I think the discussion about how Bush won on "values" is missing something: Rove's biggest move, and the one that paid off, was to isolate his opponent's biggest strength and knock it down. Rather than run from it, they ran right into it and turned it into a liability. On our side, we should've attacked the resoluteness of GWB on 9/11 itself and gone after it, showing footage of him reading My Pet Goat over and over and over.
By focusing the debate on GWB's policies, we played into their hands. People who liked GWB didn't like him because he was right, or because they'd thought about the issues and their ramifications--they liked him because he was certain, resolute. In a time of uncertainty, that was comforting.
Rove knew this. By hitting the flip-flopper theme, he isolated the key emotional point of the election season: people wanted someone with answers, no matter how wrong.
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