This is a provocative piece from the Los Angeles Times:
Is Rove trying to in fact get Dems to rally behind Hillary?
http://www.latimes.com/...
Peter Wallsten=(c) 2007, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON -- Day after day last week, outgoing White House political strategist Karl Rove delivered slashing attacks on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner. Her health care record was ``spotty and poor,'' he declared. Her candidacy was ``fatally flawed,'' he said, and no one with her negative poll numbers ``has ever won the presidency.''
Why did Rove, who often stays in the background, step forward to deliver such public attacks -- especially when Democrats haven't begun to choose their presidential candidate for 2008 and the election is more than a year away? The answer might seem obvious: Rove saw Clinton as a formidable opponent and wanted to get his licks in early. ...
Reverse psychology?
And I doubt the first time Rove has played this game:
For high-level campaign professionals like Rove, however, that kind of thinking may be way too simple. The decision to focus on Clinton to the exclusion of other potentially formidable Democratic standard-bearers such as Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois offered a rare glimpse into a world where things are not always what they seem -- the world of modern-day electioneering, whose denizens often prefer going from A to B by way of Z.
In this case, Rove's weeklong broadside against Clinton, which he was expected to repeat in multiple appearances on television talk shows Sunday, looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush's re-election bid.
The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a post-mortem conference at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated the Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.
In the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, at a time when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be in November 2004, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.
These guys like Rove are certainly thinking about who they want to run against, and ra*$&ing the Democratic primaries as much as possible to get
their way.
Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to the GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party's nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists feared most. Unlike Kerry, who had been in public life for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former front-runner Howard Dean, whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards could not easily be painted as ``nutty.''
If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd's own words: ``Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds,'' said Dowd, `` ... So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards and we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce'' around Kerry.
``It wasn't like we could tag (eliminate) somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped,'' he said.
A transcript of the conference is contained in the book, ``Campaign for President: The Managers Look at 2004,'' edited by Harvard's Kennedy School Institute of Politics.
Gee, isn't politics fun. Attack, attack, attack.