But the political dynamics for winning a second presidential term often differ markedly from winning the first. So don’t be surprised by many eerie parallels between Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Bush’s 2004 campaign. The president may not rely upon “Karl Rove politics” in the strictest sense, and nobody would confuse David Axelrod with Rove. But Obama’s reelection route and rhetoric may bear more than a few Rovian hallmarks.

Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.

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But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one...

This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it’s halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin.

Karl Rove heard echoes of Obama's rhetoric too, and implicit optimism about the direction of the country, and cried foul.

"I was, frankly, offended by it,” Rove said on Fox News Monday. “I'm a huge fan of Clint Eastwood, I thought it was an extremely well-done ad, but it is a sign of what happens when you have Chicago-style politics, and the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising."

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One of the big headlines out of the filings Tuesday is that Harold Simmons, a Texas billionaire, gave the Karl Rove-affiliated American Crossroads an impressive $7 million over the course of just a couple months in the fourth quarter of 2011. That's nearly 40 percent of the $18 million the group raised last year; an affiliated group, Crossroads GPS, whose donors are secret, raised more than $30 million.

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We all know the basic facts: A lot of conservatives see Romney as completely unacceptable. The more pragmatic ones see Gingrich as wholly unelectable. Fox News is run by consummate conservative elite Roger Ailes. Ailes has two objectives: Generate ratings and elect Republicans. The Gingriches of the world excite Fox viewers, because of their shamelessness. Romney excites no one, but he'll need Fox's support if he ends up the beneficiary of a Gingrich collapse.

Fox has indulged its audience's brief surges of affection for unelectable fringe candidates, from Trump through Cain, but the channel's always been careful to remind the base that they may eventually have to hold their noses and vote for Romney. Karl Rove, who's already running a shadow campaign against Obama, has made this point explicitly during his Fox appearances.

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Cablevision's Optimum cable pulled the ad, which claimed that Tester voted against banning the EPA from regulating farm dust. The supposed EPA rule was completely imaginary and the vote was about Chinese currency manipulation.

I bet Crossroads is super embarrassed about this awful mistake, right? Of course they are:

Nate Hodson of Crossroads said in defense of the pulled ad, "It was a very small cable system. The four largest broadcast stations in Montana reviewed the facts supporting the ad and will continue airing it."

He said later, "We are communicating with the cable system and expect that the ad will be back up and running on cable soon."

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Rove is very much in a "do I have to do everything myself" mode these days, which is why he's also running the GOP's congressional campaign as an independently funded venture. Here he is practically acting as a Romney surrogate on Fox and attacking Herman Cain, because actual Romney surrogates seem unable to.

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After redistricting, Rep. Tom Latham, a Republican representing Iowa's 3rd District, found himself living in the district represented by Steve King, one of the party's most celebrated and powerful total nutjobs. So Latham's moving to the new 3rd District to run against Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Des Moines. The Iowa Independent reports that Crossroads is getting an early start on the campaign:

The group has spent $85,125 so far at KCCI, the local CBS affiliate in Des Moines and the state’s largest network TV station. The group has run ads since late June, and recently spent $13,472 for ads running between Oct. 25 and Nov. 3. At least a portion of the ads being run in Iowa target Democratic U.S. Rep. Leonard Boswell.

The election is a year away. Crossroads just has money to burn.

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Rove, in Bloomington, Minn., for the Republican Midwest Leadership Conference (can't believe they held it the same weekend as the Values Voters Summit), was glittered by LGBT activists on Friday, in part because Rove was the one who decided Bush should endorse an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in 2004 but mostly because he's just an all-around repulsive person who has made America a meaner, poorer place.

The glitter mostly missed him. But still: Good show, glitter-bombing folks.

Less embarrassing but probably more aggravating to Rove is the growing rift between him and his wealthy political allies, the Koch brothers, that Politico's Kenneth Vogel reports on today.

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Rove has no great love for Rick Perry or Mitt Romney, but his raison d'etre is getting Republicans elected and viciously smearing Democrats, so he's charging ahead without waiting for the party to settle on one of those jokers. American Crossroads, Rove's shadow-RNC is launching ad campaigns targeted at President Obama's campaign stops, accusing him of wanting to raise everyone's taxes. ("The message is somewhat misleading," ABC News says, but because "Karl Rove lies" is a "dog bites man" story, they don't devote much ink to it.)

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That's why Crossroads GPS put some subliminal messaging in this one! It happens 39 seconds in, for just a split second: The word "TAXES" appears over an image of Obama, thus reinforcing the idea that Barack Obama something something taxes.

"Subliminal messaging" is basically a big joke, so I imagine the point of this was actually just to get this ad picked up on the political blogs and also to OUTRAGE a bunch of lefties. So fight back! Don't get outraged!

