Awesome. I think it’s time for me to tell Al Franken’s favorite story about Karl Rove.
the early 1990s, Rove arrived in Alabama eager to ruin the Alabama judicial system by injecting extreme, vicious partisanship into what had previouslt been an only somewhat vicious political culture. His plan succeeded. In his first year of operation there, he put three GOP candidates on what had been an entirely Democratic court for more than a century. Today, the court is entirely Republican. And not just Republican, but Roy Moore, 2.6-ton-Ten-Commandments-in-the-courthouse-rotunda Republican. It seemed like just another sparkling Rove success story. But in the first campaign season of 1994, there was a hitch.
Rove ran four candidates. One of them lost.
The man who beat Rove’s guy, Harold See, was Mark Kennedy, son-in-law of former Governor George Wallace. Don’t like him so far, right? Neither did I, until I read Joshua Green’s description of him. Check this out:
“Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children’s Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, non-profit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect.”
Pretty good, huh? Plus, he was a Kennedy! You’re probably guessing that he beat Rove’s candidate by trumpeting his heroic work advocating on behalf of the powerless. Well, you’re kind of right. In fact:
“Some of Kennedy’s campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children.”
Uh oh. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
“One of Rove’s signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.
“We were trying to counter the positives from that ad,” a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile.”
Yep, you were right. But how do you smear a guy with that without having your fingerprints all over it?
“”It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information,” the staffer went on. “That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that’s one of the ways that Karl got the information out– he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out.” This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state.”
Ah. Smart.
Excuse me while I run away from my computer and vomit.
ONE MINUTE LATER
There. I vomitted in the wastebucket. I had been planning to use my office bathroom, but I didn’t make it.
Let’s go back to Joshua Green. He talked to Kennedy’s campaign manager, Joe Perkins.
“”What Rove does,” says Joe Perkins, “is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin’, tobacco-chewin’, pickup-drivin’ kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take.”"
So even though Kennedy won in the end (by one percentage point), when his term was up, he decided not to run for reelection. He just didn’t have the stomach for it.
When Green sat down with Kennedy, he met a man whose victory a spelling bee champion might call “Pyrrhic.”
“Kennedy appeared to derive little satisfaction from having beaten Rove. In fact, he seemed shaken, even ten years later.”
See? Rove took Kennedy’s strength (touching the lives of kids) and used it against him (saying he was touching kids). Genius. What a pro.
Actually, I have to take another break. Hold on.
THREE HOURS LATER
This is Franni, Al’s wife. I’m with him at the hospital. I told him this would happen if he looked too closely into the Karl Rove situation. This book is really taking a toll on Al, and I’m thinking of calling off the whole thing. Or maybe he could just focus on debunking lies from Rush or Sean Hannity. That always makes him happy. I hate to see him like this. -Al Franken: The Truth, with Jokes
And this is the man now running our national security. For once, I’m going to take Bush’s advice from right after his inauguration in 01… and ‘pray for this great nation’…
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