Karl Rove

It is fascinating to watch politicians and political insiders try to write a new chapter in their lives. The tricky part is doing it while trying to erase your past and that is what Karl Rove is attempting to do.

Rove is a winner. That is why he was one of President Bush’s right hand men. Rove could win elections because he didn’t let people get in the way. He was a win at any cost kind of guy, but that Rove is not the one that appeared on the Today Show over the past two days. This kinder, gentler guys tells us the he simply did not do some of the things people say he did. He said “his reputation as a down-and-dirty political campaigner is undeserved. Tricks attributed to him were either media distortions or the work of others.

Rove specifically said he had nothing to do with the smear tactics used against Sen. John McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 Republican presidential primary campaign. One of the more notorious dirty tricks of which Rove is accused is the so-called “push-pull poll” conducted in South Carolina during the 2000 primaries, when George W. Bush and John McCain were vying for the Republican presidential nomination. The poll suggested that McCain, who has an adopted daughter from Bangladesh, had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman.” Rove claimed he had nothing to do with it and he went on to criticize McCain for not making it a teachable moment, and sharing how he and his wife had adopted a daughter.

Rove went on to say “I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it’s meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.”* Rove is attempting to distance himself from the thing that he perfected. Dirty Politics existed before Lee Atwater, he exploited it for Bush Sr., but Karl Rove perfected it for GW Bush and like it or not that will be his legacy.