Bush’s “Architect” Launched Anti-Gay Marriage Campaign After Burying Gay Father

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The Washington Post recently reported that there is widespread panic amid the Republican establishment about next week’s midterm elections. But the paper found that there are two people whose confidence about Republicans prospects strikes even their closest allies as almost inexplicably upbeat.

They are President Bush and his top political adviser, Karl Rove. Last week Rove told National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel about why he remains so optimistic.

Karl Rove: "Unlike the general public, I'm allowed to see the polls on the individual races and after all, this does come to individual contests between individual candidates... I'm looking at all these, Robert, and adding them up, and I add up to a Republican Senate and Republican House. You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math, I'm entitled to the math."

Karl Rove’s comments have led many to ask whether he knows something that the rest of the country doesn’t? To help answer that question we are joined by journalist James Moore in Austin Texas. He is co-author of the new book “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.” He is also co-author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential.”

• James Moore. Co-author of the new book “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power.”

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, Rove told National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel about why he remains so optimistic.

KARL ROVE: Unlike the general public, I'm allowed to see the polls on the individual races, and, after all, this does come to individual contests between individual candidates... I'm looking at all these, Robert, and adding them up, and I add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House. You may end up with a different math, but you're entitled to your math, I'm entitled to the math.

AMY GOODMAN: Karl Rove’s comments have led many to ask whether he knows something the rest of the country doesn’t. To help answer that question, we’re joined by journalist James Moore in Austin, Texas, co-author of the new book, The Architect: Karl Rove and the Master Plan for Absolute Power. He is also co-author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. James Moore, welcome to Democracy Now! What do you think Karl Rove is talking about?

JAMES MOORE: Well, there’s no doubt, Amy, and this has happened historically, and Karl knows it better than probably most of us, that within a national race like this, you can get into local districts and you can have a dynamic in a local election in a congressional district that drives an election and is completely disconnected from what’s going on nationally.

Now, the problem is that when Karl Rove says these kinds of things, it immediately spawns conspiracy theories and a number of other things related to electronic voting and voter suppression and any number of other things, that he has the confidence that they can turn an election and keep it, quote/unquote, “close enough to steal.” Whether Karl Rove knows bad things that the rest of us don't know is what’s causing a lot of people concern right now.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about how Karl Rove was integral to the creating the pretext for war, for the invasion. Can you talk about what he did around the issue of information, propaganda, misinformation?

JAMES MOORE: Well, what happened with Karl when the 9/11 attack occurred, Karl was in on the planning very early on, from before the President was elected. There was talk about Iraq and what must be done about Iraq, about the oil resources. Karl was in on that from the beginning, Amy. And when 9/11 happened, not just Karl Rove and the President and Donald Rumsfeld and the Vice President, Dick Cheney, they all saw an opportunity to take that event and frame it in a way that gave them the chance and the resources and the political and public support to do something that they had intended to do anyway, which was to somehow find a way and a reason to project United States military power and U.S. influence into the Middle East and to put us on the ground in the Middle East, where all of those critical oil resources are.

The President's belief was and continue to be that, regardless of whether there were WMD or not, that there was a madman standing on top of what may be the world’s largest supply, the largest reserves of oil. It was Karl's job to take a failed domestic presidency after 9/11 and create messages that would turn this president into a wartime president and would get the public to rally behind him. And that is what has sustained George W. Bush up until this point, until his presidency has shown signs of falling apart.