www.TokyoRove.com is the website for WTF? How Karl Rove and the Establishment Lost…Again.
PULL QUOTES: Highlights from C. Edmund Wright’s new blockbuster:
According to Rove’s professed “acute Understanding,” if a voter thinks Bush is to blame for the economy, we must AGREE with him. If the voter thinks Obama personally took out bin Laden, AGREE with her. If the voter thinks Republicans want to stop all sexual activities, RUN AWAY from the issue. If the voter thinks Palin is a dolt, REINFORCE that idea. Mr. “Acute Understanding” thinks we can actually win this way. Who is the dolt again?
The image of a typical OWS encampment allows us a peek at the future, which is a powerful object lesson by itself. The fear of even having this discussion with the voters is why we are not happy with the establishment. They would rather change the subject to something trite like “jobs and Ohio” without realizing that a communist movement central to the Democrat universe is about “jobs and Ohio.”
One thing the GOP must do is clean house of all the little naive “daddy got me a job” consultants, and hire some folks who have actually been in the real world for a while.
Apparently in the mind of Democrat consultants, women should vote the concerns between their legs over the concerns between their ears.
Newt and his official staff, including the consultants inside WOF, were so obsessed with Mitt’s campaign that they forgot about Obama, whoever the hell he is, and refused to acknowledge that Santorum even existed. Those were two awful mistakes.
Social liberals are being naïve when they discount the fiscal cost of moral depravity, and social conservatives are naïve to ignore the moral cost of fiscal depravity.
Pundits may drone on about moderates and independents and low information voters, but nothing turns moderates, independents and low information voters into higher information voters like a campaign that draws sharp and clear distinctions, and one that generates enthusiasm
The subject of Obama’s awfulness was not what the establishment wanted because Mitt’s not very good at that subject. And besides, soccer moms won’t like it either, or so we’re told. The arrogant and controlling establishment was telling us to shut up, sit down, and listen to our bettors – and everything would work out just fine. In this way, the GOP establishment is similar to very thing we fight against in the Federal government, the arrogant controlling assumption that the elites know what we really need. This problem is inherently limiting when your message is ostensibly about decentralizing control, and why Mitt’s message was inherently limited.
Perhaps Newt would have swung and missed, but Mitt was out on called strikes-
Compared to Axelrod’s escapades, the mind numbing use of focus groups and phony polls by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos during the Clinton years is child’s play. Axelrod does not merely use deception. He IS deception.
Obama thought the first thing to do to turn our economy around would be to help trial lawyers destroy present day companies for decisions made many years ago. Do they teach that at Harvard Law, or Harvard Business?
Instead of focusing on this in 2012, the GOPe had all kinds of tortured internal debates about Romney’s tax returns instead. To the establishment, having incompetent felons running government is just not a problem, yet having a rich and generous nominee with competent accountants apparently is.
The man from Texas is indeed profoundly hated by the left. But that is not the point. The man from Texas is not hated alone. The left has projected their hatred of him onto us. His refusal to fight back was not the individual “falling on the sword” he thought it was. When he refused to fight, he let us all down.
McCain was almost irrelevant, which is hysterical considering he has spent every waking moment for forty years desperate to remain relevant
McCain stumbled into the Palin pick out of misconception as he fancied Palin as a young McCain, and not a young Reagan.
The technical term for the extension of a campaign like Huckabee’s is also known as the “Fox News Channel audition period.”
If you really want to get sick, do some research on how the brunt of the crisis might have been avoided simply by suspending the “mark to market” regulation imbedded in the Sarbanes-Oxley bill. This law, a bureaucratic accounting illusion to begin with, turned a future balance sheet challenge for some banks into an immediate cash crisis for the entire world.
It’s the perfect crime and the grandest of all larcenies. America is being stolen in broad daylight.
In other words, they should look at a focus group as a starting point the for voter education, instead of an end point of candidate capitulation.
Liberals in power have simply made borrowing too easy and drilling too hard.
As long as we run low information campaigns, we will suffer at the hands of low information voter.
A campaign will never succeed if it’s built on the premise that offending soccer moms in southern Ohio is a fate worse than losing the entire American experiment. Such campaigns are inspired by focus groups, and isolated from reality.
Conservatism takes longer than the confines of a single focus group to understand, and yet, Rove insists that he can gain “an acute understanding” on the basis of focus group data. That’s nutty.
This mindset is foreign to the entrepreneur’s very fiber. This kind of thing is what keeps the movers and shakers from moving and shaking. This is what motivates Atlas to shrug. This is what liberal elites know. This is what they want.
And to folks who believe “you didn’t build that,” this is music to their ears. They either believe it in ignorance or cheer it with their resentment. Or both. And it’s not just Dodd Frank. This is what will make everything about Obama Care like pulling teeth, including pulling teeth. This is the EPA and the INS and the IRS and the TSA and all the other alphabet agencies becoming the focus of our lives.
There is nothing in this great game that will ultimately defeat the entrepreneur. It is simple human nature. There is, however, one way to defeat the entrepreneur and thereby ruin an entrepreneurial economy. Change the very nature of the game. Yes, rig the game so that honesty and hard work and innovation are merely coins of a foolish realm. Rig the game so that the little microbial rules become more important than the game itself – thereby elevating the little human microbes who sit in government cubicles 40 hours a week with no risk above the dreamers who work 100 hour weeks and who are willing to risk everything.
But the ominous impact is that below the surface, this dynamic depresses and numbs the human spirit of the would-be self-starting entrepreneur. And do not think for a minute that this is by accident.
Mistakes like this one are fear based and symptomatic of the Republican consultant, who lives in a vacuum of venial and un-related single issues, and assumes voters live there too. The idea of melding a socially conservative principal with libertarian disdain of unlimited government power is just a bridge too far for the Lilliputian consultant mind, especially one frozen by the irrational fear of being called homophobic.
