than Democrats and for having more resources. Time ended on this chipper note: "As long as they [Republicans] end up keeping control of both houses, they still come out the winner on Election Day."
Forget about reading the analysis post-election, with Democrats now busy installing new drapes. The article produced real-time cringes, mostly because of the context, which was virtually void of skepticism. There's nothing wrong with journalists checking in with Republicans and getting their side during the campaign season. But the tone of the Time piece -- the working assumption that Republicans would naturally find a way to outsmart Democrats -- was startling considering the circumstances. Meaning, Bush at the time stood as the most unpopular second-term president in modern history in part because the White House had spent the previous 18 months careening between a series of political debacles (Social Security, Katrina, immigration, port security, Iraq).
In other words, Bush's presidency was in shambles (think Jimmy Carter, circa 1979), yet Time eagerly passed along the transparent spin about how Republican chances were "getting better by the day." Those kinds of simplistic campaign talking points worked wonders with right-wing bloggers and radio talk show hosts who excitedly repeated them as a way to calm their nerves during the campaign homestretch. But Time?
Sure enough, its 1,500-word article did not quote a single Democratic or independent source. It was, in the most literal sense, transparent RNC spin (i.e., "House Republican officials contend that many of their Democratic challengers are so little known that they could be buried in an ad blitz").
Unfortunately, given the disastrous election results for Republicans, the GOP's-sitting-pretty angle became something of an obsession for Time's Allen, who came back to the storyline again and again with October efforts such as "Why The Democratic Wave Could Be A Washout" and "Why Some Top Republicans Think They May Still Have the Last Laugh." And then there was Allen's November 2 blog entry, "Upset in Michigan?" which hyped the Republican-friendly theory that its candidate there had a chance of knocking off incumbent Democratic Sen. Debbie Stabenow. (He didn't; Stabenow won in a landslide.) The dispatch included no polling data to give readers any idea if the Republican even had a chance, and it included no quotes from any Democratic or independent observers. The entire Michigan item consisted of quotes from Republicans insisting their guy really, really had a shot.
Time's string of campaign misses all carried with them the undeniable imprint of Bush senior adviser Karl Rove. (It was fitting Rove gave his first, exclusive post-election interview to Time's Allen, who continued to treat his key White House source very gently.)
The Beltway press' gooey, ongoing crush on Rove has probably set some sort of record for longevity inside the Beltway as Rove's media stature seems to climb with each passing year, despite Bush's accumulating missteps -- missteps Rove helped choreograph (i.e., Terri Schiavo). Forget the fact that Bush needed the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the vote counting in order to secure a win in 2000, that Republicans in 2002 won congressional seats by promising a (phony) war of revenge against Iraq, or that in 2004 Bush, a wartime president who one year earlier boasted booming job approval rating, narrowly defeated a liberal from Massachusetts in the general election. The mainstream media echo chamber has been nearly unanimous; Rove was an organizational genius who had literally cracked the code to winning elections, while his Democratic counterparts wandered around in the electoral dark.
The media's Rove crush continued throughout the campaign season. Echoing the White House chatter, lots of reporters and pundits signed off on the phony premise that Sen. John Kerry's "botched joke" was hugely important and might doom Democratic chances. They also thought Rove's "vaunted" get-out-the-vote apparatus was going to bury Democrats at the polls. (It's "a stunning machine," crowed an editor from The Hill.)
Last month, the Los Angeles Times described Rove as "far from being discouraged" about Republicans' chances this fall and giving "a virtuoso performance designed to prevent the Democrats from taking control of the House and Senate." CBS' Harry Smith announced Rove was "cool as a cucumber" because the "Republicans have an amazing get-out-the-vote mechanism." And Vanity Fair published an usually soft 8,500-word profile of Rove -- soft, given the fact that Rove was a man on the verge of his political and professional collapse.
And then there's the new, endlessly worshipful book, The Way to Win, by ABC News' Mark Halperin and The Washington Post's John Harris. (Talk about a bad time for a Rove-is-a-genius book to hit stores.) The tome stresses again and again that Rove is much more than a mere hired political gun, he's a thoughtful policy wonk. (He reads policy books! He attends policy conferences!) Halperin and Harris do everything in their power to prop Rove up as a wise man obsessed with "ideas" and desperate to implement thoughtful policy. Unfortunately, that loving portrait completely contradicts previous reports from inside the West Wing about how the Bush White House is almost uniformly devoid of serious domestic policy debate. Instead, politics -- by Rove's demand -- rules all:
There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.
