A Turd Blossom By Any Other Name -- could easily apply to Cheney, as well. "lb"
billmon.org
The Guardian's Julian Borger notices that Karl Rove lately has been living up to only one of the two nicknames bestowed on him by his boss:
Bush's other nickname for the Boy Genius is "Turd Blossom" - a Texanism for a flower that blooms from cattle excrement. This year, there should be ample opportunity for him to earn the title.
CBS's Dick Meyer notices as well:
It's beginning to look as if the vaunted Karl and George team has developed a serious case of tin ear syndrome.
But UPI's Martin Sieff gets in the unkindest cut of all:
The entire dynamic of the U.S. presidential race has changed. Instead of white rabbits, all Rove has been able to pull out of his hat are dead, wet fish. He'll have to do better than that if he wants to avoid Joe Trippi's fate come November.
Now when I call that unkind, I mean unkind to Trippi -- who, for all his faults, invented a completely new way to organize and fund an insurgent primary campaign. Rove, by contrast, is simply -- and rather unimaginatively -- trying to run the same plays taught to him by his master, Lee Atwater. In 2002, with the winds of war and mindless patriotic hysteria blowing in his favor, it worked. Now it's ... not working. To tell the truth, Karl's beginning to look a little obsolete -- an '80s guy in a '00s world.
But saying Rove's tactical blunders are the cause of Bush's current misfortunes isn't correct, I think. To be sure, Turd Blossom's tactical skills have always been overrated. Anyone who watched him send Bush on that idiotic two-day victory lap through California in the closing days of the 2000 campaign should know that. It almost cost Shrub the election -- did cost hiim the election, save for the Supreme intervention.
But nothing Turd Blossom's done or tried to do over the past six months has differed all that much from the tactics that worked so well for Bush in 2001 and 2002 -- set grand but vaguely defined goals, proclaim your desire for bipartisan comity (while using every conceivable opportunity to stick it to the opposition) and simply ignore or deny any setbacks or deviations from the script. The pocket whatever you get (whether its a completely botched transition of power in Iraq or a runaway pork barrell of a prescription drug plan) and proclaim victory. Then flush all the details down the Orwellian memory hole and move on.
If Rove has deviated from the Atwater playbook in any way, it's in taking the conservative base a bit for granted -- e.g. the prescription drug boondoogle and the amnesty plan for undocumented workers. But tactically, those were both eminently sensible moves. Rove may not actually be a Boy Genius, but he knows how to count, and he understands that Bush can't win unless he can find a decent sized slice of swing vote to add to the true believers. Hispanics and seniors (who might be induced to vote GOP on cultural grounds if the Democratic edge on economic issues can be neutralized) are logical targets.
Rove also had every reason to believe he could take the base for granted -- given that Bush spent the first two and half years of his presidency sucking up to it with gospel fervor (sometimes literally). But of course, the base wouldn't be the base if it didn't guard it's prerogatives with a fierce suspicion. The conservative God is a jealous God. Still, you can't blame Karl for trying to do an end run around it. He had no choice.
Rove's real sin is strategic, and if anything, should be even more alarming to the conservatives than any of his tactical blunders, because they're guilty of the same sin. All along, the Rovian project has been to restore and strengthen the old Reagan coalition -- primarily through the care and feeding of its key constituencies: the military, defense contractors, small business owners, the extractive industries (and the states where those industries are strong) and, above all, the Christian conservatives.
This has meant a rigid dedication to the classic Reaganite mix of supply-side economics, macho nationalism and a pious, if largely symbolic, display of loyalty to "traditional values." Above all things, the Rovians want to turn the clock back to 1984 -- the year of Morning in America, the bear-in-the-woods ad and the "San Francisco Democrats."
As it turns out, though, the program is conservative only in its dedication to conserving Republican power at all costs. (This is where Rove had me fooled. Up until last year, he had me believing he really did want to complete the unfinished conservative "revolution" of 1980 and 1994. But it's easier to see now that the will to power -- and the privileges and patronage that come with power -- are all that remains of the original Reaganite project.)
The electoral strategy suggested by Rove's political objective is simple: hold the base and attract enough swing voters on symbolic issues (guns, God, gays and the threat of big gummit) to reach a majority. In his new book, The Two Americas, Stan Greenberg calls this the "100 percent" solution, because it's based on the idea that if the Reaganite base can be held intact, finding the remaining slice of votes should be relatively easy -- particularly if the base's rough edges can be smoothed over with a little "compassionate conservatism."
But, as Greenberg also points out, trying to revive a 25-year old coalition with a 16-year old electoral playbook is a deeply reactionary exercise -- and an inherently risky one:
The hope for the Republicans today is that they, like the McKinley Republicans, have "figured out a new governing scheme through which people could view things and could conceivably enjoy a similar period of dominance." Rove is contemplating the hegemony that has proved so elusive over the past half century.
Or this might be a colossal misjudgement of the country's mood and aspirations and a gigantic overreach. Without any electoral mandate and scant evidence of popular support on the issues in the polls, there is good reason to question the reality of such aspirations for 2004.
Keller [Bill Keller, current editor of the New Pravda, and author of a long 2003 magazine piece on Bush called Reagan's Son -- billmon] allows for the possibility that Bush could succeed in his ambitious agenda and thus offer a remarkable tribute to Reagan, but he also imagines that Bush could "overreach" -- "which means it will be a failure on a grand scale."
In the white patriotic heat of post-9/11 America, it was possible to imagine Rove's project might succeed -- that the Democrats could be crushed, once and for all, and driven to the margins of the political system. I thought he might actually pull it off myself.
But now the realities of 21st century life are catching up with Rove and his '80s nostalgia kick. The cultural and demographic transformation that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote about in The Emerging Democratic Majority, coupled with the deflationary downside of globalization -- not least the huge increase in income inequality it has created -- are all taking their political toll. And the Democrats (wonders of wonders) are finally figuring out how to play this game.
Rove and Bush may yet figure out how to crawl to safety through the political sewer this year -- by ruthlessly using the advantages of incumbency and money, as Atwater and Bush did in 1988. And those same assets may enable the Republicans to keep their tottering coalition intact for a few more election cycles -- particularly if they can find a good front man (a native-born Arnie) to deliver the pitch. But the dream of restoring the golden age of Reagan, in all its glory, is dying. America is finally moving on, even if the Republicans aren't ready to go. And there's not much a Turd Blossom -- or even a Boy Genius -- can do about that.
Posted by billmon at March 9, 2004 09:29 PM | TrackBack |
