WASHINGTON, March 8 (UPI) -- Is Karl Rove the new Joe Trippi of U.S. politics: a supposed genius who turns out to be just a disastrously unrealistic dreamer when the real campaign starts? It's starting to look that way.
Even Democratic Party insiders and Kerry campaign strategists have been bewildered at the passive silence and blundering slowness of the massive Republican Attack Machine to crank up and start countering their own powerful and highly effective blasts.
Through late January and all of February, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts rapidly closed enormous credibility and popularity gaps with President George W. Bush as he vaulted to the head of the Democratic presidential pack. Yet as Kerry's star rapidly rose on the fires of his withering attacks on the president -- and the Trippi-led campaign of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean collapsed -- the Bush campaign sat on its colossal $150 million campaign chest and did nothing.
Kerry strategists were delighted by the silence but also puzzled and even un-nerved by it. They took it for granted that it was only a matter of time before all the GOP guns starting blasting away at them.
Last week, the much-feared attack finally came: and it turned out to be a damp squib. The new $10.5 million Republican ad campaign focused on symbolic shots of Bush at Ground Zero, the remains of the World Trade Center after its "9/11" destruction. And while many of the families of the more than 2,800 people who perished there found the footage in perfectly fine taste, many others of course did not. The issue became a controversy. The Kerry campaign and its own Attack Machine eagerly seized on it and the president's champions and spokespersons suddenly found themselves playing on the defensive and caught off balance.
Was this just a natural glitch as the GOP juggernaut rolled out of the starting gate or something far more? The president, his political master strategist Karl Rove and the GOP political machine have looked so good for so long, it is hard to imagine them missing a beat on anything. But on issue after issue, initiatives they took have failed and the political miscues just keep adding up.
First, the president's State of the Union speech turned out to be an embarrassing fizzle. The pledge to make war on athletes' use of steroids provoked widespread derision. The plan to put a U.S. permanent base on the moon and send astronauts to Mars produced much criticism and even derision while failing to catch fire with the public. Then Kerry's rapid rise put embarrassing and very negative attention on the president's patchy record of service in the National Guard during Vietnam, the same conflict where Kerry was a thrice wounded and twice decorated hero.
Also, much to the consternation and even surprise of the White House's economic strategists, the long-awaited recovery produced only a tiny rise in new jobs created so far compared with the nearly 3 million previously lost during Bush's term of office. Comments by senior Bush economic advisers, especially N. Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, suggesting the continuing loss of U.S. jobs was a "good thing" in macro economic terms have hurt Bush in key industrial states with high unemployment rates.
Even the president's immigration reform now threatens to erode his conservative base. Critics are now claiming it has already provoked a massive increase in illegal immigration from Mexico.
In the face of all this, Rove's much touted political strategies have so far given Bush no relief as his poll numbers continue to erode.
Rove focused on wooing America's Hispanic, Black and Jewish communities, all traditional, core Democrat constituencies. But Bush is now trailing Kerry by a potentially catastrophic 13 percentage points in California according to recent polls. The national army of enthusiastic Hispanic supporters has yet to materialize. Meanwhile African-Americans are stronger than ever for the Democrats. In the primaries, they flocked in huge numbers to Kerry's banner.
Even the amazingly enthusiastic response to Mel Gibson's highly controversial new movie, "The Passion of the Christ" by Evangelical Protestants across the nation -- Bush's true bedrock base -- has embarrassed the president's largely Jewish neo-conservative supporters and fired up the 80 percent and more of American Jews who usually vote Democratic.
Rove has been unable to come up so far with anything to counter all this except the images of "9/11" and even they have backfired on him.
There is still time for Rove and his team to get back on their game. But the record of their flubs, miscalculations and failures is already long and growing longer by the day.
These are no longer just an embarrassing glitch or two, missteps that everyone makes. There is a well-documented and very clear pattern to them by now.
For the first time in their experience of U.S. national politics, the president and Rove are up against an aggressive, efficient challenger who is nationally credible and who hits hard. They still have not laid a glove on him. So far, they have been out-thought and outfought every step of the way.
The entire dynamic of the U.S. presidential race has changed. Instead of white rabbits, all Rove has been able to pull out of his hat are dead, wet fish. He'll have to do better than that if he wants to avoid Joe Trippi's fate come November.
