Posted on 05/31/2007 8:53:31 AM PDT by kellynla
Karl Rove’s political strategy for President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign was "maniacally dumb,” declares Newt Gingrich – who says the right can’t retain power if it alienates the center.
In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg for The New Yorker magazine, the former House Speaker said Rove left Bush with "no political capital.”
Gingrich observed: "All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote.”
The Bush campaign failed to wage a campaign based on ideology, said Gingrich, and instead of suggesting that Kerry was "to the left of Ted Kennedy,” it focused on attacking Kerry’s war record.
Gingrich has gotten heat of late from some conservatives for reaching out to center-right voters, Goldberg notes. But Gingrich said he wants to bring the center into a coalition with the right "because I want to give the right power. The right can have power only by being allied with the center.”
Failure to recognize that was Rove’s mistake in 2004, according to Gingrich, who feels Republicans risk alienating "America’s natural majority.”
The GOP’s only hope of holding on to the White House in 2008 is to nominate a candidate who runs against Bush, just as Nicolas Sarkozy won France’s presidency by "making his own president, Jacques Chirac, his virtual opponent,” said Gingrich.
Goldberg writes that Gingrich "says the Bush administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter presidency, when nothing seemed to go right.”
Gingrich also warned: "When you have the collapse of the Republican Party, you have an immediate turn toward the Democrats, not because the Democrats are offering anything better, but on a ‘not them’ basis. And if you end up in a 2008 campaign between ‘them’ and ‘not them,’ ‘not them’ is going to win.”
Gingerich is about as loyal to the President as he was to his various wives.
I turned off of Rove a long time ago.
I may be wrong but it seems to me that the 2006 election campaign was fought from a losing position.
The support of Specter over a true conservative gave me real heart burn.
A decision by the White House that America will pay dearly for and soon.
Good tactician executing a flawed or wrong strategy can do more harm than bad tactician executing good strategy. Think 2006 "all politics is local" GOP campaign which only played into Schumer-Emanuel hands, as they "out-conservatived" conservatives.
Newt is a strategist, so is Condi, in a true sense of the word. Maybe it's because they are historians.
And the Republicans cannot gain/maintain power if they continue to alienate the Right. If the Republican party continues to slip Left, it will lose more and more voters as it did in 2006 that no longer see a difference between the two parties. They were called Reagan Democrats for a reason.
It looks like newt is joining the rowe hate fest, what a shame first global warming pandering(sucking up to kerry) by him and now this, what a disgrace
See post #17
Gingerich is about as loyal to the President as he was to his various wives.
True that, Gingrich may be sharp as a tack, it’s in the moral outlook that he falls down and hard.
I must say that I do agree with his view on this though, a candidate pinning themselves to GWB’s policies in 2008 has an excellent chance at losing their bid for election.
In politics a year is a lifetime, I expect many candidates to distance themselves from GWB, that is simply smart strategy.
Great post. Thank you for the link.
I think Gingrich is a better strategist than Rove by orders of magnitude. Gingrich engineered the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democrat domination (the longest in US history). Rove barely eked out a victory for W in 2000, and the most anemic successful reelection campaign since 1916.
Three generations.
You are forgetting Prescott Bush who as a board member of Union Banking Corporation had property seized by President Franklin Roosevelt under the Trading with the Enemy Act. He was reimbursed after the war $1.5 million which was used as seed money for the Bush family’s Texas oil ventures.
Prescott Bush was also involved with the eugenics promoting American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947.
And now GW wants to patriate millions of mexican interlopers to beef up the tax rolls and bolster a social security system that has been decimated on the wage earner side by four decades of a country employing abortion as a convenient form of contraception.
The family circle of cause and effect is complete.
Subtitle - “To win we don’t need Reagan Democrats, we need liberals and illegal brown people who can’t vote”.
Paraphrase to Gingrich “your wheel had it’s turn, and it is time for you to go again”
Newt is trying to rewrite history.
Kerry based his campaign on a single plank, his four months in Viet Nam with the Swift Boats.
The Bush campaign never challenged him on this. Only Kerry’s fellow officers and sailors did.
Bush’s position was that the provision of McCain-Feingold that allowed the Swiftboaters as well as groups on the left to operate was a loophole which should be closed.
Bush actually did run his campaign on the issues. But he had to fight the drive-by media as well as the Rats.
With all due respect to Newt, he had even less success fighting the MSM than Bush has had.
I'd say Rove was smart enough not to let Bush run on his ideology; also in the proximity of Kennedy. Tax cuts is the only successful Bush domestic policy that Kennedy hasn't co-championed
Bottom line.
The RATS neutered Newt a long time ago.
The Bush campaign failed to wage a campaign based on ideology, said Gingrich, and instead of suggesting that Kerry was "to the left of Ted Kennedy,” it focused on attacking Kerry’s war record.
Sorry Newt, but the Bush campaign never said one negative word about JF'nK's war record. Everybody else in America did, including most of us, but the Bush campaign, no.
‘Gingerich is about as loyal to the President as he was to his various wives.’
Or as President Bush has been with those of us that elected, and reelected him. The President knows the base hates the Amnesty crap he keeps trying to shove down our collective throats....so to me he’s just as ‘disloyal’ as anyone alive can be today in American politics.
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