The Karl Rove Crush

By Eric Boehlert
Created Nov 15 2006 - 8:54am

"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 [0] 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 [0]" and "Why Some Top
Republicans Think They May Still Have the Last Laugh [0]." And then there
was Allen's November 2 blog entry, "Upset in Michigan? [0]" 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 [0].) 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 [0] 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 [0]" 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 [0] 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 [0] 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 [0], 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 [0]
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
[0]." 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 [0] "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 [0] 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 [0]
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 prop fall 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 [0] 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