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On Strategy

A football coach whose game plan called for winning an endless series of one-point games would not be called a genius. He would first be called a lunatic, then an unemployed lunatic. So I never quite got what the fuss over Karl Rove was all about.

Yesterday's election results were, in part, the inevitable result of the silly concept of a permanent 51 percent percent majority. Political parties, like sports teams, need to win the occasional laugher if they're to be consistently successful. Otherwise, they have no cushion to soften the blows of outrageous fortune, or their own mistakes.

Rove's reputation is the result of a journalistic fallacy that's almost impossible to escape. As deadline nears, there's a natural tendency to see the world through one moral imperative-he who returns my phone calls is the font of all goodness and wisdom. In politics, the front-runner's profession par excellence, this tendency gets much worse.

Rove was a genius because he told reporters he was and they wrote it down because they needed a simple explanation of a complex issue for a story. It's not a partisan trick. Rahm Emanuel is out there today doing the very same thing.

There would be much less public distrust of the press if we acknowledged the obvious on top of each newspaper or website each day. Capturing reality in a 750-word piece is like painting a sunset in crayon. With your teeth.

posted by Michael Gee @ 12:45 PM