The Nappy Cat Chronicles

Rove on McCain:

WALLACE: All right, and for fair game, what is McCain doing that goes a step too far?

ROVE: Well, McCain has gone in some of his ads — similarly gone one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test. They don’t need to attack each other in this way. They have legitimate points to make about each other that are beyond, you know, the…

WALLACE: Real quick question — 30 seconds. Do they need to be 100 percent passing the truth? Just, in other words, when you were running Bush’s campaign, did you care whether some fact-check organization…

ROVE: No, and look, you can’t trust the fact-check organizations, with all due respect. They’re human beings. They’re individuals. They’ve got their own biases built in there. But both campaigns ought to be careful about it. They ought to — there ought to be an adult who says, “Do we really need to go that far in this ad? Don’t we make our point and won’t we get broader acceptance and deny the opposition an opportunity to attack us if we don’t include that one little last tweak in the ad?”

Greg Sargent on Rove on McCain:

Wow. This is a bit like being labeled a sleaze merchant by Bob Guccione or Larry Flynt.

Rove’s words will make a nice news cycle soundbite for the Obama campaign, but Sargent is incorrect. The McCain campaign is blatantly lying. Rove is aware that, because every word and every image is archived, a campaign can’t get away with that. Instead, a campaign should use three basic strategies:

• First, a campaign should remove context from its opposition’s quotes and repeat ad naseum. All that matters is that it’s 100% true that those words can be attributed to the opposition.
• The second strategy is infinitely more devious: If the truth is being taken for granted, raise doubts. For example, if one of Obama’s daughters was relatively pale-skinned, the McCain campaign could have hinted that Obama’s wife had an affair with a white man. Or, perhaps Obama smoked crack and had sex with a disabled gay man. As an added bonus, “value voters” love to swallow this sort of shit and will repeat it for free.
• Finally, a campaign should always grant its candidate plausible deniability. If a campaign is going to blatantly lie or use the preceding strategies, it must use proxies. Otherwise, the candidate is made vulnerable to attacks from the very journalists who should be dutifully transcribing the attacks made by the proxies.

Rove has used these strategies to successfully win elections for years. So, in all fairness, Rove is not calling the McCain campaign sleazy. He’s calling both campaigns inept.