Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence

More dispatches from Bush's Brain (and its mouthpieces): in today's LA Times, Peter Wallsten writes about the Bush campaign's reverse psychology strategy in 2004.

The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a postmortem conference on the 2004 election at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

In the run-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be that November, Rove and his aides had begun to fear that their most dangerous foe would be then-Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina.

With his Southern base, charismatic style and populist message, Edwards, they believed, could be a real threat to Bush's reelection.

But instead of attacking Edwards, Rove's team opened fire at Kerry.

Their thinking went like this, Dowd explained: Democrats, in a knee-jerk reaction to GOP attacks, would rally around Kerry, whom Rove considered a comparatively weak opponent, and make him the party's nominee. Thus Bush would be spared from confronting Edwards, the candidate Republican strategists actually feared most.

Unlike Kerry, who had been in public service for decades, Edwards was a political newcomer and lacked a long record that could be attacked. And, unlike former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who had been the front-runner but whose campaign was collapsing in Iowa, Edwards couldn't easily be painted as "nutty."

If that sounds implausibly convoluted, consider Dowd's own words:

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds.

"So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards," Dowd said. "And we knew that if we focused on John Kerry, Democratic primary voters would sort of coalesce" around Kerry.

"It wasn't like we could tag [eliminate] somebody. Whomever we attacked was going to be helped," he said.

Nicolle Wallace, the 2004 Bush campaign communications director, recalled at the Harvard conference that the campaign "refused" to even respond to Edwards' attacks on Bush, not wanting to make him seem like a threat.

Clearly, this rings true. And while I can't recall whether I read much discussion of this tactic in the blogosphere in 2002-03, I remember the first time I read the phrase "Breck Girl" from a White House-friendly mouthpiece. Ah, I thought: they're worried about Edwards. (As well they should have been .)

Hopefully I'm more politically savvy now, because while I was right, I was (a) mostly guessing; and (b) even those guesses were likely nudged into existence through regular exposure to my now-boss, the fortunate possessor of a very astute political mind. And, of course - since I wasn't blogging then but merely lurking back then - I don't have foolish predictions scribbled yesterday to shame me today. (Oh how convenient!)

But the important point here is that Democrats should not waste a lot of time reading entrails or tea-leaves to divine the closely-held strategies of their adversaries. Because as the above example surely illustrates, what the Rove team planned was entirely obvious and predictable.

Whether in fact Democratic strategists (or citizens choosing which candidate to back) actually knew who Republicans feared and whom they were gleefully anticipating running against was and is irrelevant. Simply said, Democrats should have known that Edwards was the stronger candidate to run against Bush.

And another point: was the actual strategy the Bush campaign chose to employ - attacking Kerry instead of Edwards - that important? Not really. BushCo took the opportunity to nudge the opposition into helping them. But even if Democrats could be said to have foolishly fallen into a trap of the Republicans' making, isn't it more important that not enough Democrats were equipped to reach the obvious conclusion that Kerry was the weaker candidate?

Take away Rove's head-fake tactics and you're left with too many people who live entirely in a reflected universe. In this shadow world of Plato's cave, we are endlessly scrutinizing the shadows that play on the wall instead of the objects casting those shadows themselves. This is a recipe for endless second-guessing: is Rove saying this just to trick us? On what level is Rove trying to trick us?

How teeth-gnashingly lame.

Turdblossom, mid-departure, keeps swiveling back to offer parting shots at Clinton - spawning numerous twitchy musings in the blogosphere about his intentions. Does he really fear Hillary or is he most afraid of Barack? Continuing with Wallsten's article:

Why did Rove, who often stays in the background, step forward to deliver such public attacks -- especially when the Democrats haven't begun to choose their presidential candidate for 2008 and when the general election is more than a year away?

The answer might seem obvious: Rove saw Clinton as a formidable opponent and wanted to get his licks in early.

[snip]

In this case, Rove's weeklong broadside against Clinton -- which he is expected to repeat in multiple appearances on television talk shows today -- looks suspiciously like an exercise in reverse psychology that his team employed three years ago when it was preparing for President Bush's reelection bid.

As my gamer friends mights say: Merlin's beard! People, please: Democrats should know how our candidates stack up not because we're busy at the listening post transcribing tapes from Bush's Brain - but because we have the capability to make those judgments ourselves. (The good news this time around is none of the three front-runners should give us pause. The real historical parallel with the 2004 Democratic field is the 2008 Republican field. Or, one could say, minefield: they're thick with Kerrys but have no Edwards.)

Jerome Armstrong, no slouch in the experience department, writes the following at MyDD:

I do tend to believe that last line of Dowd is how things usually play out, but am doubtful that Rove is calling any shots.

Oy.

Please: enough caring what Republican operatives are up to. Such examination of motives is a neat parlor game, but we really don't need to break out the Ouija board to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of our candidates.

Do we not have eyes to see and ears to hear?



[cross-posted at Vernon Lee]