No, that is not a typo. Nor have I lost my mind (even if it is New Year's).
Without question, Karl Rove is the sleaziest, most despicable political operative of the generation. The litany of his corruptions of the American political process is so long, and so filthy, that I haven't the stomach (especially right now) to go into it.
But there is one trick from the Rove playbook that, properly applied, is not only honorable but extremely effective:
The intuitive way of attacking an opponent is to find his weakness and attack it. Karl Rove does the opposite: he finds his opponent’s strength and attacks it. BC Politics
And it works. The Swiftboating of John Kerry in 2004 is a classic example. Kerry decided to run on his record as a Vietnam war hero, in contrast to George W. Bush who spent the war AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard. Whether that was a workable strategy is both open to debate and irrelevant to this diary; the point is that the Swiftboaters seized on Kerry's strength and turned it into a weakness. They raised doubts, they made spurious claims about his awards, they mocked his heroism; in short, they made Kerry's honorable service and heroic actions useless as a campaign tool.
It didn't help that Kerry tried to rise above it and ignore it; that only made people think that if Kerry wouldn't defend his own record and his own honor, how could he be trusted to defend the honor of the country?
OK, how can we honorably apply the Rove tactic in the 2010 elections? Simple: By attacking the Republicans on national security.
Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership." New York Review of Books 14 Aug 2008
The thing is, ever since Bush and Cheney took over the White House, and especially once the Republicans solidified their hold on Congress, they have been lousy on national security. The missed signals in advance of 9/11, the bungling of the fight against terrorism by dropping the hunt for Bin Laden just as we might have captured him, the unnecessary and distracting war in Iraq , the use of torture - which does not provide useful information but does serve as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda - the list goes on and on.
In the post-Bush/Cheney era, Republicans are out of power, but nowhere near out of mischief, and they continue to play mischief with national security:
- Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has had a hold on President Obama's nominee to head the TSA - the agency responsible for keeping people like the Michignan bomber from getting on a plane - because he wants to prevent TSA workers from unionizing. When called on it, DeMint had the gall to blame Harry Reid for the delay, because Reid wanted to get health care reform passed. Reid now plans to force a cloture vote on Errol Southers' nomination, something not normally done while a hold is in place.
- Thirty-seven House Republicans, including John Boehner and Pete Hoekstra, voted against Homeland Security funding back in June. Over 100 Republicans voted against the final conference report - which included funding for explosive device detectors. No Democrats voted against the first bill, and only 6 voted against the conference report.
- Hoekstra, who is now running for governor of Michigan, sent out a fundraising email just after the Christmas attack charging the Democrats with bungling national security and promising that, as governor, he would keep Michigan safe - if you send him money.
- The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) also sent out a fundraising letter which used the Christmas attack to claim that Obama and the Democrats
showed a remarkable lack of understanding of the threat America faced but in the face of what nearly happened a couple days, [sic] it is even more infuriating.
- House Minority Leader John Boehner (see point 2 above) also sent out a fundraising letter for the NRCC blaming Obama for the attack and promising that donations would help prevent the closure of Gitmo.
There are other items that we can - and should, later on - add, but I have picked this list specifically for this reason: Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has announced his intention to use these items against the Republicans in 2010:
Democratic leadership in Congress is pledging to make Republican votes against key national security and defense funding measures a feature in the upcoming congressional elections, following the botched Christmas Day terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound airliner. ...
"What you are seeing now is that the [Republican] House and the Senate campaign committees trying to exploit an attempted terrorist attack, to try and raise money off an attempt to blow an airplane out of the sky... I think the American people ought to be appalled by that."HuffPo Interview with Van Hollen 31 Dec 2009
In other words, he is going to use Rove's tactic of attacking his opponent's strength.
And it's about time. For too long, Democrats, as noted above, have ceded the national security mantle to Republicans, who have exploited it without, with rare exception, being called to account for it. In 2006, we started to see some timid efforts to call the GOP out, and in 2008 candidate Barack Obama made it clear he considered the GOP record, and particularly that of the Bush administration, to be national security disasters, as did the DNC - which is one reason he is now President Barack Obama.
In the wake of the attempt to blow up NW253 as it approached Detroit, Republicans have been on the warpath, hoping to reprise their previous strategy of winning on national security to win back power in 2010 and 2012. And, for the most part, Democrats kept silent, much to the dismay of their supporters here and elsewhere.
On Dec. 30th, Van Hollen called on the White House to be more aggressive in fighting back, and he led the charge himself. (H/T to Muzikal203.) The White House took on Dick Cheney's ridiculous claim that Obama "doesn't ... want to admit we’re at war." Rep. Eric Massa (D-NY) is leading the charge against Dick Cheney and Jim DeMint, including a diary in this blog. That's the sort of thing to be expected from a former Navy commander, not to mention a survivor of a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Massa took the mantle of national security that Cheney had wrapped himself in and strangled him with it.
That's the honorable way to use the Rove tactic of attacking your opponent's strength. It's honorable because that "strength" is a packet of lies and misdirections which will crumble at the first shot of truth.
Well, perhaps not the first. Which is why we have to keep firing, we have to keep bringing up the facts, until the supposed GOP superiority on national security is firmly, completely, and irrefutably exposed for the chimera that it is.
And then we have to keep firing some more. This is not Sam Rayburn's Congress, where Republicans and Democrats would fight all day on the floor of the House or Senate and then go off together for drinks in the evening. There are no nice guys in politics any more. Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay (and yes, LBJ) saw to that. McConnell, Boehner, Hoekstra, Palin, not to mention the right-wing propaganda machine, are even worse. They play for keeps, for all the marbles, with no scruples, and no quarter given.
Which means they have no right to ask for quarter either. But that does not mean we stoop to their level. We don't have to; we have history, facts, hell, even the environment on our side. We even have the people; there are and almost always have been more of the country favoring the Democrats than the Republicans (one reason Rove felt he had to play his dirty tricks was because he knew he would never win on a level playing field).
All we need now are the guts.