{"id":10951,"date":"2007-05-30T09:45:19","date_gmt":"2007-05-30T13:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10951.html"},"modified":"2007-05-30T09:45:19","modified_gmt":"2007-05-30T13:45:19","slug":"guess-who-called-karl-roves-political-strategy-maniacally-dumb","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/guess-who-called-karl-roves-political-strategy-maniacally-dumb\/","title":{"rendered":"Guess who called Karl Rove’s political strategy ‘maniacally dumb’?"},"content":{"rendered":"

That New Yorker story<\/a> on the implosion of the GOP is the gift that keeps on giving<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Bush has presided over a Republican Party in “collapse,” and Karl Rove’s strategy in the 2004 presidential election was “maniacally dumb” for focusing so heavily on the conservative base.<\/p>\n

The words, perhaps, of Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman? Or John Edwards? Nancy Pelosi, maybe?<\/p>\n

None of the above.<\/p>\n

That harsh assessment of the president and his chief political adviser is being offered rather by former Representative Newt Gingrich, who engineered the Republicans’ Congressional election victory of 1994 and went on to become speaker of the House.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Indeed, Gingrich unloads<\/i> on his party in the interview with The New Yorker.<\/p>\n

“Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent — that’s a collapse,” he explains. “I mean, look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions.”<\/p>\n

What’s more, Gingrich directly blames Rove for running a 2004 campaign that left Bush with no political capital. By running a relentlessly negative campaign, Rove\/Bush had no real mandate for any policies or agenda. “All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice” — of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy” — and chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.<\/p>\n

Gingrich also blasts Tom DeLay-led Republicans in the 109th for what’s called the “second-order effect of base mobilization” (by motivating the base, a party suffers by alienating everyone else). This was particularly true, Gingrich says, when DeLay intervened in the Terri Schiavo matter, which appalled “America’s natural majority.”<\/p>\n

DeLay, in turn, blasted Gingrich right back.
\n<\/p>\n

“The Schiavo case was one of my proudest moments in Congress,” Tom DeLay [said]…. In [his] book, DeLay criticizes Gingrich for, among other things, conducting an affair with a Capitol Hill employee during the 1998 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. (The woman later became Gingrich’s third wife.) “Yes, I don’t think that Newt could set a high moral standard, a high moral tone, during that moment,” DeLay said. “You can’t do that if you’re keeping secrets about your own adulterous affairs.” He added that the impeachment trial was another of his “proudest moments.” The difference between his own adultery and Gingrich’s, he said, “is that I was no longer committing adultery by that time, the impeachment trial. There’s a big difference.” He added, “Also, I had returned to Christ and repented my sins by that time.”<\/p>\n

In fact, DeLay speaks of Gingrich with undisguised contempt. “He’s got this new shtick now — ‘solutions,’ he calls it, like government is the new solution. Government isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.” DeLay smiled. “Did you see that he had a love match with John Kerry on global warming?” he said. “That’s not going to help him with the Presidential race.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If it sounds to you like the GOP is coming apart at the seams, well, we’re on the same page.<\/p>\n

I guess Bush succeeded in being a “uniter, not a divider” about as well as he succeeeded in everything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That New Yorker story on the implosion of the GOP is the gift that keeps on giving. President Bush has presided over a Republican Party in “collapse,” and Karl Rove’s strategy in the 2004 presidential election was “maniacally dumb” for focusing so heavily on the conservative base. The words, perhaps, of Howard Dean, the Democratic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}