Many of us now are quite aware of what occurred Tuesday evening on the Fox News Channel. It involved Fox’s call that President Obama would win Ohio’s 18 electoral votes and, thus, would be re-elected to another four years in office.
Karl Rove, aka “Bush’s Brain” and once considered the smartest political operative in all of human history, went ballistic. He questioned his colleagues’ call and said that with so few votes counted, it was at best premature to call the Buckeye State for the president. The Fox news staff tried to talk him down. They told him the numbers were right and that they were virtually 100 percent certain of it.
What drove Rove to question his Fox colleagues’ wisdom? Money. Specifically, it was the amount of money he – Rove – raised and spent in places like, um, Ohio, to defeat the president. Rove’s super PAC spent tens of millions of dollars in Ohio, and about $300 million nationally, to defeat Obama. He came up short. Therefore, I think the nation witnessed a key political operative fall into deep denial about what he had just witnessed – which was that all the effort, time and money were for naught.
The very next day, Rove was back on the air – on Fox, of course – to say that “voter suppression” was the key to Obama’s victory. He said the Obama team did a masterful job of tearing down GOP nominee Mitt Romney, discouraging voters to turn out. He just couldn’t get past the fact that the president was re-elected with a smaller majority than he got the first time. Fox News anchor Megan Kelly, to her great credit, sought to inform Rove that the size of the president’s majority didn’t matter. “He still won,” Kelly reminded Rove.
The most hilarious aspect of that exchange was that Rove was complaining about negative campaigning. Flash back to 2004 and recall Rove’s financing of the “swift boat” attack on Democratic nominee John Kerry, which sought to defame the candidate’s reputation by questioning whether he really earned all those medals for valor while fighting for his country as a naval officer in Vietnam.
Rove, 61, incidentally, never served in the military – let alone in Vietnam.
Nice try, Mr. Rove.