Republican dirty tricks
What’s up Karl Rove’s sleeve?
By: ADAM REILLY
10/5/2006 10:44:13 AM
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MR. OCTOBER: Will Rove pull bin Laden out of his hat?
Late last month, readers of the conservative web site NewsMax discovered this juicy tidbit in a column by Ronald Kessler: “In the past week, Karl Rove has been promising Republican insiders an ‘October surprise’ to help win the November congressional elections.”
Christ on his throne! Granted, the revelation was a bit vague: it wasn’t clear who these Republican insiders were, or whether Rove actually used the loaded phrase in question. No matter. For liberals dreaming of big Democratic gains in November’s midterm elections, the prospect of late-breaking machinations by Bush’s Brain was terrifying — and, at the same time, utterly predictable. After all, just four days before the 2004 presidential election, a fresh video from Osama bin Laden reminded voters of George W. Bush’s claim to be tougher on terrorism than John Kerry. And earlier in the ’04 campaign, a ballyhooed increase in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) terror-threat level helped keep Kerry’s post–Democratic National Convention bounce to a minimum. (Two years on, the words spoken at the time by then-DHS secretary Tom Ridge remain jaw-droppingly inappropriate: “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror.”)
In short, Democrats were already worried about fourth-quarter heroics from Rove, and recent developments have lent credence to their fears. In the past few weeks, the price of gas has dropped from around $3 a gallon to just over $2, cheering drivers everywhere and depriving Democrats of a key campaign issue. And what about those reports last month — quickly dismissed by Condi et al. — that Bin Laden had died after contracting a nasty water-borne bug? Is the Bush administration postponing confirmation of Bin Laden’s death until just before Election Day?
Insert jokes about tinfoil hats and grassy knolls here. But while you’re at it, remember that it’s not just Democrats who are prone to thinking this way. (Back in 2000, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto asked readers to predict which dirty trick then-president Bill Clinton would use to guarantee Al Gore’s election. Their top choice: war with Iraq.) The common denominator is obvious: when a disenfranchised political party smells a return to power, collective anxiety about dirty tricks goes through the roof.
The difference, of course, is that Republicans do dirty tricks better.
Trick or treatise?
So what’s Rove up to? Sadly, Turd Blossom isn’t talking; asked by NewsMax to elaborate on his promise, he demurred. But we can still make some informed guesses.
Tops on the list: Osama bin Laden gets nabbed sometime between now and November 7. The Bush administration’s failure to nab Al Qaeda’s number one “has been, far and away, their biggest failing,” argues Elaine Kamarck, Al Gore’s senior policy advisor in 2000 and a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It undercuts their contention that they’re waging a great war on terrorism, which they’re not. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was front and center in the discussions the other day between the presidents of Pakistan and Afghanistan.” (Last week, Pervez Musharraf and Hamid Karzai overcame their mutual dislike and hunkered down with Bush at the White House.)
In the past, the president has insisted that Bin Laden’s unknown whereabouts is no big deal. (Here’s Bush in a March 2002 press conference: “You know, I just don’t spend that much time on him.”) But it’s certain that, if Bin Laden gets nabbed between now and Election Day, the president will be singing a different tune: Bin Laden’s capture or killing will be cast as a milestone in the “war on terror,” a development that makes the “homeland” safer and shows that Bush and the Republican congress are doing things right.
That said, which would be better politically — Bin Laden dead or Bin Laden alive? The former promises loads of visceral satisfaction, especially if it’s unusually gory (decapitation, impalement, etc.). Ultimately, though, a living Bin Laden would probably be best for the GOP. For starters, he’d provide torrents of anti-American verbiage which Bush could forcefully denounce. Even better, he’d offer a test case for the new Bush-backed Military Commissions Act, which basically legalizes torture. Every few days, Bin Laden’s interrogators could hint at valuable intelligence they’d gleaned thanks to this legislation; meanwhile, Democrats who’d criticized the bill could be painted repeatedly as soft on Osama.
Another scenario worth pondering: the situation in Iraq suddenly gets much, much better. “Iraq is terrible for the Republicans,” says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “There’s got to be some big piece of good news that Rove has waiting in the wings.” Such as? “Some dramatic movement within the Iraqi government that suggests they’ve finally gotten their act together; then you have some announcements about troop withdrawals, without a major date, by the end of the year.”
Myself, I can’t think of a single development that would prove the Iraqi government’s competence or viability. But without some kind of drastic internal improvement (real or alleged), Bush — who’s now calling the Democrats the “party of cut and run” — would look like a hypocrite if he offered a withdrawal plan of his own. And, as Sabato notes, the plan in question would need to be vague (so it could be altered gracefully later on) and scheduled for after the election. Undecided Americans could be more inclined to vote Republican if, say, 30,000 troops came home at the end of October. If Iraq lapses into unfettered civil war a few days later, though, they might change their minds.
