Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

Right Now…

This election is more of choice than Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.  It’s more of choice than pro-lifers vs. pro-choicers, the evangelicals vs the agnostics and the NRA vs gun control.

This election, under the direction of the American people, is the opportunity to send a strong, direct and clear message to future congresspersons, senators, governors and other officials.  To let them know in no uncertain terms that we will not stand for Rovian-Style campaigns no longer.

It would make clear to Karl Rove and other aspiring figures such as himself, that years of turning National and State Elections into cultural divisions and smearing proud Americans who run for office are over.

Make no mistake Karl Rove is running the show now in the John McCain campaign.  This after McCain felt the full jolt of being the opponent of Rove during the 2000 Republican Primary.

Anonymous opponents used “push polling” to suggest that McCain’s Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the “pollster” determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the “pollsters” asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that’s not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

The architect behind the “push-poll”?  Karl Rove

Karl Rove also made his presence and ugly campaign style a winner in 2004 for George W. Bush’s second term.  This time using his professional ties to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to produce television ads that “criticized Kerry’s Vietnam-era military service and public testimony against American soldiers.”

Now in 2008, with the GOP in shambles after the last eight disastrous years and with McCain polling poorly against Obama in the summer, Karl Rove has been summoned again to smear his way to another Presidential victory.

First a word from the Republican nominee on March 11, 2008.

John McCain is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. It is critical, as we prepare to face off with whomever the Democrats select as their nominee, that we all follow John’s lead and run a respectful campaign focused on the issues and values that are important to the American people.

Throughout the primary election we saw John McCain reject the type of politics that degrade our civics, and this will not change as he prepares to run head-to-head against the Democratic nominee.

John McCain will continue to run on his principles and will focus on the future of our country. The stakes could not be higher in this election, and John will contrast his vision for America with that of Senators Clinton and Obama.

Overheated rhetoric and personal attacks on our opponents distract from the big differences between John McCain’s vision for the future of our nation and the Democrats’.

Throughout his life John McCain has held himself to the highest standards and he will continue to run a respectful campaign based on the issues. We expect that all supporters, surrogates and staff will hold themselves to similarly high standards when they are representing the campaign.

McCain broke that promise to the American people early in the campaign.

That’s when we saw  McCain state that Hamas wants Obama to be President, that Obama did a a disservice by not visiting wounded troops in Germany, revisit the flag pin, and insinuate that Michelle Obama was not patriotic.

But see that wasn’t moving the polls much, so enter Karl Rove and his dirty box of “real” smears.  John McCain has to have a vivid memory of what this man did to him and his family in 2000, and yet he befriended him and took him on as an advisor.

Bill Ayers, kindergarten sex-education and pigs with lipstick have dominated the McCain “talking points” sent to surrogates…and, trust me, it will get worse.

Just like the last two elections, the GOP cannot win on the issues.  They instead will attack the character of our nominee, they will exaggerate, take out of context and blatantly make shit up.  They will prey on dividing the country and on the undereducated voter…This is what they do, and it has been successful in the past.

Right now…is our time, as Americans, to insist different type of elections, campaigns and candidates.  Voters are tuned in this year, like no other election in our history.  It is up to us to educate the voters on issues, this means making phone calls, knocking on doors and being a leader in your community.

This is the year we show Karl Rove, the smear merchant, the door.

LINKS

http://www.boston.com/news/pol…

http://time-blog.com/real_clea…


4 comments

  1. People are not idiots, people love fairness, people love honesty.

    It takes a specific effort sometimes to “go over the top” to prove that you are honest, that you will not stoop to gutter behavior – but if you are willing to go that far people will recognize it and reward you for it.

    I have practiced this belief in business on the small scale – and on the largest possible scale – and won.

    In the early 90s I dreamed up an Internet Firewall called BorderWare that, with a handfull of people, we took to a #2 position in the worldwide market.  A large part of that was deciding early on that we would go entirely through reseller partners – with no exceptions whatsoever.  It was an education for me (I was just making all this stuff up as I went along) to find out that the people who earn their daily bread selling other people’s products are very cynical about that sort of thing: “Sure you will.  Unless some big customer calls you directly…”.  We made our point by calling folks who we wanted to sell our stuff and giving them orders that had come in to us – giving up the extra money we could have kept.  Knowing that they wouldn’t be stabbed in the back (as they are used to vendors doing to them) made cynical resellers eager to sell our stuff, and we ran a close second to a competitor who had partnered with one of the largest computer companies in the world.

