Politics makes for strange bed-fellows.

I just read Karl Rove’s explanation of why Hillary won. It’s the Wall Street Journal’s most popular piece of the day.

We have Karl Rove to blame for George W. Bush’s success in American politics. Rove has often been the “architect” of GWB’s election campaigns, getting him elected Governor of Texas in 1994 and 1998, and then as President of the United States in 2000 and 2004.

A few details about Rove:

• He never knew his biological father. After his parents divorced when he was 19, he learned that the man who his “father” (Louis Claude Rove) was not his biological father, and he later discovered that his adoptive father (Louis Claude Rove) was gay. He says that he loves Mr. Rove, though he’s not against using anti-gay sentiments to convince Republican voters to support his candidates.
• He started college at the University of Utah but never finished.

• He has known George W. Bush since 1973.

• He was fired from George H.W. Bush’s 1992 presidential campaign after it was discovered that he had spread a negative story in Esquire Magazine about another Bush adviser who was more favored than he was.

• GWB won his first election as Texas Governor, in part because Rove’s staff called voters to ask whether people would be “more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if [they] knew her staff is dominated by lesbians.” During the race, a regional chairman of the Bush campaign was quoted criticizing Richards for “appointing avowed homosexual activists” to state jobs.

• During the 2000 Republican primary against John McCain, Rove’s staff played on racist fears to undermine rival John McCain, asking: “Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?”

• He eventually resigned as a Bush adviser when it became clear that he had helped to leak the name of a CIA operative to the press because her husband had written an op-ed in the New York Times doubting that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. Bush let his “architect” go, because he was involved in too many scandals and investigations related to the misuse of power to attack and undermine political enemies.

I give this background to explain why I wasn’t shocked by the clearly racist innuendos advanced by Rove in his explanation of Hillary’s victory, which makes me think it’s just a sneak peek into the Republican National Committee’s eventual attack on Obama if he becomes the Democratic nomination. Either that, or they’re trying to convince Democrats and Independents to vote for Hillary, because they’re ready to go to battle with Bill and Hillary — Rove’s been locked in that battle since 1992 when he got kicked off of Bush Sr.’s campaign — but Obama is still too new and too charismatic to attack too directly.

Rove notes that Hillary won for four reasons:

• Her appeal to women: No problem here.

• Hillary’s “personal” moments: His attack on Obama here is phrased in subtle racial terms. He says that Obama shouldn’t have told Hillary that she was “likable enough”, because it was “trash talking [that] was an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard, and capped a mediocre night.” Excuse me? I agree that Obama’s comment was ungracious, but John Edwards was a lot more aggressive in attacking Hillary. And both Bill and Hillary attacked Obama non-stop (a point he credits Clinton for below). Would the basketball imagery be equally applicable to Edwards, Hillary or Bill? Or is it most suggestive when used about a black guy? When I first read it, I thought: Hey, maybe I’m being too sensitive, maybe Rove isn’t a racist despite the tactics he’s used in the past. But then I read on and realized that the basketball comment was just a warm-up.

• Bill’s attacks on Obama: He just got through saying that Obama was ungracious to attack Hillary’s likability. But Rove then goes to great lengths to credit Bill Clinton for attacking Obama (though Rove is careful never to actually praise either Clinton too much). He says that Clinton makes a decent attacker but promises that there is more harmful information out there about Obama (and suggests that he has it) and that there are people who are/will be more skilled at executing the killer blows.

In his words: “Former President Bill Clinton hit a nerve by drawing attention to Mr. Obama’s conflicting statements on Iraq. There’s more — and more powerful — material available. Mr. Obama has failed to rise to leadership on a single major issue in the Senate. In the Illinois legislature, he had a habit of ducking major issues, voting “present” on bills important to many Democratic interest groups, like abortion-rights and gun-control advocates. He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn’t know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through. . . . He won’t escape criticism on all this easily. But the messenger and the message need to be better before the Clintons can get all this across. Hitting Mr. Obama on his elementary school essays won’t cut it.“

So Obama is “lazy” and given to misstatements, but George Bush was Shakespeare? Didn’t he have difficulty speaking basic English? Also, isn’t it curious that the votes that Obama missed were precisely about abortion and gun-control — two issues that Republican strategists use to rile up their supporters? Might this just a pre-emptive attempt to dissuade Republicans thinking about voting for Obama? Given that Obama is undoubtedly pro-choice and pro-gun control, why would a Republican highlight that Obama supposedly missed votes? Would that make it easier to get their favored positions passed?

In summary, according to Rove, Obama is a lazy, uninformed, basketball-playing Negro who is afraid to — or too lazy to — vote on issues such as gun control and abortion.

• Obama is a great speaker but he’s not saying anything meaningful: On this point, I can’t really disagree, except to say that most politicians don’t really saying anything meaningful, relying mostly on soundbites and symbols to get elected and re-elected. Anyone remember “you’re either with us, or you’re against us”? Hardly a very sophisticated statement of substantive foreign policy, though it literally changed the world with its simplicity (or better said, simplification of complex issues). And as the Hillary crying episode showed, sometimes images are more important than being brilliant and substantive. It’s sad, but that’s how people like Karl Rove get weak candidates like George W. Bush elected President.

That being said, I have no doubt that Obama will make a more substantive president than George W. Bush.

But then again, that’s not setting the bar very high.