Earlier today, Karl Rove participated in an online chat session to answer questions about his new book. Viewers were able to tweet questions for Rove to respond to. The chat was fascinating to watch for two reasons. First, it actually gave an impression of what Karl Rove might be like as a real person, and second, because it validated how online media can be more constructive and interesting then a cable TV interviewer in an echo chamber.
The setting was not glamorous, but that may have helped the authenticity of the event. The lighting was terrible and Rove was not wearing stage make-up.
When Rove was asked what it was like to work on Fox News, he replied that “For every seven minutes that I’m on television, I have to do an hour of prep work.” Yet here he was, for an entire hour, answering questions with little prep work at all. Rove had no way to know what sort of questions he would get from the thousands of followers on Twitter.
Rove seemed fairly relaxed, and took questions on a wide range of topics, including some that were not very serious. One questioner asked Rove what reality show he would most want to be on. Rove admitted that while he was not very aware of the reality TV scene that “I would like to visit one of those ‘real wives of Orange County’ sets, to see if they are real people.” He also noted that the Sci-Fi channel was his favorite source of entertainment, but he didn’t say which shows he watched.
Although some questions were trivial, the strength of the format was that the questions were not part of a predefined topic. This allowed Rove to answer questions that may normally not get asked in the Fox News echo-chamber. When asked straight up “What has Obama done right?” Rove did not miss a beat before praising Obama’s military decisions regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, as well the reauthorization of the Patriot Act and strengthening No Child Left Behind. Rove stated: “We ought to look for things he does right, and support him.”
It’s highly unlikely that Rove would have ever been asked this question on a cable news show. Even if he had, it’s not hard to imagine a left-leaning site (such as the Huffington Post or Media Matters) grabbing the clip, embedding it, and then placing it under the headline (naturally, in all-caps): “WATCH: ROVE PRAISES OBAMA!” This would have left out how Rove then went on to attack Obama’s healthcare plan. When Rove is just chatting with followers on Twitter, there is less attention on him, and he was probably freed up to give more honest answers.
Conservatives may be surprised at Rove’s lack of triumphalism over the 2010 midterms, stating that he preferred to wait and see who the final candidates are for the numerous Senate and House races. Without being forced into making a TV sound bite, Rove could explain why you need to wait on the outcome of certain primaries (such as the GOP California Senate race) before you can start making educated predictions.
Not everyone who asked a question got it answered. Rove ultimately had control over the discussion so he didn’t bring up Paul Ryan’s ambitious budget proposal, despite the interest in the topic. This showed a limitation of the format, although it was more relaxed and less intense, Rove was also his own master of ceremonies and so could avoid any topic if he didn’t want to answer it.
The success of an online format such as this comes down to the willingness of the participant to engage with the questioners. A less skilled participant could have turned the session into a chance to parrot the promotional material about his book, and treat the session as an hour-long infomercial. While little genuinely new information came from this live chat, it demonstrated how the internet could provide a forum for interviews to be more authentic and possibly discuss topics that a cable interviewer would normally ignore.
Independent // Mar 9, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Noah, I agree with your assessment. I thought Karl Rove did a fair job within the limitations of the format.
I’ve been enjoying the sessions with liberal MSM mouthpieces like Matt Laurer; Rove has been handing that rice krispie-brained mouthpiece a new one nearly every segment they air… Matt needs to stick to providing a fashion sense for mens’ speed skating and ice dancing… he sure doesn’t have a clue on politics, policy or punditry.
franco 2 // Mar 9, 2010 at 8:21 pm
Rove schmove… What’s happening with this Dating Game serial killer? OMG!!!
Rush moving to Costa Rica??? What news!!
A Billion Condoms and One Bikini! I’m soooo interested!
Levi Pays Child Support!
Frum Forum THE place for tawdry gossip!
TerryF99 // Mar 9, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Why isn’t Rove in prison? He sure deserves that or at least a proper investigation into the many illegal actions he was part of during the Bush/Cheney maladministration.
Carney // Mar 9, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Rove isn’t in prison because he doesn’t deserve to be. If there were “many” illegal actions he was part of, they would have been immediately leaked or dug up by the media, his many fervent political enemies, or the special prosecutor (Patrick Fitzgerald) who was fishing for scalps.
franco 2 // Mar 10, 2010 at 6:32 am
Terry F99 is a Rover. Nuff said.
franco 2 // Mar 10, 2010 at 6:37 am
By the way, does Frum Forum know that the headline about Rush Limbaugh is FALSE? Probably. Come here to get your propaganda folks!
