Rove the Bluffer

I like this thinking. Indeed, there could conceivably be a plan to needlessly and unprovokedly do something like invade Iran in the next few days (Saturday, for example, might work well with media even more comatose than usual). But I am increasingly skeptical that would play like it has in the past. Would hundreds of thousands (ok, millions) of highly disillusioned voters really change their votes at the last minute because our known-to-be-losers government unilaterally made another stupid move? Even if we could conjure up some supposed smoking gun (spent uranium we littered all over Iraq being found in Iran?), I just can't quite imagine the scenario working in real life. Now in terms of cover for election cheating, there might be a little traction given the absolutely abhorrent job the mainstream media and even most Dems have done in critiquing and publicizing obvious election fraud over the past six years. But we are all going to vote so early and often (i.e. with all our friends, local and telephonically connected), are we not, that any such scam would never be sufficient to bail out the republicans?

And I think the opposition is smart enough to have worked through that too. They're too close to prison sentences already to be flirting with even more egregious violations of well-established international law. Their black-hatted vigilante band is shrinking by the day.

Josh at Talking Points Memo (quoting in toto):

I touched on this point this morning in the Daily Digest. But let me return to it because I think it's important.

All sorts of articles have been written over the last week or so with one question: Why is Karl Rove so confident? What does he know that the Dems and the pundit-predictors don't?

The answer is really, really simple: nothing. There's not anything he knows. In fact, he's not even confident. It's a bluff.

There are ten different reasons to know this. But the most compelling and sufficient one is to look at his history. In fact, go back to the second post I ever did on TPM just a couple weeks shy of six years ago. It was about a stunt Rove pulled that almost lost Bush the presidency in 2000.

Going into the big day the polls all showed a very, very close race, with perhaps ever so slight an edge for Bush. Conventional logic would have dictated sending Bush to swing states like Florida. But that's not what Rove did. He chose instead to send Bush to California and New Jersey -- states Bush could only have any hope of winning in a blow-out. The reasoning was simple. Rove figured that he could accomplish more through convincing mainly the press, but also activists and even highly-plugged voters, that Bush was going to win big than he would by sending his guy into a state like Florida for some last minute retail politicking.

It's the bandwagon effect. Psyche out the other side. Act like you're winning and you'll charge up your activists/voters and demoralize the folks on the other side. Mainly, get the press to believe your hype and they'll do the charging up and demoralizing for you. As it happened, it was a really dumb decision in 2000. If not for faulty ballots and election stealing, Bush would have lost Florida and the presidency. And given the margin, at least conceivable that Bush could have won fair and square had he spent the last few days on the ground in Florida.

Now, the situation right now is obviously very different than what Rove faced in 2000. They're on the defense. But all the same logics and principles apply. For the Republicans, the difference between a bad night on election night and a catastrophe could well turn on whether or not the party's ground troops really believe all the polls they're seeing. If they do, the demoralization will likely be crippling. And a bunch of them won't even show up. Rove has to create the impression that he knows something the polls don't to keep the Republican GOTV operation from breaking down entirely.

It's that simple.