Rove plans to lead a 527 attack to destroy Obama

It should hardly come as a surprise that Karl Rove has no intention of leaving politics quietly, thankful for having avoided the criminal prosecution he richly deserves.

He is plotting a comeback. But this time he has his eyes on a prize more suited for his unique talents -- leading the 527 assault against Barack Obama in the fall.

This revelation comes by way of Howell Raines, formerly editor of the New York Times, who was a panelist along with Rove at an awards dinner in Georgetown attended by all the old dinosaurs of the media elite. Raines wrote about the evening for Portfolio magazine.

It started with Rove on a tirade about Jeremiah Wright. Raines said he lit Rove's fuse by insisting that black candidates are held to a higher standard than white candidates when it comes to people they associated with. He noted that JFK and RFK associated with George Wallace even while he was standing in the schoolhouse door and nobody blistered them about it.

The mainstream press can be depended on to demand that any black candidate, for sheriff or president, disown every controversial thing said or done by every black man since Nat Turner’s rebellion.

And that got Rove started outlining the coming swiftboat offensive:

Rove ridiculed Obama at length for suggesting a moral equivalence between black and white racism. “We’re all morally equivalent to a guy who says ‘Goddamn America’ and AIDS was a virus concocted by the government as a genocidal tool,” Rove said. To make matters worse, he added that Obama “then concludes by suggesting that the morally equivalent black and white anger ought to find its outlet against the real enemy, which is corporate America.”

Rove’s outburst was notable, I told the audience, “because you’ve just heard the Republican campaign in a nitroglycerin tablet,” should Obama get the nomination. Actually, I was dazzled by the cogency of Rove’s case against Obama. Clearly, if perhaps unintentionally, he had outlined a G.O.P. swift-boat game plan, updated for the 2008 general-election campaign. Obama’s crazy preacher and the candidate’s sociological observations about guns, religion, and working-class bitterness have given the G.O.P.’s video pistoleros all the fodder they need for the television commercials you’ll see after Labor Day.

Shortly thereafter, Raines writes, his observation was validated by Roger Stone, noted Republican renegade:

The G.O.P. consultant added that Rove has delivered his Wright tirade in several venues. That’s the reason, he said, that it sounds as well-documented and rhetorically precise as, in fact, it was. Rove’s .50-caliber political mind, on full automatic, is formidable. “He’s very rehearsed on it because he’s auditioning for the role. He’d like to run the 527s to disassemble this guy Obama.”

So Rove is out test-marketing a package of anti-Obama smears before several audiences, including the media elite, which will be an important group to win over in order to succeed in the fall.

But according to Raines, people like Rove and Stone don't have to work too hard to win over the media. It seems the media has a penchant for political mercenaries like Rove -- admiring them for their skill and audacity.

Stone, who has been condemned editorially more times than Vlad the Impaler, is emblematic of a political age in which the press secretly admires and enables attack politics as long as it’s marketed as brutally unidealistic.

The media, it seems, distrusts idealism more than anything else, preferring the cold brutality of a Karl Rove that reaffirms cynicism.

What a sad age we live in.