Truth - Al Franken [33]
Terrorists attack countries with weak presidents, so voting for Kerry meant almost certain death for your children.
At the outset of the campaign, Kerry’s record as a decorated combat veteran made him seem strong, patriotic, and steadfast—especially when contrasted with Bush’s own record of cowardice. It had to go. And go it went.
This wasn’t the first time that the opponent of a Karl Rove candidate had been on the receiving end of a mysterious, quasi-independent smear campaign that had turned his strength into an albatross.
Back in 2000, during the South Carolina primary campaign, John McCain had the pleasure of hearing a Vietnam veteran, Thomas Burch, standing next to Governor George W. Bush, tell a crowd that McCain “came home and forgot us.” He had the even greater pleasure of learning from the Bush grapevine that Bridget, the dark-skinned Bangladeshi girl that he and his wife Cindy had adopted from an orphanage run by Mother Teresa, was not an orphan at all, but rather his own illegitimate black daughter. South Carolina’s Republican primary voters would be reminded of McCain’s interracial indiscretions every time Bridget appeared on stage with her father and, I guess, stepmother.
Ugly? You bet. The worst thing Rove had ever denied any involvement in? Oh gosh, no.
In the November 2004 Atlantic Monthly, which came out just before the election, journalist Joshua Green went snorkeling in the cesspool of Karl Rove’s political career. Being, as he was, entirely submerged in the Rove shit lagoon, Green managed to find stinky nuggets of political chicanery that had eluded me when I merely waded through the cesspool in my last book, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the stories I recounted in Lies about Rove bugging his own office in order to cast suspicion on his client’s opponent, and swiping an opponent’s letterhead in order to send out fake event invitations promising “free beer, free food, girls, and a good time for nothing” to homeless shelters—these were merely what we in the political sanitation industry call “floaters.” The heavy, dark stuff always sinks to the bottom. And down in the dankest deepest depths, Joshua Green found something that, to me, best captures the full putrescence of Karl Rove’s soul.
In the early 1990s, Rove arrived in Alabama eager to ruin the Alabama judicial system by injecting extreme, vicious partisanship into what had previously been an only somewhat vicious political culture. His plan succeeded. In his first year of operation there, he put three GOP candidates on what had been an entirely Democratic court for more than a century. Today, the court is entirely Republican. And not just Republican, but Roy Moore, 2.6-ton-Ten-Commandments-in-the-courthouse-rotunda Republican. It seemed like just another sparkling Rove success story. But in that first campaign season in 1994, there was a hitch.
Rove ran four candidates. One of them . . . lost.
The man who beat Rove’s guy, Harold See, was Mark Kennedy, son-in-law of former Governor George Wallace. Don’t like him so far, right? Neither did I, until I read Joshua Green’s description of him. Check this out:
Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect.
Pretty good, huh? Plus, he was a Kennedy! You’re probably guessing that he beat Rove’s candidate by trumpeting his heroic work advocating on behalf of the powerless. Well, you’re kind of right. In fact:
Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children.
Uh oh. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
One of Rove’s signature