The Return of Rove

"If Karl were to get hit by a bus tomorrow, it wouldn't matter," says Slater. "There are hundreds of young Roves out there in the political bloodstream, ready to take over."

Sure enough, it was right after that dismal night outside New Orleans that McCain — whose campaign stumpery until then had been fairly predictable, focusing heavily on his personal story, the Iranian threat and his experience and patriotic bona fides relative to Obama — began a somewhat drastic rhetorical overhaul. Under Schmidt's guidance, McCain's tactics took on a darker and unmistakably Rovian character.

The hallmark of the Rove campaigning method is the political act so baldly below the belt that it literally staggers you. Even the most hardened cynics find themselves continually surprised by the ability of Rove and his minions to always hit that evasive new low, coming up with things that would shock a 60-year-old Greyhound-station hooker.

What American doesn't remember Rove, after 9/11, saying that liberals wanted to "offer therapy and understanding to our attackers"? What Texan doesn't recall fondly the "push poll" Rove reportedly commissioned for Bush, in which voters were asked if they would be less likely to vote for Gov. Ann Richards if they knew her staff was "dominated by lesbians"? And what veteran doesn't remember Rove impugning the patriotism of Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Vietnam vet, by running an ad showing the faces of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein fading into the wheelchair-bound Cleland's face? Suck on that, Mr. Silver Star!

The first whiff of this kind of tactic in the current race came at the end of June, when the McCain campaign launched its new slogan "Country First," making McCain the first presidential candidate in history to make "My Opponent Is a Traitor" his rallying cry. Then there was the unveiling of a new ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Following that came a coordinated campaign to ridicule Obama for the somewhat bombastic décor of the stage for his convention speech, with the campaign issuing leaflets mocking the vertical columns as a "Temple of Obama."

All of these fairly transparent moves were beginner-level Rove tactics, designed to remove real issues from the equation and concentrate voter attention on an image of Obama as "the biggest celebrity in the world," in Schmidt's words, a superficial, self-centered member of the beautiful people who probably windsurfed with John Kerry. Rove himself provided the outlines of this strategy earlier in the year when he said about Obama, "Even if you never met him, you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette who stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

This was classic Rove. Never mind the fact that Obama, a former community organizer who has never been a member of a country club, is running against a classic Washington insider who owns no fewer than seven houses and 13 cars. But these were merely remarks made by a private citizen, not official campaign pronouncements. It wasn't until the selection of Sarah Palin that there began to be whispers about a direct connection between McCain and the actual flesh-and-blood Rove, as opposed to mere Rovism or Rovian tactics.

First there were reports that Rove called Joe Lieberman before the GOP convention and told him to call McCain and withdraw his name from consideration for the VP nomination. Rove denied the report, but conceded that he had been in touch with the McCain camp, saying, "I receive calls from people who are friends over there, which I've said a million times." He described the interaction as mere "chitchat," a claim seconded by the McCain camp. McCain aide Tucker Bounds insisted Rove had no access: "He's a Fox analyst."

But after the surprising nomination of Palin — a move that fairly stank of Rovian thinking, with its 10-megaton brazenness, its blunt anti-intellectualism and its naked courting of Rove's beloved electoral cattle, the evangelicals — Rove seemingly let it slip in a Fox broadcast that he did have inside info, saying during the teen-pregnancy flap that Palin was "carefully vetted. . . . They knew all of it." An anonymous Republican source soon told a Washington newspaper that Rove had a consistent, "medium"-size role with the McCain campaign.

By then, it really didn't matter whether it was the actual, physical Rove who was pulling the strings, or just a coterie of Rove disciples in the McCain camp. By the time Palin finished her acceptance speech in St. Paul, it was clear that McCain had gone over to the dark side — that he had decided to sign on with the same Nazi-hearted smear merchants who kicked his face in eight years ago in South Carolina. Not only does McCain now have former White House aide and Rove ally Nicole Wallace serving as a senior adviser, he actually went out and hired Tucker Eskew, one of the architects of Rove's smear campaign in South Carolina back in 2000, a man whom McCain once said had a "special place in hell" awaiting him in the next world. The Republican Party even hired Tim Griffin, a notorious Rove protégé, to run McCain's anti-Obama operations — the same Tim Griffin named U.S. attorney for Arkansas, despite being linked to efforts to suppress minority votes.

Since the convention, all of these A-list hired political killers have helped McCain move the so-called debate so far from any real issues that it took all of Wall Street falling underwater for the public to snap out of it for so much as a minute. In recent weeks, the media have been fed a stream of fabrications and absurd accusations, some more subtle than others. Schmidt, for instance, told Katie Couric that reporters had asked campaign staffers in off-the-record lunches if Palin would be willing to allow paternity tests to be done to determine who the father of her latest child was. "Smear after smear after smear," Schmidt said piously. "It's disgraceful and it's wrong." Never mind that Schmidt himself was the only person ever to mention a paternity test in public. The whole gambit was clearly designed to create a sexy headline to help push the anti-media campaign strategy, at the expense incidentally of what passes for Sarah Palin's own honor.

Couric was also at the center of the next Schmidt gambit, a now-infamous ad in which a Couric monologue about the role of sexism in the campaign was run following a clip of Palin's speech. But Couric's monologue was actually an old one, referring not to Palin but to the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the McCain camp was forced to snip the Couric bit from its still-outrageous ad charging the whole world with sexism.

The clip also made the hysterical claim that Obama himself had compared Palin to a pig when he described McCain's repackaging of well-worn Bush policies as "lipstick on a pig." It didn't matter that it wasn't true, or that McCain himself had used the line at least twice during the campaign, or that Karl Rove, offering a hilarious impersonation of civic concern, suggested that McCain had gone "too far" in the lipstick debate. All that mattered was that a week after the convention, McCain suddenly had a 51-40 lead in polls among white women — a lead that held up until the Wall Street shit-blast jolted both sexes back to electoral reality.