Dowd packaged his vicious tactics as nothing more than the application of basic advertising technique. His slicing and dicing of wedge issues was no such thing, he explained. 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?"
Dowd believed he was designing a permanent Republican majority, but, working alongside Rove, his short-term winning tactics built enormous pressure that produced an implosion. During the 2006 midterm campaign that lost the Republicans control of Congress, Dowd worked as a consultant for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican running as a virtual liberal Democrat. "I think we should design campaigns that appeal not to 51 percent of the people," Dowd told the Times, "but bring the country together as a whole."
But Dowd neither detailed nor did the Times mention his consulting work in the campaign last year of Richard DeVos, billionaire heir of the Amway fortune, for governor of Michigan. DeVos is a zealous follower of and major donor to the most extreme organizations of the religious right. His campaign against incumbent Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm was marked by nasty ads falsely stating: "Under Governor Granholm's administration, you can stay on welfare as long as you want." These weren't a new paradigm but old racial code words.
Dowd is perhaps the most peripheral member of the original Texas inner circle that brought Bush to power. (The nimble McKinnon is now working for John McCain's presidential campaign, not as a Republican, of course, but as a McCain guy.) Unlike Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is Bush's creature pure and simple, Dowd is both creature and creator. His self-involved and tortuous explanation of his disillusionment helps cast light on the banality of his motives in his original defection from Democrat to Bush Republican. However traumatic his private drama, he appears fundamentally the same opportunist, a point subtly driven home by those who know him well.
"I've known him for a while," said President Bush, asked at his press conference on Tuesday about Dowd. Bush stayed on message, reducing Dowd's defection to being overwrought about his son's shipping out to Iraq: "I understand his anguish over war. I understand that this is an emotional issue for Matthew." The Washington Post added: "Dowd, contacted later by e-mail, chose not to engage in a debate. He had said his piece. 'I don't have anything to add,' he wrote."
Dowd can have no riposte to the White House insinuation that he is a troubled person unless he breaks through his own rigidly constructed tale of conversion. There is also the danger that he could be seen as handling himself like one of his clients. His corporate communications firm, ViaNovo -- "new way" in Latin, like the Christian religion itself -- advertises on its Web site that it specializes in "high-stakes positioning."
Dowd has much to add to history as an eyewitness. What was Rove's involvement in the independent expenditure negative campaign against Sen. John McCain in the Republican South Carolina primary of 2000? White House chief of staff Andrew Card said in 2002 about the propaganda campaign for the Iraq war, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." What was the marketing done to hone various rationales for the invasion of Iraq? In the 2004 campaign, exactly how was homosexuality targeted? What were the links between the Bush campaign and the Swift-boating of John Kerry? What polling was performed to determine how to discredit Kerry's war record? After the indictment of Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, what polls did Dowd take to inform White House positioning? These are only a few of the questions that Dowd can illuminate with his special knowledge. But so far, his conversion lacks a confession.
As Dowd acts out his spiritual crisis, he maintains his silence about what he knows, a strange kind of post-betrayal omertà. It's more than a little late for the turncoat to continue playing the loyalist, wanting it both ways, unless Dowd truly means what he says about "mission work," and he is preparing to disappear for the next 10 years in Africa for the HIV/AIDS initiative of the Clinton Foundation.
About the writer
Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Clinton, writes a column for Salon and the Guardian of London. His new book is titled "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime." He is a senior fellow at the New York University Center on Law and Security.
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