Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [59]
In 1970, while still a teenager, Rove pretended to be a campaign volunteer for the Democratic candidate for Illinois state treasurer, Alan J. Dixon. He swiped Dixon’s letterhead and sabotaged the opening of Dixon’s campaign headquarters by sending out over one thousand copies of an invitation offering “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing” to homeless shelters and soup kitchens. He now refers to this as “a youthful prank” that he regrets.
A few years later, a rapidly maturing Rove conducted training sessions for College Republicans on the nuance and technique of Nixon-style dirty tricks. George Bush, Sr., who was then head of the Republican National Committee, had to send the FBI to question the up-and-coming scam artist. Bush was so impressed that he later gave Rove a job.
In 1986, while working on the Texas gubernatorial race, a fully blossomed Rove dramatically “discovered” a mysterious electronic bug in his office. Instead of calling the police, he called a press conference. The timing of Rove’s discovery was particularly fortunate: It was the morning of the only televised debate between his candidate, William Clements, and the Democratic governor, Mark White. White was forced to answer questions about the bug instead of about the issues, and subsequently lost. The Travis County D.A.’s office and the FBI later concluded that the bug had been planted by Rove himself on the same day he discovered it. The fact that the maximum battery life of the bug was a mere ten hours (meaning that a spy would have to sneak in and replace it at least twice a day) may have been something of a giveaway.
Rove’s innovative approach to campaign strategy propelled him rapidly up the ladder to the top of the state Republican party, where he orchestrated the most complete takeover of Texas since Sam Houston routed Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. (Sam Houston was later killed at the Alamo by terrorists.)
By 2000, Rove knew how to steal an election without leaving any fingerprints. According to McCain’s then campaign manager, Rick Davis, Rove had a seasoned team of character assassins already in place, including Warren Tompkins (another Atwater disciple) and former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed. Davis told me that Reed later claimed “I was the one who delivered South Carolina for W.”
Phone banks, flyers, e-mails, church pulpits, and, in one undocumented case, telepathy—all these were used as “Weapons of McCain Destruction,” as Bill Schneider might have called them on CNN’s Inside Politics. One such e-mail came from Bob Jones University Professor Richard Hand (Rhand@BJU.edu), who wrote to fellow South Carolinians that McCain “chose to sire children without marriage.” When Hand was told on CNN that there was no evidence Senator McCain had fathered illegitimate children, Hand, displaying the intellectual rigor for which Bob Jones University is justifiably esteemed worldwide, said, “That’s a universal negative. Can you prove that?”
You may remember that it was at Bob Jones University that George W. Bush kicked off his South Carolina campaign. The ultrafundamendalist school was famously anti–Roman Catholic and had a quirky policy against interracial dating. “We had to send a message—fast—and sending him there was the only way to do it,” Tompkins would later say. Bush was criticized nationally for not addressing the school’s ban on interracial dating. You know who I think would have criticized their interracial dating policy? Thomas Jefferson.
Bush won South Carolina, went on to capture the Republican nomination, and came within a hair’s breadth of winning the election.
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The following scene is excerpted from The Big Heist, my novelization of the Republican conspiracy to steal the election in Florida. The book was inspired by Bill O’Reilly’s Those Who Trespass and Jeffrey Toobin’s Too Close to Call: The Thirty-six