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Mr. McCain hasn't historically valued organization, dismissing its tedious requirements as unnecessary. Mr. McCain also has an "enthusiasm deficit" withGood luck with that. The only hope for McCain is purely negative: That people will turn out to vote against Obama. Pure fear-based voting isn't entirely implausible. LBJ beat Goldwater that way in 1964.
grassroots GOP activists who work the phones, walk the neighborhoods and register the voters. And he has no grassroots groups to match the Democrats, outside of the National Rifle Association and Right to Life. Mr. McCain will have to build coalitions of veterans, Catholics, Latinos, small business people, evangelicals and women in key states to close the enthusiasm gap.
One sentence that particularly annoys me about this Rove column:
Mr. McCain has many obstacles to overcome this year, including a political environment that favors Democrats.This environment is, to a great extent, the product of Rove's own influence within the Bush administration and the GOP, and there's never been a mea culpa from him. That the GOP is still taking advice from the architect of its most recent defeat does not inspire confidence.
I saw Rove speak at GWU, and also heard him at an informal get-together after that speech. He is a very effective speaker, as anyone who's seen him on "Fox & Friends" should know. But being persuasive is not the same thing as being right, and Rove's advice to the Bush administration was horribly wrong. To be persuasively wrong is a dangerous thing, and Rove's unwillingness to admit error fosters the suspicion that he can't learn from his own mistakes.
Mr. McCain hasn't historically valued organization, dismissing its tedious requirements as unnecessary
ReplyDelete"...whereas I, K Rove, beat the living daylights out of volunteers, having them run from pillar to post, write down names, make hundreds of calls on their own cellphones, etc., etc., etc.--to secure extremely narrow EC wins for a weak candidate with no platform at all...."
F^%$ you, Karl.
dad29, then you should be really mad at the volunteers and suckers Rove played for fools.
ReplyDeleteAs for Rove's advice it's beneficial simply because he's talking about what he's successful at: winning elections. Just never get him near policy making. We see how that turned out.