lonestar2004 said:

the administration is clueless about PR.

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Prosgeopax said:

So, in summary:
The democrats are just as hypocritical, power hungry and duplicitous as the republicans. Therefore we should support the republicans instead of the democrats.

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Paradigm said:

lonestar2004 said:

the administration is clueless about PR.

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Not even remotely. They've got Karl Rove on their side. Without that Machiavelian manipulator, Bush's ass would've been toast in the last election(of course, he was assisted by a shitty opponent).

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afoaf said:

no, he just has no moral fortitude so he has been
able to pull of some large political victories
during his career, though, mostly because he completely
debases his opponents and spins the media to his
desire.

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afoaf said:

they are definitely at a low point, but the guy
knows how to game the system.

he's scandalous.

from wikipedia.org

While resolution was pending, Dolan went (anonymously) to the Washington Post with recordings of several training seminars for young Republicans where Rove discussed campaign techniques that included rooting through opponents' garbage cans and other forms of espionage, and stories of derring-do such as the incident at the Dixon headquarters. On August 10, 1973, in the midst of the Watergate scandal, the Post broke the story in an article titled "Republican Party Probes Official as Teacher of Tricks."

====================

In 1986, just before a crucial debate in campaign, Rove claimed that his office had been bugged by the Democrats. [19]. The police and FBI investigated and discovered that bug's battery was so small that it needed to be changed every few hours, and the investigation was dropped. [20] Critics suspected Rove had bugged his own office to garner sympathy votes in the close governor's race.[21]

====================

"Sources close to the former president George H.W. Bush say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted" (Esquire Magazine, January 2003). Robert Novak provided some evidence of motive in his column describing the firing of Mosbacher by former Senator Phil Gramm: "Also attending the session was political consultant Karl Rove, who had been shoved aside by Mosbacher." Novak and Rove deny that Rove was the leaker, but Mosbacher maintains that "Rove is the only one with a motive to leak this. We let him go. I still believe he did it." [23] (Sources: "Karl and Bob: a leaky history," Houston Chronicle, Nov. 7, 2003; "Genius," Texas Monthly, March 2003, p. 82; "Why Are These Men Laughing," Esquire, January 2003.)

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Another of the slate, Harold See, ran against Mark Kennedy, an incumbent Democratic justice and the son-in-law of George Wallace. The race included charges that Kennedy was mingling campaign funds with those of a nonprofit children's foundation he was involved with. A former Rove staffer has also reported that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. Kennedy won by less than one percentage point.

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Rove has been accused of using supposed pollsters to call voters to ask such things as whether people would be "more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians." During the race, a regional chairman of the Bush campaign allowed himself to be quoted criticizing Richards for "appointing avowed homosexual activists" to state jobs. But only circumstantial evidence links Rove to the push-polling.

==========================

According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up ? absent any trace of who was behind them ? viciously attacking Harold See and his family.

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During the bitterly-contested 2000 Republican primary, allegations were made that Rove was responsible for a "push poll" conducted in South Carolina, that used racist innuendo intended to undermine the support of Bush rival John McCain: "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"[27]. Although McCain campaign manager Richard Davis said he "had no idea who had made those calls, who paid for them, or how many were made," the authors of the 2003 book and subsequent film Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential allege that Rove was involved. In the movie, John Weaver, political director for McCain's 2000 campaign bid, says "I believe I know where that decision was made; it was at the top of the [Bush] campaign." Rove has denied any such involvement.

==============================

In March 2001, Rove met with executives from Intel, successfully advocating a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel company supplier. Rove owned $100,000 in Intel stock at the time but had been advised by Fred Fielding, the White House's transition counsel, to defer selling the stock in January to obtain ethics panel approval. Rove offered no advice on the merger which needed to be approved by a joint Pentagon-Treasury Department panel since it would give a foreign company access to military sensitive technology. [32] In June 2001, Rove met with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove held almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks. On 30 June 2001, Rove divested his stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each of Enron, Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer. On 30 June 2001, the White House admitted that Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.

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what you have is a guy who knows how to game the media
and undertakes some pretty shady tactics to gain percentage
points over his opposition.

check out the movie cited in the second to last example
for more detail.

the guy wins elections, but he does it durrrrty.

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Paradigm said:

Bush is doing bad in the polls because he's a bad president.  There's only so much PR you can do before people see through that shit.  The fact is that Rove has saved Bush's ass at all the crucial moments.  Enough so that he's managed to hold on to power.

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Divided_Sky said:

Some can play the stupid card and admit they went along with the war for political reasons, but those who were informed cannot pretend to have been tricked.

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Paradigm said:

To some extent, I could accept the fact that some of them may have actually believed Bush's claims. But all of them? I think a better explanation is that they're spineless pussies.

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It's a little bit of both. We were all duped but being against the war in 2003 was seen as being against America to many, many people. The Democrats did not want to appear to be anti-America, so they had to back it.