That was John DiIulio describing the White House to Ron Suskind, writing for Esquire. DiIulio served as the first head of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. (DiIulio's unflattering assessment -- senior Bush aides who didn't know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid -- went on for seven pages in a letter he wrote to Suskind.)
Hero worship
The Rove hero worship was evident all summer long, like when pundits and reporters -- echoing Rove -- suggested Iraq was going to hurt Democrats at the polls and that Ned Lamont's primary win over Sen. Joe Lieberman in Connecticut would cripple Democrats nationwide by tarring them with an anti-war image. (An image, it turned out, that actually propelled Democrats to victory last week.)
In June, just before the Senate debated setting a timetable for troop withdrawal from Iraq, Rove signaled his intention to tar Democrats as "cut and run" defeatists who didn't have the stomach to "[f]ight, beat 'em, win." And apparently when Rove signs off on a political strategy (hit the Dems hard over Iraq), the press assumes it's a masterful stroke and shows little interest in dwelling on the pertinent questions, such as: Weren't Republicans running an obvious risk by making the hugely unpopular war in Iraq the centerpiece for their 2006 campaign? Instead, too many journalists at the time purposefully ignored clear polling data that obliterated the narrative that the Republicans had the winning hand in the Iraq troop debate.
To cite just one of many examples, an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey at the time specifically asked people if they would be more likely or less likely to support a candidate who "[f]avors pulling all American troops out of Iraq within the next twelve months." By a margin of 54-32, Americans said they were more likely to vote for a candidate (read: a Democrat) who wants to pull troops out of Iraq by next summer.
Yet amidst the Iraq debate last June, ABC's Halperin warned Democrats, "If I were them, I'd be scared to death about November's elections," while Newsweek announced "Democrats lost the week in the war over the war" and that "the GOP was clearly on the rebound." ABC's The Note, issued by the network's Halperin-led political unit, declared that Democrats were "on the precipice of making Iraq a 2006 political winner for the Republican Party."
Meanwhile, framing the debate on Today, NBC's Matt Lauer wondered, "Are the Democrats losing the political battle over the war in Iraq?" Asked about the troops debate, ABC's Liz Marlantes announced "Republicans are strutting right now," while The Washington Post reported Democrats were "scrambling" to find a winning position on Iraq.
The narrative had no basis in reality -- virtually every published poll at the time suggested the war was going to be a deadly anchor around the necks of Republicans come November -- but Rove was spinning his illogical tale, so lots of journalists played along, too timid to call it out for the obvious miscalculation that it was.
It was left to MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, of all people -- the former Republican Revolution congressman -- to correctly identify the Rove strategy of embracing the war for what it was. Said Scarborough last June: "This sounds like a complete loser for Republicans come this fall."
And it was.
Just two months later, the press took the same phony pratfall when anti-war candidate Lamont defeated Lieberman in Connecticut's Democratic primary. Beltway-based pundits (many of whom supported the doomed Iraq invasion) sounded noisy alarms. ABC's Cokie Roberts claimed a Lamont win would mean "a disaster for the Democratic Party." Time's Mike Allen (have you spotted the trend here?) was quick to declare that the Lamont win doubled as a Republican victory because it would allow the GOP to "portray the opposition as the party of weakness and isolation on national security and liberal leanings on domestic policy." Allen also went on an on, without any proof, about how "doleful" Democrats were "on the defensive," about Lamont's upset, "bemoaning" their predicament.
It was the replay of the June debate. The Beltway's simplistic (i.e., Rovian) argument was built around the phony premise that by voting for an anti-war candidate, Connecticut voters would taint the party nationally by advertising Democrats as being soft on national security. That spin, though, was demolished by the facts on the ground -- namely, that a majority of Americans supported Lamont's position on national security and Iraq.
Finally, after the "thumpin' " Republicans took, Rove's tactics have come under closer press scrutiny, particularly his late campaign predictions that proved to be embarrassingly naïve. But even there, the coverage has been artificially restrained with the starting point for many of the media post-mortems being, how could a strategist as brilliant as Karl Rove misread the looming election returns?
