Karl Rove’s target for victory is to get married white, low-information voters to save his ass through outlandish charges their husbands will reinforce for them.
A great example of how this is working is Tennessee, which I’m covering for Voic.Us. With the Republican candidate, the scandal-ridden Bob Corker, sinking out of sight, Rove had his campaign team gutted, and put in a California ad man he favored. The first result was a flyer that darkened Ford like Time once did O.J. Simpson.
The big result was the Call Me ad, which has turned the race around.
The ad calls Democrat Harold Ford Jr. a libertine, living the lie of a church-goer while actually attending Playboy parties. But it’s more clever than that. The tag line is a buxom white woman saying, "Harold, call me." Ford is black. By insinuating (with humor) the image of a "sex-hungry nigger buck after yo’ white wimmin," Rove hopes to overturn Ford’s carefully-crafted image of church-going moderation.
Polls show that it’s working. The ad is so nasty that the
candidate it supports, Corker, has made noise about wanting it
pulled. But it’s a party ad, and if he could have it pulled
(supposedly) that would be illegal campaign coordination. The party,
for its part, claims its hands are tied, that this is an "independent
expenditure" and it would do something if it could, but it won’t.
The fact that Washington reporters from national networks and journals
swallow this malarky tells you all you need to know about the
corruption of our current system. They just smile and nod and tut-tut
about how dirty the system is, all the while endorsing it through their
silence over lies, racism, and character assassination.
Remember the targets. Married women, harried by children, perhaps
dominated by beer-guzzling good ‘ol boys with Limbaugh on the radio. No
time to examine their nails, let alone the issues. They’ll swallow it,
Rove figures, because their men won’t let them out of the bubble to see
or hear anything else. If these Tennessee women lived in another
country, they’d probably just sigh, pull on their burqas, and get on
with it.
If you vote against anyone or anything on this November 7, vote against
those "journalists." They’re not doing their jobs — they’re doing Karl
Rove’s job.
