A lot of us have assumed that Bush's performance in the two Presidential debates so far was a blunder. That he'd somehow messed up, that he'd been isolated for too long, that he was doing the white powder again.
While this definitely seems plausible, after the discussion about the Dred Scott comment, I'd like to put forth another hypothesis. That this is part of Rove's "ignore swing voters, turn out the base" strategy.
After the Chimp's defeat in 2000, Rove supposedly made some conclusions about conservative campaigns. From what I've read, the conclusion is generally as follows. First, he concluded that attempting to woo swing voters wasn't worthwhile. Most either weren't as motivated to vote as they said, or were too wary about the Republican platform to be counted on. Second, he concluded that there were millions - 4 million (corrected from comments) is the number I've heard - of evangelical CINOs and other rightwingnuts that, because of Chimp/Cheney's attempts to woo swing voters, did not vote for the Chimp. Third, he observed how effective voter disenfranchisement efforts had been in Florida.
Rove's supposed final conclusion was that he didn't need swing voters to win. What he needed was to turn out the Chimp's base in record numbers by throwing red meat at them, and combine that with efforts to prevent as many Democrats and swing voters as possible from voting.
So far, the Chimp's campaign strategy has supported this, though not very strongly. His rallies have been for the true believers only. They've lacked any sort of real content, instead being simply self-promotional lovefests. Of course, the pResident's been isolated from any sort of criticism since his appointment to office, so this didn't seem to be an indicator of anything else.
However, given Bush's abysmal performance in the debates, I think the only reasonable conclusion is that this is indeed Rove's strategy. Why?
First, the debate dialog supports the conservative need to feel persecuted by liberals. After all, the only way to explain the abysmal failure of their policies, given their near-total control of government for the last 15 years, is a massive liberal conspiracy working against them. Seeing Bush getting beaten around on TV by Kerry and the moderators, and then hearing slightly negative things said about him by the pundits afterwards, has no doubt reinforced the image in their minds of a moral President doing the best he can while under attack from all sides by those who wish to destroy him. This helps woo the evangelical CINOs Rove's aiming for, as that's how they see themselves.
Secondly, this allows Bush to deliver coded red meat to his base in the middle of supposedly nonsensical digressions. The Dred Scott thing was one. I've no doubt the "Internets" comment was another, as a common view among evangelicals is that the "Internets" are a breeding ground for immorality and perversity. I'd love to see someone who's got more experience dealing with these whackos go through his other "mishaps" and try to pick out other coded phrases. This also feeds back to the "massive liberal conspiracy" and "one of us" efforts mentioned above.
Those are the big two, but other things also contribute to this. The flip-flop thing is directly targetted at these people. They tend to believe that anyone who changes their mind - especially a politician - is inherently untrustworthy. After all, or so they think, if that person had found God properly, then God would make sure they were never mistaken.
So what do you think? Did Bush really screw up beyond his handlers' expectations, or is this part of Rove's scheme to get record numbers of evangelical CINOs to the polls and prevent anyone else from voting?