p m carpenter's commentary

Karl Rove's 12-Step Program to Power: A Timely Revisit

As the iniquitous Mr. Rove rather involuntarily makes his way back into the headlines -- "House Panel interviews Karl Rove About Attorney Firings," declared WaPo yesterday in a virtually content-free story, given the proceeding's thoroughgoing gag -- I thought, What better time to reprise my summation of what, over the years, got him there?

It, "Karl Rove’s 12-Step Program to Dry-Drunk Power: A Primer," debuted on April 19, 2005 -- that is, this "reader’s digest of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater" -- and now find the retrospective to be a remindful launching point for what millions hope is sweet justice: finally, some payback for all the corrupt, underhanded turd blossoms that this defiler of American politics dropped in our path for far too many years.

So here it is, "brief notes I took when reading [Moore-Slater's book] ... add[ing] when necessary a clarifying word or two" -- notes on Karl Rove's long-cherished political campaign strategies, some of which are now beautifully biting him right on the ass:

1. Use surrogates to attack your opponent. Never let your guy (or yourself, if you happen to be running) rip into the other guy. Find some lackey who’s more than willing to get vicious ugly for you. Your guy will look like a disinterested prince.

2. Leak harmful information. This is pretty much your basic opposition-research stuff. But leak it; don’t announce it. And certainly it helps to develop friendly relations with journalists of a whorish bent. Devastating information on your opponent isn’t worth much if you can’t get the word out.

3. Turn rumor into fact. Better yet, start a rumor about your opponent and use the media whores with whom you’ve developed a good relationship to hammer away at whatever you’ve invented. Before long everyone will at least assume that where there’s smoke there’s fire.

4. Use well-organized 3rd-party groups to make allegations. This is closely related to #3. In short, if you can find a Swift-Boat kind of outfit to go libelous on your behalf, do it. Also see #1 – surrogates and the disinterested prince.

5. Funnel money to a 3rd-party candidate similar in ideology to your opponent’s to dilute your opponent’s vote. Self-explanatory.

6. Use ties to law enforcement to launch bogus investigations against your opponent. You’ll need to be comfortably in bed with a high-powered D.A., though, so this tactic isn’t for the chronically un-empowered. You also can’t harbor any compunctions about bankrupting an innocent person through legal expenses or even sending him to jail and destroying his family. This is rather big-league stuff, and not for the squeamish.

7. Associate your guy’s political positions with God and flag. Be creative. If needed, rewatch Animal House for inspiration, the part in which Otter defends his incredibly guilty pals before a college court in a rip-roaring burst of offended patriotism. It can be done.

8. Always position your opponent as an agent of the status quo, your guy as the candidate for change. Self-explanatory.

9. Build your messages on what the public already believes in. Closely related to #7. Don’t ever try to introduce the electorate to something unfamiliar or convince it of something new. Another angle is to play on preexisting prejudices. If the public hates freckled people, your guy hates freckled people. Always has.

10. "Explaining is losing." This is the only direct quote I’ve lifted from the book, because it is key, absolutely critical. If your guy has to explain anything – his policies, his past, anything – then your guy is playing a losing game. Voters in general don’t want to be burdened with policy details and candidates certainly don’t want to get mired in personal explanations. Just forget explaining anything -- anything at all -- and move on. It’ll work. You’ll be amazed.

11. Use push polling. Again, this is high-powered stuff for the monied pros. Don’t call registered voters and ask if they like so-and-so’s position on something. Call and ask if they like the satanic plan your Illuminati opponent wants to shove through Congress should he get there with all his corrupt campaign cash. You get the poll results you want, and better yet, you leave the right impression of your opponent in the minds of the questioned.

12. Pick off special-interest support for your opponent. In other words, be a hypocritical flip-flopper like all get out (and don’t bother explaining it). Bush’s decision before the 2004 campaign on erecting steel tariffs is an excellent example.

Karl, one way or another, it's time you answered for all this.

The Moron-Count: More than 4 out of 10

My Internet was out for most of this morning, so for my current-events edification I was forced to resort to cable, whereupon I landed in "Morning Joe"'s little coffee klatch, and thereupon strongly regretted it.

The cause of my remorse was an MSNBC graphic, derived from the headcounters at Gallup, showing two figures; one of no surprise, but the other a real jaw-dropper:

Would you consider -- I'm paraphrasing here, with only memory to serve -- voting for Sarah Palin in 2012? headlined the graphic. Among Republicans, unsurprisingly (although, it seemed to me, perhaps a trifle inflated), the yea-count was 71 percent.

But across the electorate at large? Forty-three percent responded in the affirmative -- and the poll was taken post-rambling-resignation speech.

