{"id":12602,"date":"2007-08-20T14:10:52","date_gmt":"2007-08-20T18:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/12602.html"},"modified":"2007-08-20T14:10:52","modified_gmt":"2007-08-20T18:10:52","slug":"watching-a-bad-chess-player","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/watching-a-bad-chess-player\/","title":{"rendered":"Watching a bad chess player"},"content":{"rendered":"

With his announcement last week that he’s stepping down from the White House, Karl Rove has been the center of the political world’s attention (again). The surprising part, however, is that Rove using his time in the spotlight to blast Hillary Clinton<\/a> quite a bit.<\/p>\n

Master GOP strategist Karl Rove won’t let up in his attacks on Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton, but the intriguing question is why.<\/p>\n

Is it a sign that Rove, who masterminded Bush’s two presidential victories, is worried about Clinton? Or a calculation that the GOP attacks will get Democrats to rally to her side because the GOP would prefer not to take on Democrats John Edwards or Barack Obama?<\/p>\n

“The Democrats are going to choose a nominee. I believe it’s going to be her,” President Bush’s departing political adviser said Sunday, noting her negative rating with the public is very high…. “She enters the general election campaign with the highest negatives of any candidate in the history of the Gallup poll.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s become something of a parlor game the past few days: why is Rove targeting Clinton? The LAT’s Peter Wallsten noted<\/a> several recent examples — Rove blasted Clinton’s record on healthcare, played her negative poll numbers in several interviews, called her candidacy “fatally flawed” — before pondering the thinking behind the strategy.<\/p>\n

It’s like watching a bad chess player making provocative moves. We’re looking for wisdom and shrewdness where it may not exist — but we’re fairly sure we’re watching someone who is trying to execute some kind of strategy.<\/p>\n

Before you dismiss this as overeager commentators overanalyzing mundane criticism, remember how Rove approached the last presidential campaign.
\n
\nWallsten added some behind-the-scenes anecdotes I hadn’t seen before.<\/p>\n

The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush’s opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.<\/p>\n

With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush’s reelection.<\/p>\n

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove’s team opened fire at Kerry. Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party’s nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.<\/p>\n

Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn’t easily be painted as “nutty.”<\/p>\n

If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd’s own words: “Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters’ minds. So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nicolle Wallace, the 2004 Bush campaign communications director, confirmed all of this and said Rove was so worried about Edwards, BC04 “refused” to even respond to Edwards’ attacks on Bush, not wanting to make him seem like a threat.<\/p>\n

Flash forward three years and we see Rove & Co. taking some concerted shots at Hillary Clinton — and only Hillary Clinton. (It’s not just Rove — remember that Dana Perino blasted a mild Clinton ad from her podium last week, knowing her harsh criticism would make news.)<\/p>\n

So, what’s going on?<\/p>\n

1. Nothing. Rove & Co. are bashing Clinton because they enjoy it and it’s a long-time habit. There’s nothing to all of this.<\/p>\n

2. Rove & Co. are bashing Clinton for the same reason they bashed Kerry — they want Clinton to be the Democratic nominee. Dems are supposed to conclude, “Hey, if Rove hates her, she must be pretty good.”<\/p>\n

3. Rove & Co. are bashing Clinton because they fear<\/i> Clinton might be the nominee, and want to lay the groundwork for general-election attacks. (Jason Zengerle<\/a> offers a vertiginous theory about Rove’s attacks possibly being “an exercise in reverse<\/i> reverse psychology.”<\/p>\n

The floor is open. Let’s hear your theories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With his announcement last week that he’s stepping down from the White House, Karl Rove has been the center of the political world’s attention (again). The surprising part, however, is that Rove using his time in the spotlight to blast Hillary Clinton quite a bit. Master GOP strategist Karl Rove won’t let up in his […]<\/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-12602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12602","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=12602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}