reposting Linda Weatherby's post of June 2 (re Karl Rove)

[Michael Eisenstadt]

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
With James Moore, Co-Author (with Wayne Slater) of "Bush's Brain"

An excerpt:

BUZZFLASH: What Karl does to achieve his goals in terms of the 
candidates he's worked for is unscrupulous. He thinks nothing of 
slandering people. He is a rumor mongerer. He has allegedly used law 
enforcement personnel to undercut his opponents. How is that balanced, 
do you think, in his own mind? That the means, even if illegal or 
skirting at the edge of the law, don't matter as long as you achieve 
your ends? Clearly, there's a lot of moral relativism going on there 
because he doesn't have any compunction about starting a whispering 
campaign against John McCain in South Carolina, claiming that he has a
black child, and he wasn't really a war hero and so forth. And yet Bush 
and Rove and the White House espouse these absolute, moral values. So 
how do those two things exist within him?

JAMES MOORE: Well, it's something I said all along. Compassionate 
conservatism in Texas is where they ask you if want green Jello or red 
Jello before they stick the needle in your arm and execute you. That's 
compassionate conservatism. But Karl's method for governance, which he 
has gotten this President to use very effectively, is completely cynical 
and it's based on the whole idea that we are all too busy to pay 
attention to the details of what's going on. We're all running around 
worrying about our mortgages and our 401Ks, and getting the kids to 
school or daycare, and picking up the dry cleaning, and planning
vacation or retirement, that we don't read deeply into the story.

He once told a consultant that we interviewed for "Bush's Brain" that 
you should run every political campaign as though people are watching 
television with the sound turned down. And toward that end, you rely 
heavily on imagery and not very much on substance, knowing that if the 
President is photographed in a school of minority and ethnic children, 
and is interested in their future in that particular photo op, that 
people will trust that image. And they don't go beyond that image to 
look at his policy, which is signing the "Leave No Child Behind Act" in 
a big, high-profile moment with Senator Ted Kennedy, and then gutting
the heart out of that bill with the funding that he offers up for it.

The President has become very good at these phony linkages. For 
instance, you'll see him running around talking about the tax bill, 
saying we need to get it passed so that we can create jobs for people. 
Factually, this tax bill -­ there's not an economist in America or a 
successful business person, Warren Buffet among them, who believes that 
getting rid of the taxation of dividends is going to create jobs anytime 
in the near future, and ostensibly in the long term. But if the 
President says it over and over enough, people will believe it, just as 
Karl Rove got him to say over and over that Saddam Hussein was involved 
in 9/11.

At time of the war in Iraq, the Pew survey showed 61 percent of 
Americans believed the canard about Iraq. So the whole concept is to 
speak as though you are a compassionate, sensitive, caring guy, and 
create these photo opportunities that prove that. But do whatever you 
want to do when you govern, because the public isn't paying very close 
attention. And they've gotten away with it thus far.

Read the entire interview on BuzzFlash.com:
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/03/06/02_moore.html