(Inside the twisted imaginings of an American abroad…)

Moderator: It is with great joy that I address the student body today, to introduce a shining example to us all. It is largely through his work and the work of others like him that we here at The University of Machiavellian Studies have observed our beliefs shape the world in the most profound way I can remember witnessing in my 58 years on this earth. But you aren’t here to listen to me – you can do that during any Tuesday lecture. So rather than repeat my thoughts, let us hear from one of our most successful graduates. The senior political advisor to the President, the campaign manager who brought Republicans their first two-term Commander-in-Chief since Ronald Reagan, the man President Bush called “The Architect” during his victory speech, Karl Rove.

(standing ovation)

Karl Rove: Thank you Dean. To all you budding pundits, shapers of the future, and perhaps next year’s White House aides, I have a message. There is only one thing you need to keep in mind, and if you remember it and apply it correctly you need never worry about your path: There Is No Right And Wrong. There is only Winning and Losing. Certainly at times limits apply, and the equation is corrupted towards What You Can and Cannot Do, but one must never get too bogged down with this. Winning and losing. That’s all there is.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here in Nixon Hall, but think about it a moment. This tenet is built into the American system. If you are, for instance, a trial lawyer, your job is not to establish guilt or innocence. Your job is to bring the jury to your side, by any means necessary. Right and wrong are false concepts that others can debate: we simply must win. Well, President Bush is my client, and it’s not my job to judge him or the democracy that brought forth his elections. My job is simply to win.
Any successful campaign must have three main prongs to it, as well as a fourth shadow wing. More on that later. The first – and least important – prong is touting the skills and positive aspects of your candidate. Whether as a challenger or, like this election cycle, as the incumbent, it certainly helps to have had some policy success. However, it’s not essential.
More important is the second prong – the negative attacks. These must be relentless and somewhat credible. By that I don’t mean they need be true – in fact, if they aren’t, you often have a better chance of getting your opponent bogged down in outraged or indignant denials. No, they must merely be plausible – for instance, with Kerry, we couldn’t really call him an anarchist or anything like that – he’s been in the political game far too long. However, we could take his actions in Vietnam and throw some serious doubt on them, as Swift Boat Veterans for Justice did. No matter if everything is a lie – you just need to create the smoke around an issue, since most people still believe where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
You’ll note I talk about that particular attack as my own, although it was done by a separate group. That’s no mistake. Your most damaging and least reality-based attacks should be done by those involved with your strategy – many Swift Boaters, particularly organizers, were part of the Bush team – but with a plausibly deniable distance from the campaign proper. You need to let your candidate sounds statesmanlike in semi-dismissing these attacks on his adversary, while also keeping up a containment wall in case a lie ever really blows up in your face. Swift Boat is actually the textbook case – there was serious blowback from that effort, but little of it reached the President. You need surrogates for the really dirty work. The President can then have another line of attack open to him, one that is more founded in facts – this past election we had the “No. 1 liberal” and “flip-flopper” paths.
Another crucial thing to do with your attacks is go right at what looks like the most unassailable piece of personal history your opponent has. I’ve done it numerous times, and I’ll do it again – the Swift Boaters accomplished this incredibly well. Bush has numerous questions swirling around his National Guard duty while Kerry is a decorated volunteer veteran of the Vietnam War. We managed to make the issue less relevant by putting the Democratic campaign on the defensive. Any time you can take up an opponent’s time trying to recapture what should be a gimme issue, you’ve taken that time away from what might be a more vulnerable spot. And if you can make the issue disappear, all the better – if we succeed in taking away a powerful personal plank from the other side, it’s a major victory. We didn’t completely do that, but we certainly kept Vietnam and Kerry’s clearly superior history therein from having much impact, a worthy achievement when running as a war candidate. In fact, we managed to do it so well that, using other issues, we were able to make Bush the tough soldier type, and Kerry the limp-wristed liberal. Who would have thought that just looking at the resumes?
