How Bush’s brain used the financial crisis Bush left us with and shady tax laws to engineer a decade of dominance for right wing extremists in swing states.
There’s nothing that highlights the insanity of the IRS scandal than Karl Rove’s crocodile tears about the IRS even daring to investigate his humble little 501(c)(4) Crossroads GPS.
“The group Rove helped found has massively outspent other 501(c)(4)s on political expenditures in the last two national election cycles, while fielding a tiny staff and offering no discernible social-welfare purpose,” writes The Daily Beast‘s Robert Macguire.
Rove’s cynical manipulation of the dark money system allowed him to spend millions and millions of dollars throughout 2009 and 2010 blaming President Obama for the economic misery of the financial crisis that George W. Bush did not prevent and made worse with tax and regulatory policies that fed inequality.
Rove’s plan was ingenious because his goal wasn’t to win one election but to distort the electoral map for a decade. It was an effort that would very deliberately change the makeup of the House and state houses alike, engineering Republican dominance where none should exist.
“In 2010 state races, Republicans picked up 675 legislative seats, gaining complete control of 12 state legislatures” Olga Pierce , Justin Elliott and Theodoric Meyer of ProPublica reported.
Victories the GOP almost entirely owed to Rove and other veterans of the Bush campaigns and White House.
“As a result, the GOP oversaw redrawing of lines for four times as many congressional districts as Democrats,” ProPublica reports.
“In both the 2010 and 2012, Crossroads GPS alone spent more than all liberal dark-money groups combined, according to FEC reports,” Macguire reports.
Rove has masterminded a coup that would last longer than even the 8 tortuous years of the Bush Administration.
No wonder Ann Romney believed the former Bush confidant when he assured her that her husband would win Ohio.
The truth is the electoral map hasn’t changed, except that the demographics continue to get worse for Republicans. What Rove managed to do is freeze politics at the nadir of an election held during the worst of the financial crisis that he successfully managed to blame on the president that inherited it.
The result is Republican legislatures in states that voted for Obama governing to the right of Mitt Romney.
There’s no better example of this than Michigan where a Tea Party legislature have taken on workers, the elderly and women in a way that suggests they have no fear of losing their seats to anyone but a Republican primary opponent.
And they’re extraordinarily popular for it. “Just 27% have a favorable opinion of them to 59% with a negative one, and their 25/61 spread with independents is even worse than their overall numbers,” PPP Polls reported Tuesday.
And though Democrats lead in the generic ballot 48/38 — about the same spread President Obama won the state by last year — it will probably take a landslide even larger than that to get them out of the majority.
All thanks to Karl Rove.
