Sometimes No News is also Bad News

For whatever reason, I haven't seen much mentioned in the news about it, but Carl Rove was recently named White House deputy chief of staff in charge of coordinating domestic policy, economic policy, national security and homeland security.

Oh, I feel much better now. This is some of what Dallasnews has to say in their article nominating him "Texan of the Year":

As a College Republican, Mr. Rove got his start teaching seminars on dirty tricks. In Mr. Rove's political rise, critics have been quick to see an instinct for winning at any cost. A Rove campaign, they say, always follows a pattern: virulent whisper campaigns or damaging attacks from surrogate groups against his opponents, but never evidence that he was involved...

In 1994, when Mr. Bush ran for governor, incumbent Gov. Ann Richards says she was targeted by an astonishingly effective word-of-mouth campaign in East Texas over gays and lesbians in her administration.

Four years ago, Sen. John McCain says he was targeted in the Republican presidential primary by a group of veterans who questioned his temperament to be president – code for whether his prisoner of war experience had made him crazy – and by Bush supporters who spread vicious rumors about his personal life...

Campaigns, in politics or on the battlefield, are often won on a key decision. Mr. Rove's big decision was to target the GOP base, not depend on moderate swing voters to build a majority. The idea was to identify your reliable voters – religious conservatives, rural voters, white men, married women in suburbs, exurbanites and business-friendly Republicans – and get them to the polls in bigger numbers than four years ago.

Energizing Christian conservatives was an important part of the strategy. Churches conducted voter-registration drives. The campaign collected church membership directories and recruited volunteers in congregations. With the Bush team's encouragement, allies put proposals to ban gay marriage on the ballot in 11 states.

This attracted evangelicals and social conservatives in droves. In the pivotal battleground state of Ohio, a quarter of those surveyed in exit polls identified themselves as "white evangelical/born-again Christians" – and most of them voted for Mr. Bush.

The election machine that Mr. Rove and company built for the 2004 race was like nothing ever seen before in an American election. Two years before a vote was ever cast, the team began assembling an enormous list from voter files, magazine subscriptions, marketing lists, population trends, TV viewing habits, census data, demographic information – and created a computerized model capable of identifying their voters with extraordinary precision.

They studied how many of their likely voters were watching CSI on television in Cleveland. They placed ads on the Golf Channel. They discovered that although the president supported a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, many married Republican women – an important constituency – regularly watched the sitcom Will & Grace, which portrays gay life positively. In battleground states, Will & Grace became a favorite spot for Bush-Cheney TV ads...

(And by the way, over 20 years in Texas, Mr. Rove was instrumental in turning Democrat-dominated Texas into a state where the GOP today holds every statewide office and both Senate seats, as well as dominating the courts and the Legislature. When U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay spearheaded the successful drive to redraw congressional boundaries in Texas, he found a Legislature and state leadership friendly to his purpose – thanks in part to Karl Rove's handiwork.)

I feel so much better knowing this man has such a firm hand in our government, don't you?

Let me leave you with some parting thoughts on our new Deputy chief of staff, shall I?

"There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
- John DiIulio, a former senior aide to President Bush said in 2002

By the way, the very day his bracing criticism of Rove and the White House made national news, he apologized to his former colleagues, twice. It was a strange, cringe-inducing spectacle, with language out of a Soviet show trial: He called his own criticisms, as quoted by Suskind, "groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples." Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer had earlier called his complaints "groundless and baseless," so his use of the same terms seemed rote and creepy, like he'd either been beaten up or lobotomized. "I sincerely apologize and I am deeply remorseful," he said in a statement.

Nice. So this is what a "moral majority" gets us?