All this ties in directly with the third prong – control of the debate. I bet most U. of Mach students haven’t spent much time reading self-help books, but there is a kernel in them worth using – you must live in your own movie. By that I mean you must always control the context, the subject, the timing – you must always be talking about what YOU want to talk about. Not what the most important issues are, not what your adversary wants to accomplish and why it won’t work, but what you feel are your strongest suits.
The easiest way to guide the electorate to an issue is through fear, and that’s just what we did. Face it – most Americans polled on the policies of the Bush administration gave us failing grades, and believed Kerry could do a better job. Two issues, though, Bush won – the fight against terrorism and moral values. Why did this get Bush the election? Because we controlled the debate well enough that a large plurality of Americans thought terrorism and moral values were the most important issues up for grabs. And we did this through fear.
To be entirely honest, I thought that the terrorism card would do a little better than it did. To a certain extent it was successful, but in another way, it was irrelevant. All the most likely locales to suffer an attack went heavily to Kerry, while Bush sweeped out-of-the-way places that really don’t face much danger. Republicans rarely win big cities, but I was hoping that enough people would vote with fear to make Illinois a real race, or maybe even California – the northern part of that state is huge and red. Perhaps the real problem was a good case could be made that Kerry would be nearly as effective fighting the terror threat – perhaps more so – and thus all the other issues which he wins tipped the scale.
Instead, the terrorist card turned out to be trumped by the moral fears of Americans. Actually, this is more to our credit – terrorism is a real presence, whereas the moral issues that dominated this election were largely manufactured by our campaign. Manufactured may be too strong a word, but we certainly focused attention and brought minor issues to the fore, creating rallies around such things as outlawing gay marriage (getting that on the ballots of 11 states – all of which passed a measure banning homosexual unions, including Ohio – didn’t hurt). We deftly moved attention from pressing issues and created a furor around what was – a mere year ago – little more than an offshoot of discussion spawned by Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and other alternative media.
Of course, another key to focusing attention is controlling the messengers who deliver the news. I partially refer to ownership and the vast corporate structures that control most media outlets, but that isn’t enough. It’s too obvious – everyone knows Fox is biased, and Sinclair Broadcasting couldn’t even get a forced showing of an anti-Kerry documentary aired. Indeed, they’re going to be tied down with FCC legal battles over it.
No, more powerful is taking relatively impartial media and getting them to toe the line. This can be done a number of ways – embedding journalists with soldiers is a straightforward approach, but more subtle is the bullying of reporters. Give them little snippets of sometimes ambiguous information, make sure lips are shut tight throughout the administration, refuse to answer questions you don’t like (or avoid press conferences entirely) and cut anyone out of the loop who doesn’t present you correctly.
Listen, we know the media holds power over our jobs. One only need look back at Nixon to realize that. But we also hold a more direct and immediate power over theirs. Make sure most real information is passed through anonymous “leaks” – many times taking the form of shadow press conferences – and also make sure only those telling your story are invited. Anyone we don’t like can quickly be reduced to reporting hearsay, Internet blogging, or covering the gardening of Atlanta.
If the medium is TV keep your point simple, tight, focused, and avoid answering questions. Secrecy is key to this working; so if loose lips are sinking your ship, rid yourself of them. You can’t be afraid to attack whistleblowers in order to discourage future ones. Just ask some of our ill-favored FBI agents with big mouths, or Admiral Wilson (who we got at by outing his CIA wife). When a scandal starts to brew, you need to move it off the front pages by any means necessary. If people had Abu Ghraib or Gitmo on their minds at polling places, our moral values campaign would have suffered heavy damage.
All that I’ve mentioned thus far is fairly academic, and hopefully by the time you graduate from U. of Mach you’ll feel able to follow – and perhaps implement – a plan such as this. But let us remember my first point: There is no right and wrong. Only winning and losing. By extension, when applied to oneself (especially as an incumbent holding the wand of power), there is no law and order. We have the power to make laws, and to break them. What you can’t do is get caught.
