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The Karl Rove invitation - Political sleepwalking?

Pretend for a moment that you're a political operative. Now, imagine the circumstances: your political party is in the red, your image with voters statewide is fading, and an important pivotal election is less than 6 months away. And you have an annual fundraising dinner coming up in a couple of weeks.

What do you do? You invite Karl Rove, undoubtedly President George W. Bush's top advisor (well, perhaps next to Vice President Dick Cheney) to New Hampshire to raise funds!

Forget whether he's got conspiracy and other legal charges of his own to face, forget about the President's problems, forget about all the dozens of other more respectable Republican leaders you could get — you invite a man who you know can bring in the bucks. You invite the "power guy" who people will pay high-plate-prices to share bread with so they can shake his hand and slip their business card.

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By Jim Splaine at 05/23/2006 - 10:57 | Accountability | Republicans | Jim Splaine's blog | login or register to post comments

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Rove is a distracting attraction

Since it's unlikely that Republican'ts are as stupid as this looks, I have to think that some purpose is served by keeping the 2002 phone-jamming story alive. If the press is paying attention to this, it's not paying attention to something else.
It was the same strategy in Florida in 2000. While we paid attention to the removal of blacks from the voter rolls, we neglected the butter-fly ballots and hanging chads and a persistent pattern of throwing out 10% of the ballots for any number of reasons.
Similarly, in 2004 while everyone was paying attention to touch-screen machines in Florida and long lines in Ohio, the votes were being stolen by the opti-scan programs right under our noses.
What we need to be paying attention to is laws and procedures that will guarantee a fool-proof random audit of paper ballots to detect the fraud and a timetable that will permit this to be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time. Once officials are sworn in they can't be removed, regardless of how irregular their selection was.
By monica smith at Wed, 05/24/2006 - 7:59am | login or register to post comments

Sleepwalking would be an improvement!

Jim, if it were merely sleepwalking, it would be forgivable.

This was a conscious decision. Someone sat down, thought this through and didn't see any moral quandry. I'm not sure if that's frightening or just pathetic.

There are plenty of Republicans out there who would make a suitable speaker at this sort of event. John McCain, Chuck Hagel, and Rudy Guiliani are all reasonable, principled conservatives. They might vote the wrong way, but they do so for the right reason, out of a sense of committment to a set of beliefs.

There are interesting new faces, such as Lindsay Graham and Jodi Rell.

There is the usual gaggle of 2008 contenders, such as Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney.

It defies comprehension why the NH GOP chose to honor a guy who is not only the poster child for partisanship run amok, but who is the target of a federal probe into intelligence leaks.

Simply remarkable.
By Peter Sullivan at Tue, 05/23/2006 - 11:47am | login or register to post comments