OK, so the White House tried to screw working people by making it more difficult for them to get overtime. What boggled the mind was that they chose to do this two months before an election, at a time when they would seem to open themselves up to a barrage of attacks for serving the interest of their corporate benefactors.
But here's what Karl Rove gets and almost no one else does. They can do anything they want to right now because the campaign pushes everything off the front page. Two cases in point. One, the very popular assualt weapons ban, which Bush supported in 2000 is set to expire and no one is lifting a finger to stop it from happening. Two, yesterday the House voted against the White House's proposed overtime rule changes. Think about this. These days the House of Representatives embodies a political worldview just slightly to the left of Gen. Franco, and yet here they are defying their leader, the commander in chief, on overtime rules because the proposals are so politically toxic. This should be front page news.
But it's not. Instead it's Bush's national guard service and what kinds of typewriters IBM was manufacturing in 1972. I have absolutely not one single shred of doubt that Karl Rove WANTS the national guard story to get as much play as possible. Because as marginally damaging to Bush as it might be, it's nowhere near as damaging as the actual state of the country . And the less people are talking about the actual state of the country, about Bush's record in office, the more likely it is that Bush will win.
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Christopher Hayes is the host of MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes. He is an editor at large at the Nation and a former senior editor of In These Times.
