Joe Klein Does Karl Rove's Dirty Work

Joe Klein does Karl Rove's dirty work by launching the first Rove attack of the 2006 campaign season.

TIME.com: Setting Up Easy Targets for Karl Rove -- Page 1: Three congressmen poised to chair powerful House committees could become a campaign issue:... [O]ne senses a fluttery uncertainty on the Democratic side--induced, I suspect, by the prospect of another nefarious Karl Rove campaign.... Rove has shown a positive genius for organizing campaigns around poisonous trivia.... [H]e will play the race card, as Republicans have ever since they sided against the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

The inevitability of race as a subliminal issue.... Representative John Conyers... chairman of the Judiciary Committee if the Democrats win control of the House in November.... Conyers is a twofer: in addition to being foolishly incendiary, he is an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped by Republicans. He is one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s....

Nor is Conyers likely to be the only target.... [P]otential African-American committee chairmen.... [Charles] Rangel... well versed in tax and entitlement policies, but he has had an unfortunate tendency to shoot off his mouth in the past. He has questioned interracial adoption, and has compared colleagues who opposed tax breaks for minority broadcasters to Hitler.... [Alcee] Hastings... most problematic of all. He is a former federal judge who was indicted in 1981 for influence peddling, acquitted on all counts, then impeached and removed from his judgeship by the Congress. In 1992 he ran for Congress himself and, improbably, won.... [A] devastating negative ad waiting to happen: "Why do the Democrats want to put an impeached judge in charge of your national security?"

Conyers and Rangel are embarrassments.... [I]t's not too late for Hastings to remove himself from the line of fire and make clear his support for [Jane] Harman as ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.

Klein says that he's just forecasting what Rove will do. He says that Rove "will play the race card, as Republicans have ever since they sided against the civil rights movement in the 1960s."

And then Klein plays the race card.

He characterizes Representative Conyers as "an African American of a certain age and ideology... one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics in the 1960s." I.e., he characterizes Representative Conyers as a veteran of the civil rights movement--but in a modern Republican way.