Attack The Strength, Not The Weakness

Karl Rove was at Choate the other day, cowing most of the people who dared attack him and generally enjoying himself immensely, from what it appears.

The funny thing about Rove is that the Democrats who are all a-twitter about him and his myths fail to see that his successes are built largely on this one principle:

ATTACK YOUR ENEMY’S STRENGTH. Not the weakness, but the strength.

See, politics is NOT like judo, in that it’s not a situation where you can find a foe’s weak point and use it to topple him/her. But it IS like judo, in that the best way to defeat an opponent is to neutralize his/her greatest strength — or better yet, turn it against him/her.

Remember 2004, and how John Kerry was running as a war hero? Rove responded with the “Swift Boat” campaign. (Which was cunning on his part — I thought for sure that he’d be using Kerry’s “Winter Soldier” appearance and his throwing the medals in the trash can against him. Instead, he had surrogates come out and make shit up out of whole cloth, which the media obediently swallowed and was still reporting as unquestioned fact in October of 2004, right before the election and months after it had been first debunked.)

Remember 2000, and the insurgent war hero McCain in Michigan nearly derailing Bush’s coronation with a primary win? Rove and Robertson stopped him in South Carolina with, among other things, tales of the confessions he made when at the Hanoi Hilton. (Never mind that these confessions were false and he was tortured into making them.) Suddenly, McCain became a crazy coward collaborator with the Commies.

Now look at 2008. McCain’s now being buffed up again by desperate Republicans as the war hero who understands our nation’s security issues best of all. The press is pushing this constantly as a given, as Glenn Greenwald notes.

Instead of letting this slide by unquestioned, Democrats need to do what Rove would do, what The Nation‘s Ari Melber tells them to do, and what Salon‘s Gary Kamiya tells them to do:  Attack this myth head-on, and apply the Sledgehammer of Truth directly to its forehead. Point out how crashingly wrong McCain was and is on Iraq, and how willingly the “maverick” shills for Bush. Keep it up, keep exposing the rotten reality behind his “straight talk” pose (Keating Five, anyone?) and his constantly getting it wrong on our security.

Speaker Pelosi and Carl Levin made a start Monday by pointing out that the “surge” failed to achieve its stated goal of sparking political reconciliation among Iraq’s major players. In fact, of the eight surge benchmarks, only one has, even by the most generous standards, come close to being met, and others are are even farther away from being met than they were pre-surge. Of course, the righties have been playing “let’s move the goalposts”, but let’s not let them get away with that.