US Politics: Brainless on the Potomac

By: Charles McPhedran

Monday 20 August 2007

Stephen Colbert plays Bill O’Reilly on TV.

Day after day, Colbert parodies, mocks and otherwise imitates the dozens of Right-wing cable shock jocks who fill up hour after hour on Fox News. Every night on Comedy Central he hurts the Bush Administration and its media supporters.

Colbert’s a sharp comedian, who explodes the stereotype about Americans not ‘getting’ irony. Indeed, he’s almost America’s funniest and most vital voice right now.

On the first episode of his show, The Colbert Report, Colbert came up with the word ‘truthiness.’ It sounds like something out of a candy advertisement, but it actually has a specifically political meaning.

‘Truthiness’ means to know ‘something from the gut, without regard to evidence, logic… or even fact,’ according to Wikipedia.

In other words, using spin and wedge politics to confirm what people already believe.

‘Truthiness’ is a word that has come to symbolise American politics in the age of Karl Rove.

Rove was more than a political strategist or confidant — he was an integral part of the Bush package from the very start of Dubya’s career. Indeed, Rove’s first meeting with Bush, down in Texas, reads more like a crush than the beginning of a political partnership.

‘Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma — you know, wow,’ Rove later trilled.

So Bush was the shiny face and Rove the brains that would get him elected — first as Governor of Texas, and then as President.

Often they seemed like two bodies that shared the same mind. ‘Karl thinks X. Bush thinks X. Clearly, it's a very complicated relationship,’ neo-conservative intellectual William Kristol told Esquire Magazine in 2003.

The arrangement resulted in a White House that was uniquely focussed on how policies would play on TV in Middle America — or on how popular the White House’s stance on this or that issue would be with the Republican Party’s Christian Right supporters.

Rove had calculated that unlike in the past, only 8 per cent of Americans were ‘swinging voters.’ That meant that it was more important to get out the base than come up with moderate proposals to win the undecided.

It’s unclear how Rove’s influence actually worked out in detail. But the few inside accounts of the White House in the Rove era available publicly suggest that policy was made solely through reading the polls.

Over the seven months that John J DiIulio Jr ran the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, for example, he ‘heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions.’

‘There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues,’ DeIulio told Esquire.

Often, this was because the White House determined its policy positions based on its ‘gut’ — which meant the extensive use of ‘wedge’ or ‘hot button’ issues, calculated to push Christians to the polls.

Studying the demographics of the 2000 election, Karl Rove found that 4 million more conservative Christians would have voted if they’d been motivated by Republicans.....