Keeping It Close

by digby

I have said throughout the Bush years that Democrats suffered from the fact that we not only had to win, but we had to win big enough that the Republicans can’t steal it. In a country that is closely divided as ours has been throughout this period, particularly in important swing states, suppressing the Democratic vote was an excellent way for GOP crooks and cheaters to win.

Here’s McClatchy’s latest on Missouri:

Accusations about voter fraud seemed to fly from every direction in Missouri before last fall’s elections. State and national Republicans leaders fretted that dead people might vote or that some live people might vote more than once.

The threat to the integrity of the election was seen as so grave that Bradley Schlozman, the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and later the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, twice wielded the power of the federal government to try to protect the balloting. The Republican-controlled Missouri General Assembly also stepped into action.

Now, six months after freshman Missouri Sen. Jim Talent’s defeat handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate, disclosures in the wake of the firings of eight U.S. attorneys show that that Republican campaign to protect the balloting was not as it appeared. No significant voter fraud was ever proved.

The preoccupation with ballot fraud in Missouri was part of a wider national effort that critics charge was aimed at protecting the Republican majority in Congress by dampening Democratic turnout. That effort included stiffer voter-identification requirements, wholesale purges of names from lists of registered voters and tight policing of liberal get-out-the-vote drives.

Bush administration officials deny those claims. But they’ve gotten traction in recent weeks because three of the U.S. attorneys ousted by the Justice Department charge that they lost their jobs because they failed to prove Republican allegations of voter fraud. They say their inquiries found little evidence to support the claims.

Few have endorsed the strategy of pursuing allegations of voter fraud with more enthusiasm than White House political guru Karl Rove. And nowhere has the plan been more apparent than in Missouri.

With populations that don’t necessarily trust the authorities to be impartial even when the stakes are huge, asking them to run a gauntlet of legal hurdles in order to vote pretty much assures that quite a few of them won’t bother. In a cynical nation that can barely get a majority of its eligible citizens to vote anyway, you can potentially peel off a percentage or two just by making voting a pain in the neck.

You would think that nobody in his right mind would actually work to keep the country divided so they can steal elections, but you have to wonder if that played a factor in Rove’s “feed the base” legislative strategy,which Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson described in their book Off Center as a conscious choice to pass bills with as few members of the other party as possible — a highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented way of doing things. This was done ostensibly to deliver to a base that they believed was large enough to win elections on its own (with the help of a handful of faux moderates who were given “backlash insurance“) as well as keep the other side looking helpless and foolish as they could never quite win anything at all, thus demoralizing their own base.

I have no way of knowing, of course, but it would be in keeping with the hubristic and reflexively dishonest Rovian approach to politics if rather than seeking to truly create a governing majority, he consciously sought to keep the electorate very closely polarized so that he could both deliver to the base and keep them engaged — and also win those necessarily close elections through the most sophisticated voter suppression machine in history. (And yes, there were probably shenanigans with the voting machines as well.)

It’s only a crackpot theory, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The man always assumed he could keep a hundred balls in the air at once. Unfortunately, his president and vehicle for this new political machine was so inept at actual governance that the Democrats were able to win big enough in 2006 that he couldn’t steal it. And now they have subpoena power.

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