Karl Rove is a big fat idiot

Now that my candidate for president has started the name-calling, let it be said loud and clear that Karl Rove is a big fat idiot. This supposed mastermind actually led Bush to lose the popular vote in 2000, and had little to do with the disaster in Florida. In fact, Ralph Nader had more to do with putting Bush into office than Karl Rove, and so did Al Gore, who decided it was better to run as a sanctimonious populist than as the natural heir to Bill Clinton, but I digress.

Then in 2002, Rove got credit for the Republican takeover of the Senate, even though the nationwide vote was almost even, with Republicans winning narrowly in just a couple of key states, including Minnesota, where Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash just days before the election.

Despite those two less-than-impressive victories, the Washington press corps annointed Rove the Uber-Strategist, the whole process akin to crowning a heavyweight champion. It doesn't matter how impressive his wins were, a win is a win, so Rove got the Belt, and he gets to keep it, by God, until someone beats him. Remember James Carville? Remember Dick Morris? The Washington press is fixated with campaign strategists, largely because reporters are fixated with the horse-race element of politics and because the strategists assiduously court the press. Kerry has Bob Shrum this year, who has never won a presidential race. He's a little like the Jimmy Ellis of consultants.

Anyway. What's so great about Karl Rove? He's the one who put W. in the flight suit last year. And the Bush campaign is certainly off to a lousy start this year, after blustering around for nearly two months all but promising a carpet-bombing ads-of-mass-destruction (AMD) campaign to destroy Kerry.

First, there was the complete dud of his State of the Union address that utterly failed to take back the agenda from the Democrats. That was followed up by David Kay's (shocking, I tell you) revelation that there wouldn't be any WMDs found in Iraq. That led to the lame Oval Office appearance on Meet the Press. (In the earlier segments, Bush was framed in front of a bookcase, and on each side of his head on one of the shelves were two bookends, and I kid you not, they had some kind of design on them that looked like the letters, "YO". So there he was, with his head in between the word "Yo-Yo". After a commercial break, he was seated slightly differently so you could only see one of the "Yo"s. I betcha that was Karl's doing. Brilliant.)

Then there was the dismal handling of the National Guard thing that the Democrats cleverly revisited nice and early in the campaign that reminded the public that W. took the easy rich-boy route to steer clear of Vietnam.

Then there was the Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. This was widely thought to be a big winning issue for the Republicans, but the Administration was pushed into it in order to shore up its base among the wackos on the religious right. As soon as the Massachusetts court redefined the issue as one of equal protection and as soon as gay couples around the country started getting married AND THE SKY DIDN'T FALL AND HETEROSEXUAL MARRIAGES DIDN'T START GETTING "WEAKER" BECAUSE OF IT, public opinion seemed to start trending in favor of gay marriage, not against it. At minimum, there is no majority in favor of amending the Constitution to deny equal protection -- it just starts to sound, well, un-American. A loser issue for Bush -- mark my words.

But that was all before the Bush campaign's unleashing of "Operation Kill Mr. Flippy-Floppy," described breathlessly by the Washington press in the same dire tones as they described the pending invasion of Iraq last year. Said one Washington correspondent, "After the Bush campaign gets through with John Kerry, they are going to track him down, pull him out of his spider hole and show pictures of the Red Cross probing his mouth with a tongue despresser."

Well, OK, I made up the quote, but you get my point.

So the ads came out and, so far, they've sucked. First one uses footage of flag-draped bodies being carried out of Ground Zero. Now, from a "strategery" standpoint, I don't begrudge the Bush campaign referencing 9/11 in its ads, but there must be plenty of more appropriate footage. Apparently no one thought that they could be accused of exploiting the dead for political purposes? And now the second one, which attacks Kerry on terrorism, includes images of a dark-skinned Arab-looking man meant to look like a terrorist, prompting protests from the Arab-American league. Its president promptly protested the stereotype, noting that if they wanted to use a picture of Osama bin Laden, fine, but using a generic image of an Arab was wrong. The whole story, and a run-down of Bush's "masterful" first ads is here.
In the piece, The New Republic's Ryan Lizza puzzles:

"What's interesting is that Bush's team must have known that by using this actor they would probably ignite a debate about race, ethnicity, and terrorism. You have to wonder about why they did it."

Maybe because KARL ROVE IS A BIG FAT IDIOT!