George W Bush’s ‘brain’ may be on his way out, but Karl Rove’s long and distinguished career could teach our candidates a thing or two about hammering their opponents.

Sure, after years of being lauded as a political genius, Rove perhaps leaves his party in worse shape than he found it, but much can still be learned from the master of the wedge.

Crikey has prepared this slim handbook for Rudd and Howard to keep in their top pocket for the upcoming election — here’s a snapshot of Turd Blossom’s election winning tactics:

  • Identify your opponent’s weaknesses, then exploit them: The Bush camp discredited Democratic candidate John Kerry in ’04 by labelling the intellectual (and overly wordy) Kerry as a “flip flopper”. Kerry acknowledged grey areas and Rove exploited this for all it was worth. (Think thousands of thongs, or flip flops, held aloft at the ’04 Republican convention…) As Slate reported at the time, “Kerry’s supporters cite his reversals as evidence of the senator’s capacity for nuance and complexity, growth and change. His critics say they represent a fundamental lack of principles.”
  • Appeal to voter prejudices: Kerry, a former diplomat, spoke fluent French. A second language is usually worth bragging about, but Republicans played on it as a sign of Kerry’s ‘foreignness.’  Spinsanity wrote back in ’04, ever since “an anonymous Bush advisor told The New York Times last April that Kerry ‘looks French,’ the Massachusetts Senator’s political adversaries have attempted to capitalize on anti-French sentiment created by the war and portray him as aloof and opposed to America’s interests.”
  • Forget the vision thing — micro-target, micro-target, micro-target: Kevin Rudd’s been taking notes of late, maybe he read the Vanity Fair profile on Rove that dubbed him an expert at “categorization — for finding, probing, classifying, and ultimately harvesting voters according to minute gradations of preference…You or I might speak of ‘the Joneses at No. 42.’ Rove is more likely to refer to the Irish/Jordanian, Princeton/Oxford, pro-choice, World Bank–economist couple with the vacation home in the Shenandoahs, where they keep their battered second Volvo, the one with the Rehoboth Beach parking decal.”
  • Be a splitter, not a lumper: In politics, as in science, writes VF, “there are “lumpers” and “splitters” — those who consolidate, and those who discriminate… Roosevelt and Regan were lumpers – “Karl Rove has always been a splitter. He doesn’t have to think about it; it is the core of his being. In Rove’s eyes, everyone is a micro-target.”
  • Dig up your opponent’s enemies, then get them on side: As The Times UK reports, Vietnam hero and later an outspoken critic of the war, John Kerry, was “simply no match for the stream of so-called ‘attack ads’ from a group called the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that questioned his war record.”
  • Identify villains: According toVF, Rove has always found villains, “gays, unions, trial lawyers, liberals, elitists, terrorists — that his candidates could use both to crack the electorate at a vulnerable spot and to define themselves in sharp relief.”
  • Look in every closet for skeletons: John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express”, which made him an unexpected frontrunner in the 2000 primary elections, was suddenly and mysteriously derailed by questions that he had a black child from an extra-marital affair, writes The Times.
  • Attack, don’t defend: Rove “attacks the problem head on and tries to co-opt the opposition’s position,” writes Dan Froomkin in The Washington Post. “He does this even when it appears counterintuitive — case in point, attacking John Kerry on his military record.”
  • Indulge in character assassination: As The Times UK reports, in 1994, a year after Rove took charge charge of George Bush’s political career in Texas, the state’s Democratic Governor, Anne Richards, was rumoured to be a l-sbian. “Voters started receiving supposed polling phone calls — a tactic later described as “push-polling”— that asked: “Would you be more or less likely to vote for Governor Richards if you knew her staff is dominated by l-sbians?””
  • Crunch the numbers, then crunch them again: As VF reports, “as a young Republican operative in still-Democratic Texas he helped develop the best voter lists, the best fund-raising lists, and the best political database in the state.” 

  • Get God on side — the Christian vote: The Atlantic Monthly reports, “he knew and understood how to interact with (and manipulate, at times) the standard-bearers of the evangelical right and the Catholic conservative intellectual elite; he studied them like a sociologist; he knew their language, totems and insecurities, and in the White House, he used the powers of government to give them their voice and to fill their ego-needs.”

  • Study your electorate with a microscope: Rove and his associates have developed a potent arsenal of tools and tactics for splitting the electorate, on both micro and macro levels, says Vanity Fair. The micro is exemplified by the vast database that the Republican National Committee calls its “Voter Vault.” Rove’s protégé, the Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, has expanded an effort that began under the direction of Bush’s pollster and strategist Matthew Dowd in the 2004 campaign, to gather detailed demographic and consumer data on Republican voters and potential Republican voters in the fashion of a consumer-oriented business. “We target voters the way that Visa targets credit-card customers,” Mehlman says. “That’s the difference from before. We used to target them based on their geography. We now target them based on what they do and how they live.”
  • Don’t be afraid to play dirty, and use your imagination: As The Independent reports, “in 1970, he pretended to volunteer for a Democrat who was running for office and stole some letter-headed stationery from the office. On that, he printed handouts promising ‘free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing,’ distributing them at a rock concert, and a soup kitchen, and to homeless people on the street, causing an unruly crowd to turn up at his opponent’s headquarters.”
  • Never leave fingerprints: During the Jack Abramoff affair, says The Times, the disgraced lobbyist claimed to have the ear of Mr Rove — his assistant, after all, had once been Mr Rove’s — but nothing was ever proved and Abramoff was imprisoned for six years.
  • Manage your media: Or, as The Atlantic Monthly puts it, “another part of Rove’s realignment theory: delegitimize, decertify and discombobulate the press; control it with psychological power; reduce its influence on the political process.”