Ed Kilgore interrupts his vacation to describe Rove as a "System Coach." Such a coach has an integrated system that wins games, and he travels from place to place applying his system.
This is how Ed describes the system:
Rove's System for playing the political game is well known: keep your base happy; target and pander to a few key swing constituencies; choose issues to talk about that achieve the two above strategies while undermining the opponent's financial base; stay on the offensive; use polarization to disguise the extremism of your agenda and tactics; never admit mistakes; and exploit the rules of the game (especially in terms of media coverage) to your absolute advantage.Ed also suggests that the system will survive Rove's departure, but questions whether it will continue to be a winning system as it becomes clear that it is totally irrelevant to solving the problems America faces.
It is clear that this administration wins elections but does nothing to solve American problems. This is an explanation, and it may be a ray of hope as the American voting public begins to understand just how irrelevant the Bush administration has really made itself to America's problems.
More on the Rove System, this from Mark Schmitt.
the Rove system has had not just a bad week, but a bad year. The Plame smear was very much in keeping with the Rove system, which is as much as anything else a sort of postmodern way of managing beliefs: vague possibilities can be asserted as absolute certainties; things known to be false -- such as the Niger-uranium story -- can be maintained as at least possibilities.I fully concur with Mark's last line.
The real test of the Rove System has come in the policy fights of 2005, particularly the Social Security reform battle. No president before Bush would have run the reelection campaign that Bush ran in 2004, focused entirely on destroying his opponent, for the reason that it would give him no mandate to govern. The Rove System changed that rule. It says, do what it takes to win, and political capital comes with winning, coupled with being a wartime president and making whatever assertions about facts and possibilities are necessary to win. (Bush gave much of the system away in his post-election press conference.) But that has turned out to be wrong. Bush couldn't simply assert a mandate for policies that he had barely mentioned in the campaign, and certainly had not put to the electoral test. And as the command-and-control structure of the Rove System begins to come apart, it will come apart absolutely.
I don't think Rove is indispensable. There are others who can implement the Rove system -- Ken Mehlman seems to do a perfectly serviceable job. I'm less concerned with getting Rove as an individual than with ensuring that Rovism is fully understood and forever banished from American politics.
Ed is describing which voters Rove motivates and how he targets them. Mark is describing the messages that Rove uses to target those groups. We need to understand both and expose them as they happen to take the power away from them. In particularly, if the media does not understand these techniques, they must be taught.
Related articles.
- Why do Republicans win elections?
- Why conservatives are getting elected.
- Repubs losing ground; Demos not gaining.
- What does the Democratic Party stand for?
- What do Democrats need to win?
- Dean Charting a new trail for Democrats.
- New study: Democrats better for Economy.
- How do we reform the Democratic Party?
- Differences between Democratic and Republican economics.
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