ahhhh...that evil genius...Karl Rove....who got a republican fraud elected president......I wonder how that man can sleep at night knowing he set this country back 100 years by getting bush elected...knowing he was a complete empty suit.......andy
y Michael Tackett BALTIMORESUN.COM
There’s a lot of pent up demand on the campus here, with candidates, consultants, staff and reporters all wondering when this presidential campaign will end, even though it really hasn’t begun.
That has led to several cases of premature prognostication and some odd instances of Republicans and Democrats seeming to wear the other party’s clothes.
It is, after all, the Republican Party that has a tradition of anointing the candidate who has stood in line the longest to be the party nominee. Democrats prefer the messy process in which they train fire on each other. Now it is the Democrats, with Sen. Hillary Clinton playing the role of quasi incumbent, seen as invincible, while the Republicans are spending a lot of time violating Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment.
But the election of 2008 also presents another question: Will it be 1968 again, or 2004?
The 1968 election of Richard Nixon was among the first when a candidate consciously catered to the party base during the primary, then ran to the middle in the General Election to capture the coveted swing voter. From at least that time, most winning candidates have adopted that playbook. Perhaps none did it as skillfully as Bill Clinton in 1992, with a campaign that was surgically tailored to appeal to the middle.
And it worked. Until that is, when Karl Rove rewrote the strategy and delivered a winner for George W. Bush in 2004. Rove’s thinking was essentially that for every concession Bush made to the middle, he was in danger of losing support at the party base. And through brilliant microtargeting of GOP voters, Rove’s strategy wrung vote after vote out of his party, cementing Bush’s re-election.
This was particularly effective in Ohio, arguably the most pivotal state of the 2004 campaign.
Which brings us to this campaign. On the Republican side, at least one of the leading contenders, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, would like to return to the Nixon strategy. His positions favoring abortion rights and gay rights--anathema to party faithful--just happen to play well in megastates like California, New York and even Florida.
Giuliani’s dismal showing at last weekend’s straw poll among religious conservatives gathered in Washington was a powerful demonstration of why the Book of Rove would not work for him. The GOP base also seems highly skeptical of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and some have misgivings about Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts. In fact, only former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee can lay any real claim to the hearts and minds of a lot of social conservatives.
The question, though, is how many of those same conservatives are willing to compromise, particularly if the alternative would be to cast a vote for Hillary Clinton.
And that’s one reason why Clinton might be looking to the Rove model should she be the Democratic nominee. You can be assured that no other candidate so animates the animus of the Republicans than the junior senator from New York. At the same time, there is no reason that her campaign can’t do for her what Rove did for Bush, which is to make sure you have had a fierce debate during the campaign, made few accommodations to the other side, and stoked the enthusiasm of your own core supporters.
That would at least give the country a clear choice, not a blurring of distinctions like Bill Clinton offered in 1992 or George Bush offered in 2000. And the irony would be that Hillary Clinton took a page from Bush to win, and Giuliani would need one from her husband.
Michael Tackett is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Chicago Tribune. He has covered every presidential election since 1988 and served as the Tribune's chief political writer during the 1996 and 2000 campaigns. He also served as National Editor for U.S. News and World Report. And, don't hold this against him, he has a law degree.
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