Matthew Dowd's Failed Homoeroticism

Matthew Dowd, long a part of the White House inner circle and the chief campaign strategist for Bush-Cheney 2004, expressed his disappointment with President Bush in an interview with the New York Times. Dowd originally fell in love with Bush (“It’s almost like you fall in love”) because he envisioned Bush as someone who could bridge the divide between the Republicans and the Democrats in Washington. But love doesn't seem to last forever. Dowd was appalled by Bush's failure to fire Donald Rumsfeld after the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003, later became disappointed by Bush's "my way or the highway" leadership style, and is now so opposed to the Iraq War that he's been thinking about joining anti-war demonstrations.

Matthew Yglesias doesn't believe it adds up and I don't either. Dowd wasn't just another guy in the Bush White House. He was the co-chief pollster for the 2000 campaign and it was Dowd's interpretation of poll data that justified the Bush administration's whole strategy of scaring up a bare 51% majority by sowing fear and division in 2004. Dowd was the guy who came up with the brilliant idea that most people who identified themselves as "independents" actually voted the party line almost all the time. The consequence of this insight was that Rove and Dowd developed campaign strategies designed to heighten the partisan identifications of Republicans by relentlessly vilifying Democrats.

Given that Dowd himself was at ground zero of the Bush campaign nastiness, his story of souring personally on Bush doesn't sound too plausible. Personally, I wonder about the extent to which Bush himself contributed to Dowds personal drama. Bush may have been growing inflexible and intolerant, but it's hard to believe that the frat-boy atmosphere and hard-core put downs of opponents wasn't there from the beginning. Likewise, it was Rove and Dowd who trumpeted Bush's inflexibility as the heart of political virtue and grand strategy for the Republican Party. Politicians serve as props for the staging tactics, advertising strategies, and speech-writing of their political advisers and consultants. If Dowd soured on somebody, it shouldn't have been George Bush. It should have been Matthew Dowd himself first, then Karl Rove, and finally the rest of the hyper-aggressive and relentlessly partisan White House political office? In fact, Dowd bears more responsibility for Bush-era divisiveness than President Bush himself.

When the history of the Bush inner circle is written, one of the main story-lines is going to be the twisted strands of love among his staff--Condoleeza Rice and Harriet Miers thinking of Bush as husbands, the boy bonds of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove, the shared satisfaction of being really big swinging dicks. Perhaps Bush "principles" retreated to private places to compare penis size like NBA players. Matthew Dowd is somewhat different though in that he does not hesitate to directly express his love for George Bush. Here, Dowd explains how love blinded him to President Bush's shortcomings.

“When you fall in love like that and then you notice some things that don’t exactly go the way you thought, what do you do? Like in a relationship, you say ‘No no, no, it’ll be different.’ ”

Obviously, there's a lot of homoeroticism here. What Dowd seems to have fallen in love with in George W. Bush was his own self-image in the more prestigious form of a President who was following his advice--somewhat like a puppeteer swooning for his more-famous puppet. In falling for the President, Dowd loved a seemingly larger-than-life version of Matthew Dowd himself. Along this line, Dowd gradually fell out of love with the George Bush version of himself when things didn't go "exactly" the way he thought they should.

Too bad, Dowd didn't fall out of love so much with himself because now Dowd's looking for another venue in which he can really love himself, something on another continent. According to Dowd, “I wouldn’t be surprised if I wasn’t walking around in Africa or South America doing something that was like mission work.”

Maybe he can take Ted Haggard with him.