I confess that after reading thousands of pages of investigative reporting on Turdblossom, until the last few days, I had still not understood the overarching strategy with which Rove intended to secure single-party government in the United States. The attorney firing scandal has dropped into place a puzzle piece that completes an amazing picture of a carefully planned attack on American Democracy.
This diary explains what I believe to be Rove's vision for the engineering of one-party authoritarian rule in the United States using a strategy called the "One Percent Solution."
Conventional electoral politics is focussed on securing a majority, and it is assumed that there will be a range of electoral outcomes reflecting the variability of individual races, with correspondingly variable vote tallies. But in recent years, American elections have been notable for very close races. Fewer than 100,000 votes would have swung both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections.
The key to Rove's 1% strategy was his understanding that a sufficiently well-financed and tuned election advertising campaign could reliably split the vote, and that a set of special tactics, legal and extra-legal, could consistently swing the less than 1% needed to decide the election.
The engineered splitting of the vote was the result of great advances in researching and crafting of attack advertising, using focus groups and other tools for precision targeting of messages keyed to voter fear and hostility. Because both Democrats and Republicans have access to the same propaganda resources, evenly split elections would increasingly become the norm. The beauty of the 1% strategy is that election advertising need only put the Rove candidate at the 50% mark. Securing landslides would be unnecessarily wasteful of campaign funds.
How to win the last 1%? This turns out to be the focus of most of Karl Rove's political career. Here are the methods I have discerned thus far:
- Disenfranchising opposition voters, e.g., Jeb Bush and Kathering Harris scrubbing the voter rolls in a manner that favored Republicans.
- Direct interference in opposition GOTV efforts, e.g., the NH phone jamming episode.
- Halting recounts in winning races and securing recounts in losing races. 2000 was a successful recount halt, and a number of Rove's minor campaigns have featured epic recount battles leading to eventual victory.
- Aggressive and energetic appleals to judicial and other decision making bodies to clinch a victory, e.g., Roves first election as President of the College Republicans and Bush vs. Gore.
Understanding Rove's 1% solution explains why the Gonzales scandal strikes so close to the center of BushCo corruption. Rove wanted to INSTITUTIONALIZE in the US DoJ tactics that would consistently deliver the decisive 1% in future close elections. By filling the ranks of Federal prosecutors with campaign operatives trained in suppression of opposition votes and increasing of BushCo votes, Rove intended to make Republican Authoritarianism a permanent government. Once enough DoJ assets were in place, very few Democrat would ever again win a close election. It is noteworthy that some of the prosecuters fired by Gonzales were directly criticized for not intervening in close elections won by Democrats. Rove had been planning this move for years, and Gonzales' clumsy implementation of the prosecutor firings revealed the scheme.
As long as Karl Rove remains active in American politics, our nation is in danger of being subverted and our democracy corrupted. It is vitally important that Rove and the school of gutter politics he represents be driven out of American public life permanently.