The press also continues to look away from Rove's string of colossal miscues that led to the Republican losses. For instance, Republicans themselves are furious that Bush waited until the day after the elections to fire beleaguered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "I think the timing was exactly backwards," complained Newt Gingrich, who said Bush's clumsy maneuver likely cost Republican candidates between 10 and 15 seats in the House. For now Bush is getting the blame. But does anybody really think that Rove did not play a significant role in the misguided decision to keep Rummy on through the elections? After all, it was Rove who insisted all year that Iraq could be a winning issue for Republicans and that candidates would get credit for sticking close to the president. That turned out to be a costly blunder, and so did Bush's refusal to can Rumsfeld.
Rove's fingerprints are all over both miscalculations, but the press, still not over its Rove crush, shies away from the tough questions.
We've seen this theme over and over, and on topics far more than just the election. I see three ways of reading this in each individual case:
1. Lazy, inept, and stupid. 2. Corrupt. 3. Frightened.
I know that Media Matters is not supposed to ascribe motives to what the "journalists" did, but is there any objective evidence for what the problem is with Allen & Carney?
My bet is 75% for #1 because all they are doing is drawing a paycheck, 15% for #2 because they just don't care anymore, because 10% for #3 because if they don't do it they will be replaced with someone who will.
You might also consider these under your general headings:
Blackmailed - you know Rover probably has the biggest set of dirty secrets folders since J. Edgar Co-opted - I always thought that this is what happened to labor organizer Ronald Reagan back in the 50's. He was exposed to "the good life", and thought "Hey, these people ain't so bad, and they seem to really like me".
Good point. However, although I wouldn't put anything past the Bush/Rove crowd, I haven't seen any evidence that they have resorted to blackmail. Their MO seems to be that anyone who steps out of line, loses access. If you lose access, you immediately become less valuable to your big-corporate-newsroom editorial staff.
That's where the fear comes in. Loss of status, if not outright losing your job.
That was when he ran the presidential bid of Phil Gramm, who never came within miles of winning a primary, though he'd raised much more money than anyone except Dole. It's an episode always omitted from Rove hagiographies.
Whatever skepticism the media had about Rove's abilities vanished when he squirmed out of his Plame problem. If he could do that, the press reasoned, he could do anything.
Not so.
Based on what I read in the media, Democrats should have picked up an additional 30 seats in the house (+ a few more in the Senate) if: (1) Kerry had not made his gaffe joke; (2) Saddam had not been sentenced to die the day before the election; (3) The NJ Supreme Court had not mandated civil unions a week before the election; (4) gas prices had not dropped 75 cents leading up to the election; and (5) Democrats did not have a San Francisco liberal lined up to be Speaker.
I kept hearing those circumstances tilted the playing field strongly toward Republicans. Then throw in the usual flawed media talking points: (1) terrorists want Democrats to win; (2) the economy is roaring; (3) Democrats don't have a plan for Iraq (or anything else); and (4) Democrats were panicking as the election neared while Republican were growing confident. How on earth did Democrats avoid a Republican landslide? Its almost as if issues such as Iraq, health care, minimum wage, corruption, gross Republican mismanagement of all aspects of government, etc. mattered.
One thing I'm very grateful for is that people on my side will stop whining about Rove. I got so tired of people making comments in the blogs and on liberal talk radio about how they were so sceeeered of Karl Rove. This election showed that his dominance is over. They pulled everything out of their hat of dirty tricks. Didn't work this time. Rove will no longer be the Republican boogeyman, praise Jesus.
While Rove is not a genius, I doubt he is a complete idiot. He knew the war was a drag on the GOP, even if fools such as Allen can't look at polls, Rove most certainly does.
His (very public) announcements that they were going to run on the war were meant to psych out the Dems, so that they would think Rove is right, be afraid to run on the war, and seek to change the subject.
Two things happened: 1. despite much handwringing, the dems didn't really fall for this in a major way; 2. The War was the #1 issue on people's minds, especially as it got worse and worse through october, and it didn't matter what the candidates talked about.
my 2 cents.
I don't buy the "if only Donald Rumplestiltskin had been fired before the election" business. I don't think they held off because they thought the war was a winning issue, they held off because it was a losing issue and they knew it - and dumping Rumpled would have been an acknowledgement that things are, indeed, really screwed up in Iraq.
Better, that is, to tough it out with a straight face and confident gaze than to "flip-flop" and in essence admit your opponents had been right all along.
I don't think they held off because they thought the war was a winning issue, they held off because it was a losing issue and they knew it - and dumping Rumpled would have been an acknowledgement that things are, indeed, really screwed up in Iraq.
I think this is exactly right. Dumping Rumsfeld weeks ahead of time would have helped, but dumping him on the eve of the election would acknowledge that the war is a disaster and probably have only made the situation (for them) worse.
