A speculation:
We all know Karl Rove has been a master political manipulator for three decades. Best sellers have been written about it. His favorite modus operandi over the years has been constructing a "straw man" scenario (fake, untrue) that can be easily rebuked for his candidate's gain.
A famous example: late in the 1986 Texas governor's race, Rove apparently planted an electronic bug in his own office, then staged a press conference accusing the opposition of spying. The FBI was called in, smelled a rat, and no arrests were made. Still, the charge hovered in the press and Rove's client beat the Democratic incumbent.
That episode is classic, manipulative Karl, but who knew he's also an amateur OB-GYN on the side, politically speaking?
Saturday afternoon, just one day after John McCain unveiled Sarah Palin as his running mate, the liberal website Daily Kos posted a shocking story written by the anonymous "ArcXIX" (a one-time Kos diarist whose entry has now been scrubbed away according to their own search engine). It claimed, as we know, that Palin's fifth child is actually her daughter's and that the Alaska governor had "faked" her own pregnancy.
Although the gossip wasn't new in Alaska, the speed with which this detailed account appeared on Kos was quite impressive. There were extensive media and medical links, a timeline and ample photos designed to bolster the yarn. Prep work went into it, and other progressive websites and bloggers took the bait. (It should be noted that Huffington Post largely refrained.)
Later that night at dinner, I suggested that it was hard to believe McCain's people, including his adviser Rove (and Rove protégé Steve Schmidt, the campaign's senior strategist), had not vetted this tale. It seemed to me that if it were true, they were already aware of it and planned to use it as a play for sympathy. Maybe, for example, they were going to say she'd lied "to protect her family," a standard ploy.
Way too Machiavellian, friends insisted, so I conceded the point. The crazy story was surely false, and if it later proved true then McCain operatives must have been blindsided. In any event, I agreed there was likely no pregnancy exposé afoot in this Republican presidential candidacy.
Then came Monday, and the next shoe dropped, this one without the stench of rumor. The McCain campaign, in Minnesota for his party's nominating convention, disclosed that Palin's daughter is five months pregnant. This makes it virtually impossible that the teenager secretly gave birth to another child four and a half months earlier.
The Washington Post reported this news and told us that -- no surprise -- McCain knew about it in advance. Aha, so there actually was a pregnancy exposé afoot, and McCain's team was not blindsided. Interesting. The online version of the Post story initially added this:
"The statement Monday....opened the door to reporting about what the McCain campaign called the 'nastiness' on the Internet about whether Sarah Palin had faked the delivery of her fifth child."
Well, I suppose it does indeed open that door for the McCain campaign, seemingly by design. Cue the violins, because religious conservatives are being played like a Stradivarius.
This scheme reeks of an orchestrated "two-fer." First, Sarah Palin gets cast as victim, justifying the accusations of "scurrilous attacks" that McCain minions have quickly turned into their key talking point. That "cover" then naturally muted any negative reaction by the hardcore Republican base to the revelation of a teen pregnancy on their ticket, which by itself would make them apoplectic.
Again, classic Karl, unchanged from the old days.
First you set up your bowling pins, then you knock them down, capisci? Either pregnancy story would be a cinematic bombshell by itself, but two of them, back-to-back? One perfectly positioned to fully repudiate the other? While at the same time scoring a direct hit at those evil, meanspirited liberals in the blogosphere?
It's a grand flourish straight out of the movies, an Hercule Poirot revelation in Murder On The Orient Express.
It seems beyond mere happenstance. It's....it's....almost scripted.
Somewhere in St. Paul, Machiavelli himself (aka "ArcXIX," aka "Turd Blossom") is probably grinning.