Adam's blogbox: the Iraq War is an Enron fraud committed on the American people

Call Karl Rove counterintuitive.

The intuitive way of attacking an opponent is to find his weakness and attack it. Karl Rove does the opposite: he finds his opponent’s strength and attacks it.

Examples of the Karl Rove Strategy are (1) the Swiftboating of John Kerry: attacking his Vietnam heroism; (2) calling the Vietnam paraplegic Max Cleland a traitor who backs Osama Bin Laden.

Now Karl Rove has come up with the GOP strategy for November: accuse the Democrats of wanting to “cut and run” from Iraq.

Following the rules of the Karl Rove strategy, believe this: Karl thinks that wanting to leave Iraq is the Democrats’ strength, not their weakness, and that’s why he is attacking it. Or alternatively, he perceives it as the GOP’s weakness, and that is why he has decided to defend it by attacking the Democrats on this very point.

Following this line of thought, how should the Democrats play to their strength?

Here’s how. They should say that the Iraq War is an Enron fraud committed on the American people.

Whether it’s true or not, doesn’t matter. I believe it's actually true, but that doesn’t matter. The truth doesn’t matter to Karl Rove, so it shouldn’t matter to the Democrats. The beauty of calling the Iraq War an Enron fraud is not that it’s true, but that it’s a great attack.

Number one, it’s what a majority of the American people already believe, except nobody has yet told them this in so many words.

It’s time the Democrats, or at least one Democrat, tells them in so many words.

Unfortunately Hillary Clinton can’t, because she backed the war, and still appears to back it.

In fact, most of the Democrats are in the Hillary camp. Only 13 Democrats voted for the Kerry resolution to set a date to "cut and run" out of Iraq.

But saying that the Iraq War is an Enron fraud neatly finesses the Karl Rove Strategy, because it uses his own form of name-calling as politics against him.

“Cut and run” is a way to demonize the Democrats as cowards and weaklings. Calling the Iraq War "an Enron fraud" is demonizing the GOP as a bunch of fraudsters and crooks.

It is something the US people could easily believe, or enough of them anyway for the GOP to lose their majority in the House and the Senate come September.

It’s what George Lakoff calls framing. Karl Rove has framed the debate one way, about “cut and run.”

It won’t help the Democrats to fight the election in this Karl Rove framing.

They have to come up with their own reframing of the debate, i.e. call the Iraq War a fraud. It fits in well with their attack on the GOP’s culture of corruption. This way, they make the Iraq War part of the GOP culture of corruption -- a monstrous fraud committed on the poor innocent American people. Now the Democrats make themselves out to be the righteous exposers of a fraud they are determined to end, instead of weaklings and cowards who want to “cut and run.” They make the Iraq War a cancer that must be cut out for the American people to be healthy again.

Will the Democrats use this reframing to fight the GOP?

Don’t hold your breath. When it comes to the political battle field, the Democrats act like a party who, in the face of any GOP attack, has decided to “cut and run.”

Let’s face it, we got ourselves a dumb-fuck president because we deserve him: we’re a dumb-fuck nation. And we also got ourselves the opposition we deserve -- a dumb-fuck party called the Democrats.