The bottom line is that we cannot let the election move in Karl Rove's direction and a focus on personality when on the real issues themselves point out McCain will be four more years of George W Bush. M

Published on Thursday, July 31, 2008 by Salon.com
Karl Rove’s Media Birds Chirp About Obama’s ‘Arrogance’
by Glenn Greenwald

Displaying the startling prescience and unconventional insights that have long been the hallmark of his magazine, The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait wrote on June 30:

The best aspect of a McCain presidency is that, while it would probably follow the policies of George W. Bush, it would put an end to the politics of Karl Rove . . . . In Bush’s Washington, critics are enemies to be dismissed rather than engaged. A McCain presidency would promise to dismantle the whole Rovian method that has torn open such a deep wound in the national psyche.

From The New York Times Editorial Page, yesterday:

On July 3, news reports said Senator John McCain, worried that he might lose the election before it truly started, opened his doors to disciples of Karl Rove from the 2004 campaign and the Bush White House. Less than a month later, the results are on full display. The candidate who started out talking about high-minded, civil debate has wholeheartedly adopted Mr. Rove’s low-minded and uncivil playbook.

From The New York Times today:

After spending much of the summer searching for an effective line of attack against Senator Barack Obama, Senator John McCain is beginning a newly aggressive campaign to define Mr. Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency. . . .
Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on.

There’s obviously nothing surprising about the McCain campaign’s reliance on the standard, personality-based attacks that the GOP uses every election year. It’s long been obvious to everyone outside of The TNR Circle that McCain’s only prospect for winning would be to move the election away from debates over issues (where his positions are widely rejected by the public) and instead demonize Barack Obama as an effete, elitist, effeminate, far Leftist, terrorist-loving radical, and it was equally obvious that McCain — “drooling for power like a fruit bat with rabies,” as Matt Taibbi put it in November, 2006 — would eagerly employ those Rovian tactics. That may be a surprise to long-time Beltway McCain worshipers such as Chait and The Washington Post’s David Ignatitus (who today longed for McCain’s “healing gift,” “this fiercely independent man,” and “not the heroism but the humility”), but not to anyone else.

What is far more notable than McCain’s now almost-complete reliance on Rovian demonization themes is how obediently the establishment media has been spouting and disseminating them. Five weeks ago, on June 23, Karl Rove appeared at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club, mocked Obama as “the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by,” and labeled him “cooly arrogant.” Ever since, that Obama is “arrogant” — and the related sin: “presumptuous” — has become standard, mandated media script.

It’s now literally difficult to find a discussion of Obama in the establishment press that isn’t based on this personality-based theme — with media stars either expressing the opinion themselves or repeating it as a McCain talking point.

Karl Rove - CommonDreams.org

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What's more arrogant than ignoring a congressional subpoena?

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You meet the same folks on the way up as you do on the way down.

Is that a rhetorical question or a punch line for part two of a joke?

Oh! You might be serious. O.K. dude (^:

You mean like Karl Rove. I love that photoshop picture of him between two huge cops in handcuffs being perp walked down the sidewalk. One can only hope.

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Hook'im, book'im, and cook'im.

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You meet the same folks on the way up as you do on the way down.

There seems to be a rove spirit moving McCain. and I think that will hurt him post Convention.

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