Rove Is "Reaching Out" To Nervous Republicans.

Source: NY Times

Now that Rove free from drafting new policies for the White House, he can go back to what he does best: the game of politics. It appears that he's back to batting .300 right now.

So what's his secret? Using the same type of tactics on the GOP as the White House does for the whole world: "You're either with us or against us."

With so much on the line, Mr. Rove has taken to traveling the country to form strategies with individual candidates and local parties while brainstorming with the president's political and policy teams on broad items the White House can pursue to help Republicans everywhere. He is focusing on only the major planks of Mr. Bush's agenda and not the minutiae of policy that had consumed hours of his day.

In regular West Wing breakfast sessions catered by the White House mess, Mr. Rove and the White House political director, Sara Taylor, have already been reaching out to nervous and vulnerable Republicans, three at a time, laying out an emerging three-prong attack on Democrats over national security, taxes and health care.

In meetings at the White House, aboard Air Force One and in candidates' home states, Mr. Rove is trying to rally Republicans to stand by the president and his agenda.

He has focused in particular on uniting them behind the administration's proposals to overhaul immigration, which include guest worker provisions that conservatives despise; the Iraq war, which has driven Mr. Bush's poll numbers sharply downward; and the Medicare prescription drug program, which the administration says will cost $872 billion from 2006 to 2014 and which Mr. Bush backed enthusiastically despite complaints from conservatives that it was a vast expansion of the social welfare state.

Mr. Rove's playbook is drawn straight from the one that worked for him in 2004: first, get conservatives fired up enough to vote, a particularly important goal in a midterm election, in which turnout is usually quite low. Second, make sure the election is not just about Mr. Bush's performance, but also about the choice between a Republican Party defined on its own terms and a Democratic Party defined on Mr. Rove's.

Mr. Rove is also working in close contact with Ms. Taylor and the Republican National Committee chairman, Ken Mehlman, to put in motion the get-out-the-vote machinery Mr. Mehlman masterminded in 2004. They are refining state "victory programs" to identify potentially friendly voters who can be expected to receive messages about how the Democrats are ill prepared to fight terrorism or will undo tax cuts the president wants to make permanent.

Wow, people wonder why he's so well-loved.

Hm, I've been wondering what sort of shit will be pulled from Rove's ass around November to save the Republican party, and it certainly looks like the immigration reform bill that was put on hold may be the big turd.

But Republican and White House officials say that as the kinks subside the prescription drug plan will be a net positive for the party come November, just as Mr. Rove said that the passage of a sweeping overhaul of immigration law would please voters who wanted action from Washington.

And look...like I said, it's nice to see that they use the same kind of scare tactics on members of their own party who question their ethics that they use on the rest of the population.

Republican and White House officials are also telling fellow Republicans that criticizing the president risks bringing the party down with him. At the same time, party officials have said they do not want the election to be a referendum on Mr. Bush.

Yeah, that nickname, Turd Blossom, sure fits him like a glove.

Tags: [Karl Rove], [Bush administration], [White House], [GOP], [Republicans], [Rove using threats of loss to unify Republican party members], [Sara Taylor], [the Turd Blossom nickname is certainly well-earned]