And the picture of him is out of date. You see, you budding faux journalists here at Frum Forum, you give the game away. You have obvious malice. Then it’s harder to claim you made a mistake in the copy.
franco 2 // Mar 10, 2010 at 6:45 am
Hey Frum, what’s today’s dish?
I heas Sarkozy And Bruni are BOTH having affairs (how, er, French). That’s from Drudge. Drudge though isn’t in your league because all he does is aggregate. There’s no political section, no discreet commentary by a coterie of interns and wanna-bees. Drudge never wrote speeches or any books and Meet the Press and NPR don’t have him on as a pundit He just posts headlines and links with the occasional pic. Drudge doesn’t use stock photos of girls in bikinis when he makes reference to a condom story either – that would be crude and juvenile. So those are some differences….oh that and about a billion hits.
TerryF99 // Mar 10, 2010 at 8:31 am
franco 2 // Mar 10, 2010 at 9:08 am
Ooh la la!
Reports surfaced Tuesday that French royal couple Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni may both be having extramarital affairs – allegations which, if proven true, will surely knock Tiger Woods out of the spotlight.
It’s rumored that the French President has Chantal Jouanno – a right-wing cabinet member – on the side, while the First Lady is seeing musician Benjamin Biolay.
“The presidential marriage is breathing its last breaths,” French paper Journal Du Dimanche reports. “Carla Bruni is in love with Benjamin Biolay, and the president has found solace with Chantal Jouanno.”
An online French publication, suchablog.com, reported shortly thereafter that Bruni had been a close friend of the 37-year-old musician for many years and is now “unofficially living with him at his flat in Paris.”
Those aren’t the only outlets that have Carla and Nicolas saying a joint “mon Dieu!” Tuesday, Yahoo News France, Le Post and the Global Post, as well as European TV news channel iTele, gave the allegations substantial coverage.
Sarkozy’s spokesman at the Elysee Palace in Paris has said he has “absolutely no comment” on the rumors, but this certainly isn’t the first time whispers have swirled about the First Couple’s marriage. Rumors recently flew that the two are holding on to the last threads of their relationship just until the end of Sarkozy’s presidency.
The intentions of Bruni – who was linked to Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton and Donald Trump before meeting the French leader at a dinner party and marrying him just three months later – have been questioned in the past. In a February 2007 interview, the then-model admitted she gets “terribly bored” with monogamy – and was painted as a gold digger when she married Sarkozy later that year.
Just sayin’
balconesfault // Mar 10, 2010 at 10:14 am
I’m sure that the smaller the audience, the less Rove is likely to lie.
But fundamentally, when Rove speaks, there is never any reason to believe a word he says. Even when he’s reflecting on his own opinion. Rather, you can be sure that Rove is always framing, and the actual veracity of what he’s saying is utterly irrelevant to him.
LFC // Mar 10, 2010 at 11:40 am
If there were “many” illegal actions he was part of, they would have been immediately leaked or dug up by the media, his many fervent political enemies, or the special prosecutor (Patrick Fitzgerald) who was fishing for scalps.
Hmmmm. Maybe because it’s tough to read anything from millions of mysteriously deleted e-mails, or from an illegally used and also deleted RNC e-mail account?
You have to give the Bush administration credit. They certainly knew how to destroy evidence, and had no qualms about doing it.
Independent // Mar 10, 2010 at 1:32 pm
“… when Rove speaks, there is never any reason to believe a word he says. Even when he’s reflecting on his own opinion. Rather, you can be sure that Rove is always framing, and the actual veracity of what he’s saying is utterly irrelevant to him.”
That sounds more like Obama and Rahm and Nancy and Harry, than Rove. Balconsefault, you couldn’t be more wrong if you voted Democrat every day until you die… and that’s saying a lot.
Independent // Mar 10, 2010 at 1:42 pm
LFC, I don’t recall all these missing emails you supposedly want the WH archives to produce. Since Ford signed the law, all presidential, executive office and white house office documents are the property of the US taxpayers –and that includes emails, jottings on legal pads, doodles on the back of napkins, too.
There are no missing emails. There are only wild-assed speculative conspiracy freaks seeing phantoms in the night. If there are some misplaced documents from the Bush WH, they’ll be discovered because nothing got past the Archives. The emails were restored; nothing was there. In fact, the Bush WH also restored documents held by the RNC; nothing there either.
What is interesting is that CREW was the group behind the missing email conspiracy freak show. CREW has a stable of lawyers that the Holder DOJ hires from… especially guys like the al Qaeda 7 lawyers who worked so hard, some as CREW staffers, to get terrorists out of jail.