But what if Bush & Co. aren’t planning to decrease our overseas military commitment this month? What if they actually increase it — by attacking Iran? (Forget North Korea; Kim Jong Il doesn’t fit the whole “Islamofascism” narrative now in vogue at the White House.) In a September cover story in Time titled “What Would War Look Like?”, Michael Duffy reported that several ships capable of laying and hunting mines were poised to set sail to the Persian Gulf by early October. Along with the dusting-off of a plan to blockade Iranian oil ports, this development “suggest[s] that a much-discussed — but until now largely theoretical — prospect has become real: that the US may now be preparing for war with Iran,” Duffy wrote. (In fact, the USS Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group, which includes a guided-missile cruiser, two guided-missile destroyers, and an attack sub, reportedly left for the Persian Gulf on Tuesday.) A wholesale war might not help the GOP, since Bush’s handling of Iraq is increasingly unpopular with the American public. But if it were a limited operation in response to an (allegedly) imminent threat — bombing purported nuclear-weapons facilities in Iran, say — Republicans could take advantage at the polls.
Maybe we’ll see a great big terrorist plot targeting the US foiled in the next couple of weeks. The story wouldn’t even need to hold up long-term, as long as it freaks people out through Election Day. Maybe there’ll just be another spooky terror-threat increase à la 2004, one that makes people stock up on bottled water and duct tape and vote Republican on November 7. Or maybe the GOP is poised to play some sort of immigration-related trump card. How ’bout a crackdown on illegal aliens employed by some big, Democratic-friendly employer? Or better yet: a Latino bearing anthrax (in a piñata!) gets caught at the US-Mexico border.
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Surprise! We like boys!
But wait. How exactly does the troubling tale of newly disgraced Republican congressman Mark Foley — former leader of the Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus — fit into this narrative of Republican treachery and Democratic victimhood? After all, Foley’s serial flirtations with underage House pages could become the defining scandal of the 2006 elections: this week, the Washington Times — the nation’s most reliably conservative newspaper — called on Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert to resign immediately for abetting (intentionally or not) Foley’s repeated e-dalliances with teenage boys. The Foley debacle still hasn’t played out, but it seems safe to say it can only hurt the GOP. (Among other things, the Foley revelations could depress turnout by the party’s conservative Christian base next month.)
It’s not clear what role, if any, Democrats played in bringing this story to light or driving it forward. But clearly, Republicans aren’t the only beneficiaries of late-breaking developments. This might be a good time for liberal readers to try a little thought experiment: if similar revelations had just been made about a Democratic candidate, how would you respond? For that matter, would it bother you if you learned that one or more Democrats had helped ABC News break the Foley story? Be honest, now.
Another thought: Rove’s mysterious October surprise may have already happened. This past Sunday, Britain’s Sunday Times posted a video of Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah — the 9/11 ringleader and hijacker of United Airlines Flight 93, respectively — yukking it up for the camera and then (more somberly, natch) reading their martyrdom messages out loud. Since terrorism is the GOP’s political trump card, anything that puts terrorism on the brain bodes well for the Republican Party — and the fact that this video had reportedly been kicking around for a while certainly seems fishy. The 700-mile fence between the US and Mexico approved by the Senate last week could yield Republican votes. Or the price of gas might keep going down, until it finally levels off at a buck a gallon on Election Day.
Or maybe — just maybe — all this talk of an 11th-hour shocker is just a bunch of BS aimed at throwing Democrats off their game. “Democrats are so psyched out about Karl Rove that they always assume he has an October surprise — or two — waiting for them,” says Mark Halperin, political director of ABC News and the co-author of a new book, The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008, that examines Rove’s methods. “The Democrats spend so much time bracing for the surprise that they lose valuable time, just the way Rove wants it.”
“It’s a Jedi mind trick by a master Jedi,” agrees Simon Rosenberg, a veteran Democratic strategist who heads the New Democrat Network. One could even make a compelling argument that the Rove/October-surprise fixation has serious long-term consequences for the Democratic Party: the more time Democrats spend worrying about shady Republican tricks, the less time they spend considering their own weaknesses, like the fact that their national organization pales in comparison with the GOP’s, or that DNC chair Howard Dean may have picked a crappy time to implement his new 50-state strategy.
Even if Rove does pull something shady at the last minute, will voters take the bait? Are they really that uncritical, that malleable, that lemming-like? Steve Grossman — the former Democratic National Committee and Massachusetts Democratic Party Head — thinks otherwise. “The bottom line is, political gimmickry and political gadgetry in the hands of Karl Rove and out of the mouth of George Bush is not going to reassure the American people that this country is on the right track,” Grossman insists.
Time will tell. But Sabato, for his part, is far from convinced. “One thing I’ve learned for sure is that the American public is already cynical enough to simply assume that politics drives many of the key decisions from Washington,” he argues. “And they don’t care, as long as they like the decision and as long as the effects of the decision are positive for them, whether it’s lower taxes or lower prices at the gas pump or good news in Iraq. They don’t care. And they’ll respond to the good news.” If he’s right — and if Rove presses the right buttons over the next five weeks — all this talk of a Democratic resurgence may come to naught.
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