Even as the American people gave the Republicans the back of their hand and sent the Dems into power, the media is STILL reporting as if nothing changed on Election Day. How can that be?
Bush is wildly unpopular, he recently got caught in a lie, he lost the House and Senate, Rove was wrong about the elections and the admin is in a tail-spin due to corruption charges and pending investigations. In short, these clowns are in meltdown at a time when the nation is "at war." So what does the media write about? Pelosi's designer clothing.
In a page 1 story on Saturday, WaPo's Peter Baker continues the trend of letting Rove set the agenda of his reporting. "Rove Remains Steadfast in the Face of Criticism" quotes the "unflappable" Karl calling for his staff to "Get me the one-pager" referring to an internal analysis that was "updated almost hourly since the midterm elections with a series of statistics explaining that the "thumping" Bush took was not such a thumping after all."
While he quotes the likes of Andrew Sullivan, Richard Viguerie, David Gergen and Bill Maher criticizing Karl Rove in general terms, the bulk of the article uncritically recites Rove's theories on how the election was about bad luck and timing, rather than any kind of rejection of Bush policies or Rovian tactics.
The basic theories of the spin-meister are left unquestioned, and quoted in great length, including: "The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008." Rove's spin of Joe Lieberman's victory to show how Iraq was not the primary issue in the campaign is also unchallenged: "It plays some role, but if Iraq is the determining factor and it is a dominant opinion, then in a blue state like Connecticut you should not have 60 percent of the voters vote for one of the candidates who said, 'Stay, fight and win,' " Rove said, referring to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's victory as an independent. "I don't deny that it's a factor, but it is hard to declare" that it is the overriding factor."
Througout the article a variety of selective statistics are mentioned as if definitive and no competing facts are offered. Following the one mild rebuttal of Rove's theories by a departing and clearly disheartened Ken Mehlman, the article ends in an up-beat embrace of Rove's future.
"Rove...believes his turnout campaign actually beat the odds of history, ticking off a dozen races that were supposed to be closer. "What happened in all those? It may have been that the tactical work done by the White House, the Republican National Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee had a big impact."
The lesson, he added, is that "if you're not complacent and you're prepared and you are driving and have a good game," you can win even in a tough political year. And so now it's back to the drawing board for the Architect."
This is how one of the Post's leading political reporters analyzes Karl Rove's role and status in the aftermath of a failed election? God only knows what he would have written if the GOP had held onto the Senate!
We have been talking for years how the MSM echo chamber (Read Lap Dogs if you haven't*) has distorted the truth by spreading the GOP talking points, painting the Republicans in rosy prose while piling on baseless and easily refuted comments that disparage the Democrats. And the American public seemed to have fallen for it over and over.
For once, it seems that the GOP, and Rove in particular, fell victim to their own system of deception. This time, the voters didn't.
I'd like to keep pushing the exposure of the MSM to the American news consumers. It is a seemingly impossible task - and having just accomplished one in the election, I hope we take it on.
Some ideas:
As more news comes out of the investigations, we need to criticize the media as much as the GOP.
Keep pushing the excellent books on the MSM failures, Media Matters, and FAIR; *Consider Lap Dogs for Christmas presents. (No, I have no connection to Eric. What I really like about the way he wrote it is that it essentially teaches the reader how to think about an article skeptically instead of taking it as 'gotta be the truth'). Another book that is only for serious sloggers is Peter Brock's Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting(Google, it is only available from the publisher). Brock (no relation to David) is lousy on some writing basics, organization and sentence structure stand out, but the information and perspective it gives on yet another instance where the media helped push us into war, for fabricated reasons they never questioned, is important.
I was intrigued by a new label for this. A blogger referred to the MSM as 'the GOP Xerox machine'. Might be good to use it or another one to frame them. Tossing them in with a big corporation doesn't bother me at all, but maybe just switching to 'copy' would be fine.
Keep supporting and heaping praise on the standouts, Olbermann, etc.
Just to keep drumming this point in. Kerry had been noted by at least one local reporter during his extensive campaigning to have polished his late night comedy one-liner jokes. He has been on Letterman and Maher - at least once each, and was perfect. Rove, et al knew that sooner or later he would flub something - even commediens do (Stephen Colbert did at the infamous DC gig). They had to wait a LONG time before it happened. Unfortunately, bad timing for the rest of us. The GOP smear machine - and the media copy machince- will ALWAYS be aimed at anyone who looks like a threat to them.
