Mud Wrestler
Well now. Just as I was basking in the glow of three successful debates and a nice sense of momentum, I finally got to read this seminal article about Karl Rove in The Atlantic, by Joshua Green and I realized that I was being far too complacent. I urge you to read the whole piece. Rove is not a magician and he is not omnipotent. But he is ruthless, particularly when he’s in a corner.
First of all, Rove’s history in tight races is very instructive. He will play very, very dirty, particularly in the last couple of weeks, and he will use some tactics that are extremely difficult to counter in a short period of time.
One of his favorites seems to be to smear his own candidate in order to make his opponent look like a dirty trickster. This is, of course, where the Rove/CBS memo theory comes from. But, Rove usually does this sort of thing very late in the game, so I would suspect that we will see something new in the next week or so if it’s going to happen.
The most instructive anecdote in the article is the one in which the race was so close that Rove insisted on a recount. It would sound very familiar except that in this case, his client was the challenger. This is likely to be a primer for what will happen if Kerry wins narrowly. Hooper was Rove’s Republican client. Hornsby was the Democrat:
Judicial races that no one had expected to be competitive suddenly narrowed, and media attention—especially to Hooper’s race after the “dialing for dollars” ad—became widespread. Then Rove turned up the heat. “There was a whole barrage of negative attacks that came in the last two weeks of our campaign,” says Joe Perkins, who managed Hornsby’s campaign along with those of the other Democrats Rove was working against. “In our polling I sensed a movement and warned our clients.”
Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory.
Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)
The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots.
As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes.
The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'”
Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him.
The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.
When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.
I had read a bit about this race, but until now it really hadn’t hit home that Karl Rove had single handedly orchestrated the Bush recount strategy in 2000.
This is going to be a very, very difficult couple of weeks and if we don’t win decisively, it’s likely to continue for quite a while. We cannot count on Republican shame to keep them from requesting hand counts or trying to block absentee ballots or behaving in any other hypocritical manner based upon their arguments in 2000. They have no shame and hypocrisy means nothing to them. So, we will have to be prepared to slug it out.
In the meantime, the blogosphere is going to have to help the media see what is happening when Rove launches his next slime attack. I suspect that the Mary Cheney brouhaha may be the first shot — it doesn’t make a lot of sense by itself, but perhaps as an introduction to a new character smear it might. Whatever it’s going to be it has something to do with Kerry being cruel and unfeeling.
Keep your eyes and ears open for signs in the next few days. When the going gets tough — and the going is certainly tough — Rove always resorts to ratfucking. As Josh Marshall says,
It’ll be like a ‘where’s Waldo’ thing: Karl Rove Dirty Trick’s Watch. (For examples, see the Green piece.) Who will be able to spot Karl’s dirty tricks first? Who has the sharpest eye? Sit back in your seat. Get out the popcorn.
