Roverian Ambition

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us?

Rove is leaving the White House, and says he's going hunting. I suspect that he'll spend most of his time stalking Democrats. Out of the talk show circuit, his most recent target has been Hillary Clinton who he describes as "fatally flawed." Some suggest, and I agree, that Rove does not speak casually. He speaks with purpose, and his purpose now is the same as it was when he turned his guns on Kerry during the 2004 primary season. The Republicans want to run against Clinton. That's their best chance of victory. He is hoping to drive Democrats toward Clinton, the Democrat with the highest unfavorables, by attacking her. It worked in 2004 when they got to run against Kerry instead of against John Edwards, the candidate they feared the most. Here's an excerpt of the Newsday article:

The ploy was described by Rove lieutenant Matthew Dowd during a post-mortem conference at Harvard University the month after Bush defeated the Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. In the run-up to the Democratic National Convention, at a time when it was not yet clear who Bush's opponent would be in November 2004, 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, they believed, Edwards could be a real threat to Bush's re-election. 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 the 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 feared most.

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