The worst part of this for me is knowing how horribly the vets have been treated for decades and how strongly and reliably Kerry has fought for them. This was not only a huge indicator of McCain's two-faced capacity to lie about someone he knows well, but of how the end result is so contrary to the people portrayed as victims. Instead of realizing what a champion they have in Kerry, too many vets are now under the impression he insulted them. If they continue to believe this and act on it, further harm could be done.
Just for an example. There is a video of Kerry's speech to a teachers group in South Carolina this week here:
[link to www.youtube.com]
Not only does he deliver a few planned quips well, he ad libs even better over a squeaky door. The audio is not good but you can hear it.
The first day, my not-very-political husband said, "It'll backfire on them (the Republicans)" and I think it did. They behaved so outrageously, comical really. OH! Did they ever think they had a great issue with that Kerry joke.
mike allen is a puppy on ritalin, earnestly chasing the ball wherever karl rove throws it, desperate for a chance to have Bush rub his bald head in approval.
Did any of you consider this ... that the GOP wanted to lose. Especially knowing that Pelosi would be "Speaker of the House".
Having Pelosi exposed the entire country and all of America now seeing just how crazy liberals are would lock a GOP candidate in for the White House in 08'. The Dems would not stand a chance of winning the White House ... no way.
Rove and the GOP just put you liberals in the "TRICK BAG" and you don't even realize it.
How funny is that ??
Just writing to say that I enjoy yr writings.
Your argument would have more force if it wasn't premised on liberals being "crazy". Since most are thoughtful, and practical people, your comments seem to be aimed at saving face for the Republicans and Rove. The next two years will reveal, once again, that people are not buying spin. Go Buckeyes!
I am so sick and tired of Rove's supposed genius. He is a snarkly little creep who does things most people would believe to be dishonorable. There are a lot of people out there and they rise quickly... then just as quickly fall.
They are the sleeze, the acting out of the darkest parts of our personality that reason, manners, civility, partiotism and a belief in a higher cause keeps us from expressing.
Any idiot can pander to the religous-right and promise them anything... What is especially cynical and disgusting is that they then have to do absolutely nothing and they can continue to blame it on the Dems. It costs them nothing and continues to pull in the gullable... just for dividing our country, smearing half of the Americans as traitors.
No genius required... just no soul.
"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
Despite what the polls indicated and just the general anger out there regarding Repub "decisions," its the quote above that sums it up. Rove's "strategery" was always to keep power by any means. The tissue of smears and lies, repeated ad naseum, caught up to the Turd Blossom, and subsequently the party. Case closed.
There is a huge MEDIA push afoot to direct the Dem Majority that they SHOULD NOT do that "investigative" thing ... that they should let bygones be bygones, and concentrate instead on putting forward a plan for the future, and doing so with "bipartisanship".
First, this advice is funny, because the advice is to NOT be "like the Republicans", who investigated the ass off ever fart and burp in the Clinton Administration, and were "rewarded" with total control of government for a half decade.
Second, it is a "suggestion" that the Dems continue the Republican's aborgation of their oversight duties, and to allow corruption to simply pass, because there are "bigger issues".
Third, just ONE of those pending investigations is into election machinery, and whether the machines have been "rigged" in the GOP's favor. Failure to look into THIS issue would assure any such corruption injected into "the system" would remain undiscovered.
For example, MY OWN theory is that the machines are rigged AT THE FACTORY, and requires nobody anywhere down the line to be aware, or to act, or to in any way contribute to the scam. In truth, only one (or two) people at the FACTORY will be aware of the rigging ... the machines can be assembled and delivered in ignorance to what resides in that all-important PROGRAMMING. The programming is "proprietary", and thus SECRET ... nobody can look at it, investigate, or examine it. If the machine spits out a total, we simply have to TAKE ITS WORD that it is accurate.
The PROGRAMMING would explain Karl Rove's confidence ... he KNEW that the stage was already set for a GOP victory: ONE LINE of the programming can instruct each voting machine to tally every hundredth vote for a DEM as a vote for the GOP. This simple instruction would have the effect of a 2% shift of the vote to the GOP column, enough to swing a vast majority of the elections across the land into the GOP column. It would turn a 49%-51% Dem victory into a GOP win, and this applies to MOST elections in this divided country. It is enough to make a plotter confident that the rigging will assure the final result.
