posted by Jerry Skurnik
Thu, 10/12/2006 – 10:08am
His campaign was run by Karl Rove who is so smart that one book about him is titled Bush’s Brain and another Boy Genius. Rove is so brilliant that political reporters are probably trying to find out if he is behind the North Korean nuclear tests.
Of course, if the butterfly ballot had not confused 1,000 Jews in Palm Beach, Rove would have been the idiot who blew a big lead by having Bush spend a day in Los Angeles that he should have spent in Jacksonville.
http://www.slate.com/id/2151740/
Is Karl Rove the great mastermind of American politics? Everyone seems to think so. George W. Bush’s nicknames for him include "The Architect" and "Boy Genius." Other Republicans see Rove as a shaman who can conjure victory out of the air—and Democrats agree. (They would rather think they’ve been losing to a nefarious wizard than to a lazy moron.) The political press, always more comfortable with personality than ideology, cottons readily to the myth that the country is run by an elusive puppeteer.
While Rove boasts an impressive winning streak, the largest part of his success is arguably due to luck and circumstances beyond his control. By rights, Bush should have lost the presidency in 2000. He got fewer popular votes than Al Gore, and would have had fewer in the Electoral College but for poor ballot design in Florida. In the closing days of the campaign, Rove sent Bush to California, a state he couldn’t possibly win, in an attempt to telegraph "confidence." If the official count in Florida had more closely reflected voter preferences, this tactical blunder would have made Rove the laughingstock of American politics instead of the genius. Rove’s early White House performance didn’t indicate much in the way of brilliance, either. He managed to lose control of the Senate for his side without an election, when a neglected Republican moderate, Jim Jeffords of Vermont, quit the GOP.