Furthermore, as Gallup enumerated this most curious state of affairs, 53 percent of everyone polled agreed with the proffered statement that the media's treatment of the soon-to-be ex-governor has been "unfairly negative."

Now, the 53 percent figure I came close to understanding, since the electorate detests the media about as much as it does pols. But to see that more than four out of 10 would voice an unprompted willingness to cast a vote for such an indisputable blob of scatterbrains on stilts was nothing short of appalling.

There is, however, one possible mitigation, although it's purely notional. And it is this: If Gallup were to call me today to ask about my willingness to vote for Sarah Palin in 2012, my eager, immediate, even unthinking response would be, "You betcha!" And maybe I'm not alone.

Anything to lighten the political atmosphere and to urge her forward. Run, Sarah, run. We -- especially those of us in desperate need of cheap entertainment -- are beggin' ya.

Funnyman Franken needs your prayer-offerings

If, as a yeomanly United States senator, Al Franken manages to retain his famous sense of humorous sanity, it will be nothing short of a minor miracle.

Honest to God, I feel sorry for the guy. He seems to want to legislate, in earnest, for the benefit of Minnesotans as well as the nation -- but, to quote King Lear, O, that way madness lies.

That's not to suggest that Franken is naive. He's been around the political block and he knows -- in large but still academic part -- what's in store. So, in best junior-senatorial fashion, he has chosen to start off by fitting in.

"Sen.-elect Al Franken’s first day on Capitol Hill was Not A Circus, and the soon-to-be junior senator from Minnesota was Not Funny At All," riffed the Politico. "Those were the messages Team Franken toiled to convey to the press and the public Monday, tamping down anything that resembled a spectacle surrounding Franken’s arrival and stressing the former comedian’s sober side."

Which he may wish, soon, to nevertheless intoxicate with some sanity-saving levity. For it's further reported, with a few realistic modifications added here, that yesterday he met with "Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to discuss the agenda" -- legislative delays, nomination holds, filibuster threats, bribery negotiations, counterproductive amendments, private airings of petty grievances, and in general the wholesale sell-out of the democratic will -- "for the week ahead."

Said peppy Franken-adviser Eric Schultz: "I think you’re going to find, as Minnesotans found, that he’s a serious, thoughtful person who wants to come to Washington to work" -- and try not to leave drooling, babbling, sedated, and straitjacketed.

But perhaps Franken is just playing it "solemn and staid," as he was additionally described yesterday, while he quietly goes about collecting plentiful comedy material for "Saturday Night Live" or a blockbuster Michael Moorelike film, "Dude, Where's My Democratic Senate?"

Whatever the case I wish him all the best, and I pray for his sanity.

Sarah Palin could always join the Democrats

In this morning's column I referenced two passages from Vanity Fair's "It Came from Wasilla" as most exemplary of the Alaska governor -- Sarah Palin's "extravagant self-regard," which finds itself comfortably housed within "a political party that ... often demands qualities other than knowledge" -- but upon further reflection, I believe I was remiss.

There was a third -- today a rather pedestrian, ho-hum quality which invited oversight, but whose implications are politically transcendent: "Palin has always been a party of one."

With respect to Palin alone, VF's Todd Purdum noted she possesses "no political principle or personal relationship [that] is more sacred than her own ambition. To be sure, Palin is 'conservative,' whatever that means, but ... in a June interview with Sean Hannity, she sounded like a New Dealer when she proudly proclaimed that 'a share of our oil-resource revenue goes back to the people who own the resources—imagine that.' In the next breath, sounding like a 'starve the beast' conservative, she said she hoped the price of oil, the principal variable of state revenue, would not rise too much."

Confused, contradictory, and, as Purdum put it, "all over the lot in the articulation of her platform." Yet Palin is hardly alone, and that's where, logically, the "transcendent" part comes in -- and it's something that Democrats, in general, and on a macro level, are far more guilty of than Republicans.

As a party they're confused, contradictory, and all over the lot. Now it's true that ever since Democrats broke from their nineteenth-century and Southern states rights' mold they've tried their best to square with Will Rogers' observation about political incoherence, yet for a few decades running they at least -- roughly -- stood for civil rights, equal opportunity, progressive taxation, and (post-Vietnam) a vaguely intelligent and humbler foreign policy.

Today? Take any Democratic pol and you're also taking your pick, philosophically speaking. He or she might be neoconservative in foreign-policy approach, might not; might be for more equitable taxation, might not; might wish to legislatively overcome historical traditions of inequality, might not; or, in the most current debate, might demand health care for all, or, might not.

Each is, Palinlike, merely "a party of one." And since overcoming many of society's inbred problems first requires a factual, non-subjective, pragmatic, one-size-does-indeed-fit-all approach, the Democratic Party's collectivity of individual deviations means that it, too, is fast becoming "a political party that ... often demands qualities other than knowledge."