Oh, Ben Smith reminds us of when a 2000 ad for Bush said "RATS" on top of Al Gore -- did that even make sense? RATS! Doesn't Al Gore just remind you of RATS?

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And it's gonna bring down this corrupt administration with bombshells like these:

The site is clearly a work in progress: while it publishes new articles each day, they come from only a few contributors. It began with some documents that set the tone: a list of union leaders who were met in 2009 by the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis, and the production costs for an advertisement for Medicare featuring Andy Griffith ($404,000).

The Labor secretary met with labor leaders? Stop the electronic presses!

So many professional conservatives don't really understand how journalism works, when it works. They really only "get" its cousin, propaganda.

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It has been a red-letter week for the grand-mal celebrity meltdown.

Charlie Sheen has proven himself to be the poet laureate of all once and future megalomaniac sex-addicted crackheads, and John Galliano's once brilliant design mind unraveled like a cheap acrylic Christmas sweater in a Marais bar, where he dressed down French patrons in a torrent of Nazi jackbooted verbal abuse, prompting excommunication from the worlds of both Natalie Portman and the house of Dior.

Several weeks ago, before any of this went down, I saw John Galliano's recent designs in Manhattan's newly re-opened Dior store. I believe I saw foreshadowings of his meltdown in those designs. I trashed the new Dior collection. I have been a longtime Galliano fan, but I felt his new designs were cynical, weak and irresponsibly barbarous.

Because I have spent several years translating fashion statements into English, I could literally read from the clothes that John Galliano was in a deeply miserable place -- the clothes themselves seemed to be screaming in agony.

Fashion is a language of references.

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Fun fact: Rove, who divorced his wife of 24 years in 2009, is now openly dating lobbyist Karen Johnson. Johnson sat on Bush's Business Council when he was governor of Texas, and worked for his transition team in 2000, which helped her lobbying business immensely. Rove and Johnson have been rumored to be having an affair for years. The former incarnation of Radar Magazine reported the rumor in 2005. In 2008 Radar claimed that Johnson's family was urging her to leave Rove and settle down with a ranch foreman named (no joke) Rhett Hard. Looks like that is no longer necessary.

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A substantial portion of Crossroads GPS’ money came from a small circle of extremely wealthy Wall Street hedge fund and private equity moguls, according to GOP fundraising sources who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity. These donors have been bitterly opposed to a proposal by congressional Democrats — and endorsed by the Obama administration — to increase the tax rates on compensation that hedge funds pay their partners, the sources said.

Crossroads GPS, remember, is the group founded with the help of Karl Rove that spent at least $16.6 million on advertising to boost Republican candidates around the country. Unlike its partner group American Crossroads, Crossroads GPS is organized under a section of the tax code that allows it to keep the identity of donors secret.

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The new effort, in the form of an online petition that has gained about 2,000 signatures, is reminiscent of a successful push against Target Corp. after the company gave $150,000 to a conservative Minnesota group that campaigned for a candidate who opposes same-sex marriage. After the outcry, the CEO of Target ultimately said he was "genuinely sorry" for the move.*

 The situation with Gold's, which, the petition notes, "markets and caters to LGBT customers," is somewhat different. The gym chain is owned by Dallas-based TRT Holdings, the company of billionaire Robert Rowling. A longtime conservative donor, he has given $2 million this election cycle to American Crossroads.

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I see that Seth Masket is talking election predictions again. I'll update what I said before about a range for Senate results...at this point, I'm not going to be surprised if Republicans end the cycle with anywhere from 42 to 53 seats. As for the House; Nate Silver has it right now as a 75% chance of a GOP takeover, and that sounds reasonable to me. The Democrats are certainly going to lose seats, but will it be 25? 65? I'm not going to make a prediction.

OK, that makes me a wimp. Two excuses. One is that when I was a wee grad student, the late Nelson W. Polsby wouldn't join the office pools that we (OK, I) organized every Election Day, and generally wouldn't make pundit-like predictions, at least not when I was around. So, I could blame it on Nelson, and say I'm following his example.

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Perry, though press shy, is a familiar name in political fundraising. He was the main moneyman behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group that so effectively attacked John Kerry in 2004. His net worth was reported a couple years ago to be $650 million.

Here's what the Center for Public Integrity said about his 2006 spending:

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In August, American Crossroads raised $2,639,052. Fully $2.4 million of that -- or 91 percent --  came in the form of gifts from just three billionaires.

We've previously reported that the group is getting a staggering amount of support from billionaires, several of whom made their fortune in the energy industry and live in Texas. Last month Trevor Rees-Jones, president of Dallas-based Chief Oil and Gas, contributed another $1 million to American Crossroads, on top of the $1 million he gave earlier this year. Fellow billionaire Robert Rowling, CEO of the company TRT Holdings, also gave Crossroads his second $1 million donation in August.

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