Keep the conspiracy freak show for finding out why Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster and then covered it up as a suicide… or how those Rose Law firm billing records showed up on a WH coffee table, late one night, just as federal prosecutors were set to indict the sitting First Lady in the morning.
LFC // Mar 10, 2010 at 2:56 pm
Your version of the missing e-mail story is uuuuh, interesting.
LFC, I don’t recall all these missing emails you supposedly want the WH archives to produce.
“Only after President George W. Bush returned to Texas did his officials turn over the 22 million documents. ”
The emails were restored;
Due to lawsuits filed by two groups, one being CREW.
If there are some misplaced documents from the Bush WH, they’ll be discovered because nothing got past the Archives.
“”The National Archives also asked why it had not been notified about the missing messages before the ethics report’s release late last week.”
So an ethics report was issued without the documents? Nothing to see here. Go about your business.
The emails were restored; nothing was there.
Oh, and all of the documents have now been released and reviewed? Really? You wanna’ go with that?
In fact, the Bush WH also restored documents held by the RNC; nothing there either.
Source please?
It’s so funny to watch you defend the Bush administration in this. If Obama lost even a day of e-mails, you’d be spitting up blood by now.
And let’s not forget the multiple wiped interrogation tapes. Do you want to address those?
panamerican // Mar 10, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Would anyone care to agree with me that GOProud has been “reincarnated” as “Independent”?
DFL // Mar 10, 2010 at 4:48 pm
Rove just came out saying that immigration “reform”(aka amnesty) should have been Bush’s first priority in 2005. What an obtuse fool Rove is. Rove is an ugly reminder of an ugly presidency, redolent of the stench of Bush’s rotting political carcass. Rove, Cheney and Bush need to catapulted to the outer darkness of the political wilderness for the sake of the party that they ran down.
Independent // Mar 10, 2010 at 8:22 pm
panamerican, that one’s been played by none other than your peer and political soulmate, TeaBag or TeaBagged or TerryF99 or the other half dozen names used here by the same farLeft troll –who knows, it could even include “panamerican”.
btw, it didn’t work.
LFC, the point about the so-called “missing emails” was that they were never missing in the first place. They were restored at considerable govt expense after the Bush WH admitted in federal court that the early Bush WH didn’t have a protocol in place to deal with what was, obstensibly, private communication. That’s what they thought and they were wrong… I guess all the good lawyers were busy working with John Woo.
Turns out the Clinton Administration pranksters who stole all the Ws off the keyboards were the same ones who took all the WH protocal briefing books and failed to advise the incoming Bush Administration of many important -but not pressing- issues like email preservation. Heck, the first 3 months of the Bush Administration’s lawyers were busy recreating this kind of administrative policy off Bush 41 books. Thank you Clinton and the Hookers4Bill team.
In fact, the chasm was so great that Dick Cheney told the WH transition staff that his team wouldn’t do to the incoming Obami what Clinton did to the Bush people. You may recall, like Obama did with some redness in his cheeks, that the Bush people even put together a 1 yr plan of action on Afghanistan and Iraq for the Obami… which the Obami followed to a t, crossing each, dotting all the suggestions from the Cheney-managed Bush transition team. And begging the Cheney people to keep it all secret from the farLeft goons and MSM.
Now, you were saying about the lawsuits to compel the WH to release the “so-called” missing emails. That lawsuit was engineered by Holder’s law firm and the CREW sleazebags who were defending al Qaeda terrorists and trying ever-so hard to get them out of prison, Gitmo, free to return to the battlefield and kill more US troops. Those guys are now calling the shots for the Civil Rights thug team inside DOJ… but we didn’t know that until Congress compelled Holder to answer their reasonable questions with a threat of subpoena.
You’ve made some wickedly anti-American friends on your side of the aisle, LFC. But you can be excused for that –it’s only your San Francisco values running over your retreating intellect.
balconesfault // Mar 11, 2010 at 9:18 am
Turns out the Clinton Administration pranksters who stole all the Ws off the keyboards were the same ones who took all the WH protocal briefing books and failed to advise the incoming Bush Administration of many important -but not pressing- issues like email preservation.
Seriously? That’s the excuse?
We’re talking an administration that was heavy laden with figures from the Reagan-Bush years … and they’re blaming inability to follow the law on some purportedly removed protocol briefing books?
The Republican version of “the dog ate my homework”. A teaching moment for a 10-year old … but if you’re making excuses like that as an adult it suggests you’ll never grow up and take responsibility.
Independent // Mar 11, 2010 at 10:23 am
Nice try at the personal attack, balconesfault. You failed at this one, too.