This brings us to the fourth front, which perhaps I’ll call tenacity, with creativity added in. Maybe this chapter in my memoirs will become “The Fat Lady Never Sings.” Regardless of how you label it, this is key to winning, and often decisive in close battles.
In one of my first elections – for a judge – we lost. But we kept at it, attacked the votes from every direction possible, made slow gains – and a year later we had the election overturned in our favor. That was entirely a fourth front effort, although we used plenty of negative attacks on our opponent in an effort to grab public favor and maybe even force him to bow out of the race. It was the lawyers that won our election, but the p.r. campaign certainly helped us keep it open a full year.
By 2000 I’d refined my style enough to end the election after 36 days. We thought ahead of time that a few key swing states would turn the race, and we worked hard to get every advantage possible before polling took place. In practice, all we needed to win was Florida, although we were prepared to cover many more states had the need arisen.
Florida, with a friendly brother Governor, allowed us to throw out a number of legitimate votes well before they could be cast – most of them Black, a group that usually goes 4-1 Democrat. This got the final numbers close. A friendly management at Fox – again family connections, god bless nepotism – called the election for us early, giving us the moral advantage. That – combined with our preparation, in comparison to the Democrats’ chaos – allowed us to convince the public that Gore was damaging the democratic process, even though we were pursuing more legal action and were trying to stop votes from being counted!
You all know how that turned out, and I consider it in many ways the finest vindication of a shadow wing that I’ve presided over. As all subsequent tallies showed, Gore won the state – but by aggressively pursuing a win-at-all-costs doctrine from the very gestation of the campaign through to the winning the election, it didn’t matter.
2004 is still fresh in everyone’s minds, and until the electors have cast their votes on December 13th, I won’t speak entirely freely about it, even to fellow Machiavellians. But suffice it to say that all the expunged voter rolls from the previous cycle remained and often expanded. The media has uncovered certain operations that were supposed to remain covert, such as the ripping up of Democratic voter registrations that required political affiliation to be printed on the outside of envelopes (of course that was done by a third party, friendly to our cause but not a part of it, I assure you). Chads found their way to Ohio, where they managed to spoil 93,000 votes. We had lawyers in Ohio’s minority precincts challenging voters left and right, and a friendly election administrator there (likely the next Ohio Governor) who helped us apply draconian restrictions on provisional ballots – the ones mostly cast by Black voters whom our lawyers challenged. We even managed to undersupply certain unfavorable districts, resulting in huge lines where voters wouldn’t have favored us.
That is all a matter of public record, but after 2000 many Americans accept it as part of power politics. Of course, there are other things that aren’t in the public record, at least not yet.
Ok UMachers, connect the dots. With the Freedom of Information Act, we managed to get a large percentage of the vote hidden behind an opaque corporate wall, counted by electronic voting firms friendly with the Republican agenda. The CEO of Deibold – in a letter last year to Bush’s Pioneers and Rangers, the top tier of donors – virtually guaranteed Ohio.
Exit polls – long considered the most reliable monitor for elections, what we ourselves use to observe voting in third world countries – were as accurate as ever. Except when applied to districts or states with widespread electronic voting – where the exit polls said Bush would get, on average, 5% less votes than he did.
Indeed, according to exit polls, Bush would have lost Florida, Ohio, New Mexico, and a few others. Even I am amazed that in Florida counties with 80-90% Democratic populations, Bush wound up winning a large majority each time (unlike in similar districts with paper ballots).
Of course, simple innocent glitches in software caused many Ohio voters to press the Kerry button, and have their summary screen tell them they’d voted for Bush. And it was simple innocent glitches that gave Bush more votes than voters in, at last count, 29 Ohio counties.
Some crybaby Democratic house members – currently six – are taking complaints to the General Accounting Office, and others are approaching the FBI about vote tampering. Let them.
Looking at the sea of nodding faces out there, I think some of you may believe all is not as innocent as I’ve described.
I’d be disappointed in Umach if it were otherwise.
Remember, there is no right and wrong.
Remember, when you make and control the laws, you need not fear them.

Thank you, and may God bless us all.