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(Photo via brilarian.)

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon notes that the Pilgrim's Progress narrative is a little rocky (beyond the Plymouth sense) for Matthew Dowd.  From Sidney:

Bush's loss of the popular majority by 543,895 votes in the 2000 election was a shock to his political advisors and prompted an internal rethinking of his strategy. During the Florida contest and before the Supreme Court delivered the presidency to Bush, Dowd wrote a confidential memo to Rove that analyzed data from the recent vote and argued that there was no significant center in the electorate. "Dowd's analysis destroyed the rationale for Bush to govern as 'a uniter, not a divider,'" wrote Thomas Edsall in his book "Building Red America." Bush's confected campaign persona as a "compassionate conservative" was suddenly discarded. The "architect," as Bush called Rove, had an architect. Bush's brain had an outsourced brain. Rove's and Bush's radical imperatives derived from Dowd's conclusions. With Bush as president, Dowd was put on the Republican National Committee payroll and became an intimate participant in White House strategy sessions. Bush and the Republicans now exploited divisive wedge issues and tactics with a vengeance. After Sept. 11, 2001, fear was bundled with loathing, the terrorist threat from abroad conflated with the gay menace within. By 2004, relying on Dowd's numbers, Republicans made gay marriage the most salient social issue, exceeding abortion and gun control in its inflammatory potential to mobilize conservatives. Dowd prescribed the strategy for targeting of Republican base voters' "anger points," as GOP consultants called them, for maximum turnout.

The "war on terror" was the glue that held the Bush message together. In the political rinse cycle, Dowd transformed the disinformation justifying the Iraq war into platitudinous Republican talking points. In the interviews he granted, Dowd repeated them effortlessly. "Events in Iraq," he told National Public Radio during the Republican Convention in September 2004, "and removing Saddam Hussein is all part of the war on terror. You can't separate out removing a brutal dictator from a place that harbored terrorists from the war on terror." One plus one equals three; the clock struck 13.

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....

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... 

Personally, I'm not quite ready to forgive and forget for the smallpox infested blankets. If Mr. Dowd wants to atone, he can start by coughing up the goods on Rove's shop.  Otherwise, the Pilgrim's Progress is nothing more than a dress-up charade, because without a full confessional, there is no owning of the mistakes.  It's just more smoke and mirrors at this point, isn't it?