The issue was purportedly “missing emails” –which weren’t. The issue was the lawyers who pressed the WH about the emails wanted them to prove that Rove, Cheney and Bush were patently evil and criminal. The restored emails showed none of that –not even a smidge of it. The politically motivated and highly partisan lawyers, all from CREW and Holder’s law firm, are the same guys who worked to free as many terrorists as possible, worked to constrain the operation of justice on behalf of the 9-11 victims and then, like you, cried that the Bush team used civilian courts to process 300+ terrorists… but they fail to acknowledge their obstructionism and advocacy hamstrung US efforts to bring the terrorists to justice for over 6 yrs.
There’s no ‘dog ate my homework”… there’s only the insight that the Clinton Administration pranksters –who you seem intent on excusing– played all kinds of games that the Bush Administration’s Transition team (headed by Dick Cheney) were determined would NOT be repeated for the Obama Admin.
I can understand how you’d like to spin all that away from the facts… but then, Saul Alinsky taught you guys that using ridicule to attack your superior opponents is the only tool you have in your weak, failing tool box.
balconesfault // Mar 11, 2010 at 12:02 pm
Nice try at the personal attack, balconesfault. You failed at this one, too.
Personal attack? If you consider a criticism of the previous administration making pathetic excuses for failure to follow the law to be “personal” … then it’s pretty hard for us to think we’re using language the same way.
There’s no ‘dog ate my homework”… there’s only the insight that the Clinton Administration pranksters –who you seem intent on excusing– played all kinds of games that the Bush Administration’s Transition team (headed by Dick Cheney) were determined would NOT be repeated for the Obama Admin.
There is no evidence that this is anything but self-serving propoganda by the Bushes. If anything, there’s significantly more evidence that the Bush Administration was determined to reject out of hand everything that the Clinton Administration did as a matter of policy … while the Obama Administration was much more receptive to incorporating things from the Bush Administration that were working.
Independent // Mar 11, 2010 at 12:32 pm
sigh, balconesfault, this is all very tiring to keep correcting your patently dishonest spinning and silly rehashments.
No, the personal attack wasn’t found in your flaccid defense of Bill Clinton’s juvenile highjinks while exiting the WH (and, incidentally, stealing furniture and artwork for the Chappie estate)… the personal attack was contained here, in your words, sigh: “A teaching moment for a 10-year old … but if you’re making excuses like that as an adult it suggests you’ll never grow up and take responsibility.”
Once again, the spin-master and troll in you fails you, balconesfault. So tiring to have to instruct you repeatedly.
While you may think it’s all self serving nonsense by the Bushes (gee, I didn’t know we had jumped the farLeft shark into attacking the Bush Dynasty now? Imagine that, from you?) but it’s simple fact.
Cheney –a highly decorated, well respected govt servant in DC– wanted to make certain that the incoming Obami didn’t run into the same problems the incoming Bush Administration experienced with Clinton’s kiddies highjinks.
Of course what kills your position resoudningly is that the Obami did, indeed, take many of the Bush Administration policies and extended them… administrative and public policy ones. Especially true of the “please keep it secret for us, Dick” strategy that the Bush Admin outlined for the incoming Obami on Afghanistan and Iraq –which the Obami followed like a passage from the Qur’an being chanted from above in the new White House minaret.
You keep batting zero, balconesfault. It’s all your side has left, now.
balconesfault // Mar 11, 2010 at 2:46 pm
“A teaching moment for a 10-year old … but if you’re making excuses like that as an adult it suggests you’ll never grow up and take responsibility.”
Exactly – if the Republicans are claiming that they weren’t responsible for following the law because they didn’t have protocol guides … they are not showing the responsibility we should demand from our officials.
Sorry if you took it personally. That’s your issue, not mine.
Cheney –a highly decorated, well respected govt servant in DC– wanted to make certain that the incoming Obami didn’t run into the same problems the incoming Bush Administration experienced with Clinton’s kiddies highjinks.
Again, self-serving propoganda. Not much evidence of this, except for Cheney’s own words. And given that out of the other side of his mouth he’s been attacking the Obama Administration virtually from day 1, it’s hard to take him seriously.
Mittens And The Brain « Around The Sphere // Mar 13, 2010 at 12:44 pm
[...] Noah Kristula-Green at FrumForum: Earlier today, Karl Rove participated in an online chat session to answer questions about his new book. Viewers were able to tweet questions for Rove to respond to. The chat was fascinating to watch for two reasons. First, it actually gave an impression of what Karl Rove might be like as a real person, and second, because it validated how online media can be more constructive and interesting then a cable TV interviewer in an echo chamber. [...]