Karl Rove’s final projection: Obama 338, McCain 200

Rove continues to push his favorite meme:

From ABC:

At a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as “coolly arrogant.”

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” Rove said…. “He’s 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.”

If you unpack this it’s really disgusting. He’s playing to all the worst classist and racist fears of the Greatest Generation. Obama’s the uppity black guy who some court forced your country club to admit and now he’s flaunting his sexual appetites — why is Rove painting the long-married Obama as a swinging bachelor? — and looking down on you. It’s all said with a veil of civility, but the Lee Atwater-ian subtext couldn’t be clearer.

As a companion piece to Tim Dickinson’s piece in the current issue on the Bush administration’s policy of denial on global warming, RollingStone.com put together a multimedia slide show detailing the major points, narrated by Tim himself. Check it out!

Newsweek: The Architect’s Faulty Specs

Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach.

Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.

I think the Bush administration really must be scared. Their numbers on the midterms must be bleak. Else why would they be pushing so desperately to pass laws that whitewash their record of 4th-Amendment and human-rights abuses?

What’s most remarkable about both the Detainee Torture bill and the Wiretapping bill that are now the focus of the last days of the 109th Congress is that they both provide retroactive immunity from prosecution for wrongdoing.

These bills are nasty in their future implications to be sure: They give the current and all future presidents the right to eavesdrop on Americans at will, and solemnize the CIA’s use of medieval and Soviet styled torture of suspected enemies of the state. Fighting fire with fire aparently means fighting “Islamo fascism” with a slightly kinder, gentler variant of the old-fashioned kind.

But what is most nefarious is that these bills … (more…)

Political Handicapper Charlie Cook raises a question that’s been on my mind since the opening of a third mideast war front:

In 2002 and 2004, in the first midterm and presidential elections after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the security issue unquestionably helped President Bush and the Republican Party. To many voters, Bush symbolized a steady and determined hand at the helm of the ship of state. And his party also benefited from having long been more trusted than the Democrats on national security.

So, will national security issues again work to the advantage of the GOP this fall, or has that well run dry for the party?

Cook has his own theory. What do you think?

Read the legal complaint filed yesterday by Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outted by the Bush adminsitration, and Joe Wilson, the diplomat who accused the administration of cooking its case for war with Iraq:

“This complaint arises out of a conspiracy among current and former high-level officials in the White House…”

UPDATE: Watch Plame’s press conference here.

Robert Novak

Novak has spilled the beans in print, but tells us surprisingly little new.

He continues to guard the “primary source” of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity — and astoundingly continues to claim that this source’s leak of that information was “inadvertent” — but he does finger Karl Rove and some shlub in the press office of the CIA as having been his “confirming” sources:

My Role in the Valerie Plame Leak Story by Robert Novak
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has informed my attorneys that, after two and one-half years, his investigation of the CIA leak case concerning matters directly relating to me has been concluded. That frees me to reveal my role in the federal inquiry….