Typical Rove manuever

I agree with Ross that this whole thing with Fox putting the obviously manufactured quotes from Kerry up "accidentally" is no accident.

Ross brings up the Swift Boat Liars, but actually the SBL is probably the most brillant thing Rove will whip out this campaign. How do I know? Because this is pathetic.

Rove got his reputation for being a dirty but brillant politician fucking over people in small races at the last minute. In Texas, he managed to usurp a popular and effective governor who had turned our state's fortunes around and installing the Shrub with a whisper campaign about how Ann Richards was a lesbian and trying to stage a covert takeover of the Texas government by appointing "hundreds" of gays and lesbians into government. It was ridiculous, but it worked. It tapped into latent anxieties that a bunch of people had about independent and intelligent Richards.

He started a whisper campaign in South Carolina during the primaries that John McCain was mentally ill from Vietnam and that he had illegitimate black children. It grabbed hold long enough to carry Bush over because it tapped into a lot of people's uneasy experiences with Vietnam--Bush's remoteness from it became an asset briefly because people just wanted Vietnam to go away.

Whisper campaigns work really well in limited time frames in small, homogenous, conservative circles. To a larger audience, whispers about Richards being a lesbian would have even less traction than rumors that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian had. Blatant race-baiting like the kind in South Carolina wouldn't have traction in a larger society where people don't immediately freak out at the very thought of mixed race children. The Vietnam thing worked for awhile with a larger audience, but there was more time for it to fade away and by November most people will remember mostly that Kerry served and Bush didn't.

If Rove is resorting to a tactics he surely knows will do nothing on a larger audience with a month to think things overs, he's flailing. And the rumor that he's picked to whisper about--that Kerry is gay--has grasping at straws written all over it. There's nothing about Kerry that creates the sexual anxieties in people that keep "gay" rumors alive. Yeah, his wife has her own mind. After the Clinton escapades, surely they know that doesn't make a man seem gay anymore, if it ever did. And it was pretty easy to read coldness into the Clinton marriage if you wanted to--I saw Hillary shrug Bill's hand off her shoulder once in irritation. Kerry and his wife exude warmth. This rumor won't take. Bush's campaign is flailing.