Two weeks ago, I called attention to some informal advising of the McCain campaign being done by my namesake Karl Rove. Rove attempted to keep scrutiny at bay by repeatedly comparing his relationship to campaign officials as casual "chit chat," though his own words from a February appearance at the University of Pennsylvania remain indicting (excuse me, I just like to use that word whenever possible when discussing Rove):
He should take a biographical tour to the places in the country that have made him who he is. Go to the Naval Academy and talk about the values he learned there. Then he should go to Pensacola, Florida and Corpus Christi, Texas where he was trained as a naval aviator, and talk from the heart and the call to service. Go to Meridien, Mississippi and Jacksonville, Florida and talk about what he learned about leadership commanding the largest naval air squadron in the United States...And he should give a speech in Sedona, Arizona and talk about the people and places in his hometown that affected him.
The coincidence of this advice and McCain's subsequent Service to America tour caught my eye, and more recently that of the National Journal, whose Peter Stone has uncovered even more indicting evidence of Rovism within the McCain camp:
After leaving the White House in August, for example, he restarted his old consulting firm, Karl Rove & Co., which has been widely distributing projections of the nation's electoral map for 2008. Some of these maps-branded with the firm's name-were prominently displayed at a March briefing by the McCain campaign's then-top media adviser, Mark McKinnon, according to Salon.
Recent developments revolve around Rove's connection with the conservative political action group Freedom's Watch. Board member William Weidner told the Journal that Rove had been advising the organization's strategy, which figures to play as heavily in the POTUS08 campaign as funds will allow. Rove has made sure to stay close to those funds as well, maintaining an advisory relationship to Freedom's Watch's principal financial backer, Las Vegas casino magnate (and notorious union buster) Sheldon Adelson. Make no mistake, the 527 campaign against Barack Obama will get lower, nastier and more Rovian with each dollar Bush's Brain can squeeze from plutocrat Adelson.
So Karl Rove has taken to advising the presidential campaign of John McCain from outside and in. Check out the extended entry for an updated timeline on the architect's blueprints...
Barack Obama will put his Foreign Policy vision front and center tomorrow in an address to the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, D.C. A long way from being the fresh-faced upstart too green to compete on national security, Obama is now charged with presenting the Conference with a reasoned alternative to the neanderthal worldview endorsed on Monday by John McCain.
What follows Obama to AIPAC is the consistent effort among Republicans and the similarly afflicted to tie the change agent's campaign staff (or failing that, anyone he has met) to anti-Semitic nonsense. The lame effort hasn't yet forced Obama to dissociate himself from notorious terrorist-sympathizers like former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski or Columbia University cultural scholar Rashid Khalidi.
Sean Hannity is left clamoring in the meantime for a repudiation of Louis Farrakhan, having missed the last three.
Last week on ABC's This Week, senior Republican operative and current pundit Karl Rove denied having any role, either informal or formal, in the McCain campaign. Rove would like to deny his role in the campaign so that he's seen as credible by pundits as having an independent, albeit conservative, voice. After all, if you are perceived of as 'on message' for a campaign, you have much less credibility in pushing campaign talking points. If you look at the evidence however, it's quite clear that Rove has a direct pipeline into the strategy that McCain is pursuing.
It's a stupid game that media pundits play. Let's first look at the denial.
George Stephanopoulos: ...of course he was President Bush's former deputy chief of staff and political strategist-an informal advisor to John McCain's campaign. You just heard David [Axelrod]...
Karl Rove: I wouldn't, I wouldn't even go that far-informal advisor-no way.
GS: Well you pass on information to them. You give them your advice.
KR: Chitchat.
GS: Chitchat? Ok, well I think that justifies, that qualifies as informal, but let's move on...
A timeline of Rove-McCain chitchat awaits you in the extended entry
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