John Edwards is the one Karl Rove fears

Remember when in 2004 Karl Rove said about Howard Dean, "That's the guy we want" because he knew that by doing so, he would make Democrats rally around a weaker candidate in John Kerry?

Well, Joe Trippi for once thinks he's doing it again, albeit in a slightly different form, and I'm inclined to agree. CNN covered Trippi's e-mail to supporters yesterday, the relevant parts of which are below:

To: Interested Parties
From: Joe Trippi
Re: Karl Rove's Worst Nightmare

You may have seen Karl Rove's recent attacks on Hillary Clinton in the news.

This is a page straight out of his tired old playbook—Rove is attacking Hillary Clinton because he doesn't want John Edwards to win the Democratic nomination.

Rove knows that Democrats will rally around whomever he attacks—so he attacks the candidate he thinks Republicans can most easily defeat.

It may seem backwards, but Rove and his cronies did the same thing last time around. In 2004, they were scared of John Edwards, so they attacked John Kerry.

Don't take it from me—take it from Rove's own lieutenant on the Bush-Cheney 2004 reelection campaign, Matthew Dowd:

"Whomever we attacked was going to be emboldened in Democratic primary voters' minds. So we started attacking John Kerry a lot in the end of January because we were very worried about John Edwards." [Los Angeles Times, 8/19/07]
Rove and the Republicans want our opponents to win—because they know John will be the strongest candidate in the general election.

We may not be the richest campaign—but John is the strongest candidate. This time around, the candidate with the boldest ideas for changing America—the candidate who can take on the special interests in Washington, D.C. and win—is also the most electable. We know it—and the Republicans know it, too.

[snip]

It is no secret that John is the only Democratic candidate who can beat any of the Republican candidates hands down. Just look at the polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports—a major national polling firm—over the past few months. They show that John is the Democratic candidate who consistently beats all of the Republicans' candidates in head-to-head match-ups in battleground states—and by the widest margins.

Rove and the Republicans are seeing the same numbers we are—and drawing the same conclusions. So Rove is using his sneaky, underhanded tactics to try and trick Democrats into rallying around a candidate who won't be as strong as John in the general election.

The latest Rasmussen poll shows John Edwards beating Rudy Giuliani 46% to 44% and Fred Thompson 47% to 41%, while Hillary loses 47% to 40%. A July Rasmussen poll showed that disgusted Republicans would be more likely to cross over for Edwards than for either Clinton or Obama. Some of this is no doubt due to the "white guy" factor, but it's there. In that same July poll, Edwards had a positive rating of 54% among likely voters, while Clinton has consistently polled in the 46-47% positive range.

Frank Newport of Gallup News Service seems to feel that Clinton's less-than-fifty-percent positive rating, combined with high negatives, don't necessarily spell defeat, pointing to Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as examples of other candidates with high negatives who went on to win. Newport of course ignores the theft of the 2000 election and the equally likely theft of the 2004 election, and doesn't take into account the extraordinary charisma of Bill Clinton, something his wife lacks.

I think Trippi is right. Rove is doing a reverse of his 2004 tactic, in which he stated the candidate against whom he'd like his guy to run, knowing that Democrats would take his words at face value and run towards the other guy. That won't work anymore, so now he's pointing to Hillary and saying "She can't win," betting that attacking her will make Democrats flock in her direction.

It seems abundantly clear to me that Democratic party apparatchiks like Rahm Emannuel and Chuck Schumer have already decided that Hillary's their nominee, DESPITE her high negatives and DESPITE the fact that in a recent Mason-Dixon survey, fully 52% said they would NOT vote for her. That's a majority of Americans who have already decided they will not vote for Hillary Clinton. How do you win when a majority won't vote for you? I'm sure there are those out there who, after over six years of telling us that we're crazy to believe that the voting system itself is compromised, are getting ready to spin an impossible Hillary victory as "rigged" (and probably also re-opening the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case to see if she was involved).

And yet, the Democratic Party seems bound and determined to nominate a candidate for whom a majority have said will not support instead of the candidate who can actually win.

At this point, we need to ask why that is.