Rove Gives The Right Advice Too Late

Karl Rove today outlines the requirements for a successful GOP campaign in 2012. Suffice to say, if Rove is right, the GOP has already stumbled into deep, deep trouble.

Rove: "The GOP nominee should fiercely challenge Mr. Obama's policies, actions and leadership using the president's own words, but should stay away from questioning his motives, patriotism or character. He will do this to his GOP opponent to try to draw Republicans into the mud pit. They should avoid it."

Kind of late for that advice. It's been now 30 months of highly racialized abuse of the president emanating from the near-official mouthpieces of the GOP, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and repeated or at least validated by an array of senior-most Republican officials and candidates. If (as Rove also says) the object of the criticisms was to persuade "independents, Hispanics, college educated and young voters" that the GOP is a party that includes the non-old, the non-white, and the non-employed in its vision of America, one has to say that the mission is unaccomplished. Worse, that the GOP has developed powerful internal taboos against doing those things necessary to accomplishing this mission.

Rove: "[B]acked by a brutally efficient opposition research unit, the president will use focus-group tested lines of attack to disqualify the Republican nominee by questioning his or her values, intentions and intelligence. Republicans should avoid giving him mistakes to pounce on and should stand up to this withering assault, always looking for ways to turn it back on Mr. Obama and his record."

Kind of late for this advice too. Over the past 30 months, Republican voters have gotten excited over a series of candidates who flunk Rove's values/intententions/intelligence requirement: Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and now Michele Bachmann. The candidates who might have passed have either declined to run (Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour), are gaining little traction (Jon Huntsman), or are drifting toward nomination almost by default (Mitt Romney).

Rove: "Any day that isn't a referendum on the Obama presidency should be considered wasted."

Ultra-late for this advice! By uniting around the Ryan plan, Republicans have themselves volunteered to change the subject. The 2012 election will be a double referendum, and possibly a triple referendum on the issues, (1) Obama presidency: success or failure? (2) abolishing Medicare as we know it for under 55s: yea or nay? and very imaginably (3) defaulting on the financial obligations of the United States: was that a good idea or not?

Rove: "Republicans also must not confuse the tea party movement with the larger, more important tea party sentiment."

This is an important point, and in some ways the GOP itself tacitly agrees - which is why Mitt Romney survives as the Republican party frontrunner. And yet it is difficult to operationalize this insight. The 2012 candidates, including Romney, are all agreed on the following points: (1) the national debt, not job creation, is issue #1; (2) Medicare coverage for seniors must be protected exactly as is; (3) health care coverage for everybody is a comparatively trivial concern. It is these points, not the tricorn hats, that constitute the core legacy to the GOP of the tea party movement. As yet, the GOP shows no signs of disenthralling itself.

Rove: "The GOP nominee could also lose if the Republican National Committee (RNC) and battleground-state party committees don't respond to the Obama grass-roots operation with a significant effort of their own. The GOP had the edge in grass-roots identification, persuasion, registration and turnout efforts in 2000 and 2004. It lost these advantages in 2008, big time, in part because its candidate didn't emphasize the grass roots. It must regain them in 2012. Only the RNC and the state party committees can effectively plan, fund and execute these efforts."

Question: is Karl Rove fundraising for the RNC? Answer: He is not. He is fundraising for his own group, American Crossroads, and his work is cannibalizing the funds available to the RNC - and reducing the RNC to a junior partner to the new independent expenditure committees.

Rove: "Voters are looking for a serious GOP governing agenda as a reason to turn Mr. Obama out of office. Failing to offer a well-thought-out vision and defend it against Mr. Obama's inevitable distortions, demagoguery and straw-man arguments would put the GOP nominee in the position of Thomas Dewey in 1948, whose strategy of running out the clock gave President Harry Truman the opening he needed."

A lot depends here on the meaning of the word "serious." If it means "detailed" then Tim Pawlenty and Paul Ryan and the Republican Study Committee have met Rove's challenge. If however "serious" means, "feasible" or "plausible" - then alas the more detailed the Republican plans become, the less serious they seem. Plans to abolish most of the post-1965 social safety network while massively reducing upper-income taxes are not feasible. Plans to create jobs by imposing fiscal austerity are not plausible.

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Karl Rove's advice in this op-ed seems to me broadly correct. But to have been effective, it would have had to have been offered a long time ago - and have been joined to a more outspoken resistance to those who have so successfully pushed the GOP so radically in the direction Rove now warns against.