    In 1998 I went to work for Cisco Systems, then becoming itself the largest networking company in the world.  They had purchased a company with a firewall called “PIX” two years before, and after losing the faith of their customers were planning on killing it off.  With a small team of engineers and a mountain of problems, we chose to turn to a single purpose: we would be completely honest and entirely responsible to our customers.  We would do what we said we would do and we would be entirely transparent to the people who trusted us with their security.  I spent the next three years saying to customers, press and partners: “I am the one responsible, this is my name, this is my home phone number, this is what we plan to do.  If you have any questions or problems you call me any time, night or day.”  We said we would hit our dates, we said we would be there for our customers, we said we would never hide from our resposibility – and we lived up to it.

    PIX – now called “ASA” – (don’t get me started ;~) is still by far the most popular Firewall on the planet.  Cisco and its shareholders have made billions of dollars in sales, hundreds of millions of people in one way or another use the product to protect themselves from the bad folks out to do them harm.  It is a good firewall and all of the credit for that goes to the engineers who built it and throw themselves at the responsibility they carry, but there are other good products and engineering teams as well.  Cisco is now the defacto networking company on the planet and has become known for the serious and solid work its security people do.  But what gave the people who have to take responsibility for their companies’ security the comfort to chose our stuff was that we went over the top to show them that we were worthy of that trust.

    This is not a common view, in business.  Much is said along these lines, but in the crunch of daily existence it is known to be safer to fall back on a the tried-and-true methods of protecting your company’s self-interest at any expense, and protecting your personal career above everything else.  I have reason to believe, however, that your self-interest can often be better served by leaving it off the dashboard and instead focusing on the interest of those you serve: your customers – in business – and in politics – your constituents.

    Karl Rove and his ilk are the cynical Robber Barons of politics.  Those who point to the success of the liars and thieves of the past – at their own success with lying and theft in the past – and suggest that those who put faith in the ability of the people they serve to recognize honesty are “suckers”.

    I disagree with them.  I believe people want to know that those they count on for their security – for their livelihoods, for the wellfare of those that they in turn are responsible for – are honest in their words and actions.  It may take an extra effort to prove this to people used to being duped, but when you can achieve it you gain more than temporal success: you improve the world.  Barack Obama is trying to improve the world, so to all those who insist that he needs to forget “the sucker boyscout act” and start using the underhanded methods of his opponents I have this to say:

    I trust Barack Obama.  I am going to do what I can to help him stay on that Higher Ground.  The other way leads to defeat or – worse – more of the same.

    -chris

  2. alyssa chaos

    Im just afraid that the issues are being drowned out by all the static produced by those who want to divert attention away from what needs to be fixed in this country. Which means we have to work even harder to cut through all the bullshit.

    On issues alone we’re lightyears ahead of the Repubilcans.

    Character attacks, the only things fueling the McCain campaign have become a staple of the Republican Party and truly if I were a republican I’d be so ashamed. Ashamed that the party cant even run an honorable campaign and resorts to culture wars to cause division amongst us.

    ugh Karl Rove. bleh.

    Right now I dont feel like I can do much for the campaign [living in a red state sucksss] other than donate. may just end up going to NM to see what I can do to help.

    -thanks for the motivation hootie.

  3. We still have a war in Iraq with no end in sight. The war in Afghanistan has been getting worse for months, if not years. The last numbers I saw showed there were 47 million Americans without health insurance. That number must be over 50 million by now. That’s one in six Americans. The percentage of children without healthcare is even higher. We have the most children below the poverty line of any developed country in the world. The unemployment numbers are going up and up and that’s without even counting all of the people who are ineligible for unemployment benefits. The true number is probably higher than it is in the so-called socialist countries of Europe. Don’t get me started on home foreclosures, the deficit, the environment, the price of gas,…

    And, all we Americans can talk about are pigs and lipstick.

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