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Thursday, April 05, 2007
If I Ever Lose My Faith In You
Recently, President Bush's pollster from his 2000 and 2004 campaign had a public break with the administration. In a New York Times article, Matthew Dowd told a reporter that he had parted ways with Bush in part because he was very disappointed that Bush had failed to be the "uniter, not a divider" that he had run as in the 2000 election. Dowd had this to say:
In 1999, Matthew Dowd became a symbol of George W. Bush's
early success at positioning himself as a Republican with Democratic appeal.
A top strategist for the Texas Democrats who was disappointed by the Bill
Clinton years, Mr. Dowd was impressed by the pledge of Mr. Bush, then
governor of Texas, to bring a spirit of cooperation to Washington. He switched
parties, joined Mr. Bush’s political brain trust and dedicated the next six
years to getting him to the Oval Office and keeping him there. In 2004, he was
appointed the president’s chief campaign strategist.
Looking back, Mr. Dowd now says his faith in Mr. Bush was
misplaced.
In a wide-ranging interview here, Mr. Dowd called for a withdrawal from
Iraq and expressed his disappointment in Mr. Bush’s leadership.
He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense
of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to
build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed
the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for
the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached
governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking
circle of trusted aides.
“I really like him, which is probably why I’m so disappointed in things,”
he said. He added, “I think he’s become more, in my view, secluded and bubbled
in.”...
Mr. Dowd said, in retrospect, he was in denial.
“When you fall in love like that,” he said, “and then you notice some
things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a
relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’ ”
He said he clung to the hope that Mr. Bush would get back to his Texas
style of governing if he won. But he saw no change after the 2004 victory.
Hmm. But as Digby and Bob Somerby have also recently pointed out, why did Bush abandon his middle-of-the-road, bi-partisan, let's work together approach and adopt a political strategy aimed at motivating his base and alienating his opponents? Why, because Matthew Dowd told Karl Rove in December 2000 that was the path to take to win in 2004. Here's an interview Dowd did with PBS for a Frontline special on Karl Rove:
Q: Let me go back to 2000 for just a minute. ... Where did this idea of a base
strategy come from? And was it as revolutionary then as it was reported as being
when we all look back? When did you first hear about it? Is it your idea?
Dowd: Well, it's interesting. Obviously, as you looked at 2000, approached 2000,
motivating Republicans was important, but most of our resources [were] put into
persuading independents in 2000. One of the first things I looked at after 2000
was what was the real Republican vote and what was the real Democratic vote, not
just who said they were Republicans and Democrats, but independents, how they
really voted, whether or not they voted straight ticket or not. And I took a
look at that in 2000, and then I took a look at it, what it was over the last
five elections or six elections.
And what came from that analysis was a graph that I obviously gave
Karl, which showed that independents or persuadable voters in the last 20 years
had gone from 22 percent of the electorate to 7 percent of the electorate in
2000. And so 93 percent of the electorate in 2000, and what we anticipated, 93
or 94 in 2004, just looking forward and forecasting, was going to be already
decided either for us or against us. You obviously had to do fairly well among
the 6 or 7 [percent], but you could lose the 6 or 7 percent and win the
election, which was fairly revolutionary, because everybody up until that time
had said, "Swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing voters, swing
voters."
And so when that graph and that first strategic imperative began to drive
how we would think about 2004, nobody had ever approached an election that I've
looked at over the last 50 years, where base motivation was important as swing,
which is how we approached it. We didn't say, "Base motivation is what we're
going to do, and that's all we're doing." We said, "Both are important, but we
shouldn't be putting 80 percent of our resources into persuasion and 20 percent
into base motivation," which is basically what had been happening up until that
point, because of -- look at this graph. Look at the history. Look what's
happened in this country. And obviously that decision influenced everything that
we did. It influenced how we targeted mail, how we targeted phones, how we
targeted media, how we traveled, the travel that the president and the vice
president did to certain areas, how we did organization, where we had staff. All
of that was based off of that, and ultimately, thank goodness, it was the right
decision.
So, despite what Dowd says now to try to improve his own reputation, Bush's base strategy was no surprise to him. Indeed, he advocated it. But for Dowd telling Karl Rove in December 2000 that there were no more swing voters, we might have had a very different Bush Presidency. And Dowd likely recognizes this, so he is trying to preemptively avoid the blame.
Doonesbury on Romney
Doonesbury is running a great take on the Romney flip-flops and political opportunism this week. It's really interesting to watch Mitt run away from every progressive social position he's ever held.
Here's one:
See the rest of the series here, here, and here.