The one miscalculation could be that the voting would be SO STRONG for the Dems that the 2% shift wouldn't be enough, in enough races. UNTHINKABLE! But it happened, and it stunned the guys who thought they had it fixed.
This small coding addition, I believe, has been in place for ten years, since Diebold's owners pledged all their support to the GOP. Testing it in some critical election precints explains the wierd, selective disparity in Ohio (and a few other states) between the EXIT POLLS and the final tallys, almost FLIPPED in ever instance. The GOP's "solution"? Get rid of Exit Polls, so long a reliable predictor of the ultimate outcome.
Until or unless CONGRESS lifts the veil of "propietary secrecy" when it comes to VOTING MACHINERY, and the experts get to take a close look at this election programming, I will continue to believe that our elections have been (partially) hijacked. In Florida, a Dem has demanded the machines be siezed, pending an full investigation of their workings ... this is very promising.
If the Dem Majority FAILS to investigate this issue down to the last detail, they will not remain a majority for long ... their fate will remain sealed in trickery.
Tex: I have been very concerned about the same thing. These voting machines must be tossed if they can be manipulated. I very seldom hear people talking about this subject, but it is of paramount importance. Stalin once said something to the effect that it is unnecessary to rig elections, all you have to do is have control over who counts the votes. In 2004 why would the exit polls have been so wrong? After all, the question that the respondents were answering was not "who will you vote for?", which could change up to the casting of the vote, but rather "who did you just vote for?" which means that the only way the polls would have been so wrong is if a bunch of Bush voters said that they had just voted for Kerry. While this is, of course, possible, why is that more likely than believing that the machines themselves did not reflect the votes people meant to cast? Since it has been repeatedly shown that the Diebold machines are easily manipulable, and since there is no process to verify the accuracy of the machines tallies, and since the Republicans had already shown the extents to which they would go to win an election (FL in 2000 for example when they actually physically stormed the recount centers to stop the recount and took thousands of voters off the roles of eligible voters before the election) why on earth should we believe that the exit polls were wrong and the machines were right?
Wasn't he the one who made the playful joke, during Bush's somber post-election press conference last week, in which he asked who was winning the "reading competition" between Bush & Rove? Everyone's talking about the thumpin' Bush took, and he tries to change the subject to something more lighthearted. And isn't it a bad idea for a journalist to be sharing these kind of "inside" jokes with politicians - doesn't that just confirm the concerns everyone has that these Beltway reporters are too snug with the people they're covering.
The bizarro world reporting of a republican phoenix rising from the election day ashes felt like a pathetic attempt by football commentators to retain disinterested viewers during the 4th quarter of a blowout. It seems like the basic goal of pursuing ratings is overlooked by media critics in favor of a conservative agenda perpetrated by the media. I tend to not give them that much credit having worked in a newsroom and seen the spurious action swirling around the real agenda - boosting ratings. It was clear to anyone reading polls that a landslide was in order, so the story was dead until the morning after when the level of destruction could finally be reported. I don't mean to compare the outcome of a football game to the future of the country, but the media isn't there to care, it's there to bring ratings to advertisers.
All the talk of Karl the Brain. All the talk of he has fooled us into winning. All the talk of a Mater Plan.
May I just say, it was a BLACK ROVEMBER from which the Republicans may never recover. Once the Dems start looking into the law-breaking activities of this Republican Party and the truth comes out, the Grand Old Party may be just that. Goodbye Karl, you had a good run.
This is an excellent piece of work. I hope the network "news" people will read, take note, and do something about the combination of laziness and lap-dog-itude that has brought us to this pass. I have always been surprised at how willing the press has been to trade what it offers (access to millions of people) for the mess of prevarication, spin, and other political pottage offered by officialdom. I am far, far more impressed with the BBC, whose interviewers at least insist that the interviewee's statements pass the raised-eyebrow test, and who make no bones about asking uncomfortable questions when they do not.
let's get a few things straight... karl rove IS a genius, but i do not use that word with any connotation of either "good" or "infallible..." rove is extremely smart and has demonstrated formidable brain power for his entire career... whether or not rove's strategy was able to carry the day in this past election is beside the point... even though rove is passionate about winning, losing does not make him any the less dangerous... why is rove still dangerous...? it's the same reason he has been dangerous all along... rove embraces evil... rove revels in darkness... rove has been the principal driving force behind the total debasement of political dialogue in this country... as long as he is in a seat of power, whether or not he's winning or losing election, we are all at risk...
[link to takeitpersonally.blogspot.com]