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Matt Dowd is not a liberal
“… With Bush as president, Dowd was put on the Republican National Committee payroll and became an intimate participant in White House strategy sessions. Bush and the Republicans now exploited divisive wedge issues and tactics with a vengeance. After Sept. 11, 2001, fear was bundled with loathing, the terrorist threat from abroad conflated with the gay menace within. By 2004, relying on Dowd’s numbers, Republicans made gay marriage the most salient social issue, exceeding abortion and gun control in its inflammatory potential to mobilize conservatives. Dowd prescribed the strategy for targeting of Republican base voters’ “anger points,” as GOP consultants called them, for maximum turnout.
… In the political rinse cycle, Dowd transformed the disinformation justifying the Iraq war into platitudinous Republican talking points. In the interviews he granted, Dowd repeated them effortlessly. “Events in Iraq,” he told National Public Radio during the Republican Convention in September 2004, “and removing Saddam Hussein is all part of the war on terror. You can’t separate out removing a brutal dictator from a place that harbored terrorists from the war on terror.” One plus one equals three; the clock struck 13.
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He was, he said, just creating a new Republican “brand.” After Rove executed Dowd’s carefully calculated targeting to produce Bush’s narrow victory in 2004, Dowd was triumphant. “Issues don’t matter in presidential campaigns,” he exulted in 2005, “it’s your brand values that matter.” For Dowd, facts didn’t matter either, only “brand” identity.
Contaminating his rival’s brand was as vital as enhancing his own. Dowd had been central in formulating the 2002 midterm campaign that zeroed in on the Democrats’ patriotism. In 2004, he and Rove crafted the negative attack on Kerry as a “flip-flopper.” Asked about the TV ads ripping Kerry, Dowd said on Sept. 22, 2004, on CNN, “I think it’s totally tasteful. And the American public is going to be fine with it.” He also blithely defended the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth defamation of Kerry’s sterling Vietnam War record. “I think the Swift boat ads were part of that dialogue,” he said in a 2005 PBS “Frontline” documentary, “but it was more important in that they pointed out something about John Kerry, which is, all this guy’s talking about is his Vietnam record. What does that have to do with the war on terror?”…”
Matthew Dowd's not-so-miraculous conversion - Salon.com
Is the former Bush pollster a true believer turned disillusioned critic, or was he an opportunist from the get-go?
www.salon.com
Dowd is an opportunist, though.
