Good point. I wonder how much of Rove’s reputation was due to the fact that Democrats just couldn’t believe that Bush was actually doing something right? (As a candidate, anyway)
Their low opinion of Bush is a major factor there. And I have a dirt-low opinion of him myself, but every candidacy has strengths and weaknesses. On top of that there was the whole South Carolina GOP primary thing and the Florida recount, where their success may be more attributable to Bush’s legal team than to Rove (I don’t know how that stuff was organized). Democrats believed he was just a master of evil dirty tricks. And these guys do overrate themselves, you know - Rove talked about his plans for a permanent Republican majority, people actually gave a crap that Rove modeled himself after William McKinley’s campaign manager, things like that. His success with people who are not George W. Bush is very limited and his results in 2012 (and the Super PACs in general) was awful. Don’t believe the hype.
I’ve always pictured Rove as being a brainiac but absolutely cynical and calculating, an “ends justify the means” type. And Bush (and his whole family) are cynical ego monsters who are perfectly comfortable with allowing others to do whatever it takes to win, like doing push polling, hiring software companies to build voting machines, intimidating voters in the wrong parts of town, losing a box of ballots, hiring the very meanest lawyers to put a foot in the door, whatever. I remember thinking in 2000, surely Bush knows how bad this is making him look. He would never want to trash his family’s reputation by even appearing to steal an election, right…?
But I love the idea that living in the Fox vacuum has left Rove & Co. blind to reality, believing their own hype, painting themselves into an electoral corner. I love the idea (and I hope it’s true) that the GOP is going down for the last time, that their Fox-watching, Limbaugh-listening rubes are (literally) dying out and being replaced by more lefty, more tolerant, more sophisticated, more activist, more non-white, non-religious generations. I love the idea that this new generation of wackjob Republicans that we’ve been complaining about for years have finally passed a point of no return and are charging full-speed over a cliff, never to be seen again.
I hope.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=15670428&postcount=646
I mentioned in the election thread that Karl Rove bet his reputation on this election. You can miss by a bit and still maintain credibility but now people are starting to wonder if Bush didn’t have something to do with winning those elections. Maybe they’ll give Bush a superPAC next election cycle.
The car dealerships in Northern Virginia spent a lot of their advertising budgets on mailers because they were crowded out of TV and radio.
Didn’t McCain get a speaking spot at the convention where he talked about invading what seemed like the entire middle east?
Ooh, maybe they’ll bring back Bush and run his brother in the next election. I can totally see that working. I can also tell you that a lot of inside the beltway conservatives has a hard on for Jeb Bush. He is very conservative, he appeals to Latinos, he is a hard worker, very intelligent, and very free market.
I think Rove was master of a particular variety of dirty trick: he could take a weak message, dress it up in lies attacks on patriotism and scaremongering, and use that to turn out a reliable Republican vote. It worked for a long time, not least because Democrats were so timid in the face of his brazen strategy. But lately Dems have been fighting back, hard, and that’s working. It’s not a strategy that functions so well when it’s responded to with forceful eloquence.
The Rove standard play is to attack your opponents strength. In 2008, they tried to attack Obama for being too popular. The wingnut base bought it hook, line, and sinker, but nobody else did. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: Nobody likes that guy, because he’s too popular! Same with him giving good speeches…the whole teleprompter thing that nobody not wearing a tri-corn hat believes or gives a rat’s ass about.
This time they tried to attack him on the economy, which turned around soon after he took office, and has been steadily improving month by month. Once again, they couldn’t sell it when it is plain as day that things ARE slowly improving. For those that don’t ignore fact checkers, and facts in general, it was a pretty tough sell.
I think what the real problem may be is that the GOP base hates Obama so bad because he is [del]black[/del] a socialist, that they just can’t grock what people like about him, so are at a loss as to what to attack.
And I didn’t read it that way. But you should. We do. We love our town, but our state mortifies us.
Well they haven’t won an election in the past 40 years without having a Bush on the ticket. 
A bit of trivia pointed out to me recently. The last time the Republican ticket won without a Nixon or a Bush was 1928 — 84 years ago!
So, a Jeb Bush/Julie Nixon Eisenhower ticket for 2016?
You can’t have two - they’ll cancel each other out!
Also national security. How many times did they beat the “Benghazi is worse than Watergate!” drum?
Anecdotal, I know, but this form of drum-beating was not terribly effective in my experience campaigning for Obama in a swing state. I ran into few genuinely undecided people, but of the ones I met while knocking on doors at least two of these undecided voters said to me, post-Benghazi, “Obama’s clearly the better candidate when it comes to foreign policy”–and no one cited Libya as an example of why they might vote for Romney. The GOP’s “the economy is awful” message did make some sense to these folks; the Libya thing did not. Again, anecdotal, but I’d be surprised if what happened in Benghazi changed just about anyone’s vote in favor of Romney.
If Brad Friedman is to be believed and his timeline is correct, it may be that an Ohio vote flip was planned but then not executed when it became clear that the President would win even without Ohio.
Confused in Minneapolis writes to ask are you referring to the “experimental” software installed by that paragon of political purity, Mr. Husted?
That’s a conspiracy too far for me to swallow. What sort of election shenanigans could be planned then called off 3/4 of the way through the counting?
You flip the votes in the tabulator, ideally for the precincts that haven’t reported yet.
I think Karl Rove has passed his expiration date. The problem with being a political fixer is that you eventually become known as a political fixer and part of the job requirement is you have to stay in the shadows. Rove is now known and any candidate who hires him faces the burden of being the candidate who hired Karl Rove - some people are going to be instantly suspicious of your campaign and start watching you like a hawk. So a smart candidate wouldn’t hire Rove - he’d hire some anonymous guy who thinks like Rove.
No, he didn’t, unless your definition of “huge margin” includes most elections. By historical standards the 2008 election was a victory of average proportions.
In the 41 years I’ve been alive there have been 11 Presidential elections. Of the nine not involving Barack Obama, four were WAY more lopsided (1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988) and one was arguably more lopsided (1996.). Only four were closer than 2008, and one of those, 1992, might not really have been that close; it depends how you parse the three-way race.
Hmmmm …
Apparently, an Anonymous message claims to have interdicted a Rovian attempt to fix Ohio.