Losin’ It

by digby

The legendarily confident Karl Rove is sounding a little bit frayed this morning. Charlie Christ (R- Closet), running to succeed Jebbie in Florida decided that he’d be better off campaigning with St. John McCain today instead of the Bush Brothers. It looks like the only one who will be seen with them on stage is the kooky Katherine Harris.

CNN caught the Boy Genius on the tarmac as AF1 was heading down to Florida.

Was this a snub?

Call him. All I know is yesterday morning they made a decision that rather than meet with the governor and president and 10,000 people in Pensacola they’d rather go to Palm Beach.

Does this say anything about the president’s popularity?

Let’s look at the comparison. Let’s see how many people show up in Palm Beach on 24 hours notice vs eight or nine thousand people in Pensacola.

One can only imagine what kind of tongue lashing he just took from the spoiled brat in chief over this bungle. The pictures of this trainwreck of a rally with the all-star team of George and Jeb up there alone with nutty election fixer Katherine Harris are going to be precious.

The fall of Rove is one of the big stories of the election. And he knows it. Of course, we’ve known what he was at least since January 2003, when Ron Suskind wrote this article for Esquire right after the last mid-term election.

The calls from members of the White House staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics, they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the right. It went deeper; it was about this administration’s ability to focus on the substance of governing—issues like the economy and social security and education and health care—as opposed to its clear political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in return a top-to-bottom critique of the White House’s basic functions, so profound is Rove’s influence.

I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s resignation: “I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a formidable adversary.”

One senior White House official told me that he’d be summarily fired if it were known we were talking. “But many of us feel it’s our duty—our obligation as Americans—to get the word out that, certainly in domestic policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce. This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations—mostly from Karl’s shop—to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it. That was Andy’s cry for help.”

But now the stunning midterm ascendancy of the Republicans boosts Rove into a new category; a major political realignment may hereby be ascribed to his mastery, his grand plan.

At the moment when one-party rule returns to Washington—a state that existed, in fact, in the first five months of the Bush presidency, before Senator Jeffords switched parties—we are offered a rare view of the way this White House works. The issue of how the administration decides what to do with its mandate—and where political calculation figures in that mix—has never been so important to consider. This White House will now be able to do precisely what it wants. To understand the implications of this, you must understand Karl Rove.

“It’s an amazing moment,” said one senior White House official early on the morning after. “Karl just went from prime minister to king. Amazing . . . and a little scary. Now no one will speak candidly about him or take him on or contradict him. Pure power, no real accountability. It’s just ‘listen to Karl and everything will work out.’. . . That may go for the president, too.”

Never forget that the dysfunction of this White House is not only the fault of Bush and Cheney. Karl Rove turned policy itself into politics in this administration. It’s one of the main reasons why nobody should have ever allowed such a white house to have extra-judicial power — there is no line between politics and national security or anything else. This is why nuclear secrets written in arabic wind up on the internet.

Tomorrow could be the day the country finally repudiates Karl Rove’s style of hyper-partisan political governance. It’s been a total disaster from the very beginning right up until this very minute. Here’s the latest from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, on the illegal voter suppression techniques they’ve been using all over the country this cycle. Report your own experiences here at Protect Our Votes.

ALREADY A STORY: Republicans are blanketing key Congressional districts with annoying robo calls. Listen to one here. These calls may result in post-election fines because they do not properly identify themselves early in the script and may also be violating caller id requirements.

NOT YET A STORY: These calls may be a coordinated effort to suppress the vote. What’s the difference between annoying robo calls and voter suppression? Many voters are reporting that the robo callers are calling back immediately when they hang up. The first words of the robo calls are “Hi, I’m calling with information about [Democratic Candidate’s Name]…” followed by a short pause. Therefore, voters receiving these calls could think they are being called repeatedly by the Democratic campaign or a group supporting the campaign.

MISSING PIECE: For this to break through, there needs to be visual evidence that voters are being called back immediately. Bloggers: please tell your readers to get video cameras ready and start rolling when the phone rings. Use the speaker phone so that the call can be heard. We need just one example of that up on YouTube and VideoTheVote.com.

Even better would be emails leaked from the robo call house responsible (or any robo call house for that matter) that offer the service or mention the strategy in question.

This election is Rove’s last gasp* and we are seeing a new round of dirty politics that’s perhaps unprecedented. He isn’t going to go down easily.

* Newt, Delay, Reed(and Rove, god willing) have fallen. The king of the talkshow pigs, Rush Limbaugh, is the last remaining head on their generation’s GOP hydra. We’re getting there.

There are many more like them, trained and waiting in the wings, so it isn’t the dawning of a new day for the Republicans. The new generation is dumber, but even more vicious. We just have to deal with them one at a time.

Update: Talking Points Memo is following this robo-call story in depth.

.