“The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.” – Napoleon, quoted by Karl Rove in a memo to a candidate in a campaign in 1986. “Compassionate conservatism,” meet the Swift Boat Vets.
HOW ROVE OPERATES: Josh Green’s new piece in the Atlantic is a must-read for anyone trying to understand this campaign. It’s a thorough investigation of Karl Rove’s record of smearing, sliming and demagoguing to win elections, as well as a respectful analysis of Rove’s indisputable political skills. I was struck by one anecdote about how Rove tried to destroy one of his opponents:
[Alabama Supreme Court Justice, Mark] Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove’s signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.
Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. “We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. “It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out – he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.” This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. “What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”
Mark Kennedy, despite having fended off Rove’s attacks, decided not to seek re-election to Alabama’s Supreme Court. Who can blame him?
POSEUR ALERT: “Pop musicians live in a world of symbology. You live and die by the symbol in many ways. You serve at the behest of the audiance’s imagination. It’s a complicated relationship. So you’re asking people to welcome the complexity in the interest of fuller and more honest communication.” – Bruce Springsteen, Rolling Stone.
The Dish 