Last week, Gov. Rick Perry accused his political opponents – mainly Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison – of sabotage for crashing his campaign Web site during a live Web broadcast.

In a statement e-mailed to reporters, Mark Miner, campaign spokesman, said:

“Today’s ‘Talkin’ Texas’ webcast by Gov. Perry was deliberately interrupted by a denial-of-service attack, preventing countless users from logging in to view the Governor’s remarks. This planned and coordinated attack was political sabotage, and we are working to identify those responsible for this illegal activity.”

Over the weekend, the FBI decided to open an inquiry into whether hackers disrupted Gov. Rick Perry’s live webcast. FBI spokesman Erik Vasys told the AP that “The FBI confirms that it is conducting a preliminary inquiry into the possibility that an intentional intrusion was conducted on the governor’s computer from out of state. The FBI considers this a hacking event with unknown origin at this time.”

However, there are more questions than answers. According to KXAN News Austin, the problem didn’t resemble a distributed denial-of-service attack, (DDoS), which causes the server act extremely slow or inaccessible to most visitors. Instead, the site displayed a Drupal, content management platform, generated error message reading “unable to connect to database server.”

According to the Houston Chronicle, Perry campaign’s Internet service provider said Redglue’s firewall system had flagged the attack, which shut down traffic to Perry’s campaign website. However, Trend Micro security researcher, Rick Ferguson, explained to IDG News that “the Drupal message appeared to indicate that the Perry server was misconfigured rather than attacked via DDoS.”

Something stinks in the state of Denmark!

Negative campaigning is nothing new. It has become part of the American political process, we have come to accept it. But there is something familiar with the recent news story and how it was played out. Almost Rovian in design – leak, lie, defame, obfuscate, and deny.

Faux Attacks

It will come as no surprise that one of Karl Rove’s most notable tendency in close races is to go negative against his opponent, early and often. One of Rove’s most valuable assets is his knowledge of gaming the media in order to achieve the desired result. He has often relied on the media to cover a controversy because he knew if the story was dynamic enough, even if story was not true, the media would breathe life into it by being caught up in the he said/she said side of the story.

One of the highlights in Rove’s career is the tight 1986 Texas governor’s race, in which Republican oilman Bill Clements, sought to oust the Democratic incumbent Mark White. Just before a debate between the two candidates – which, coincidentally or not, distracted attention from the debate in which Clements was expected to lose – Rove claimed that someone had bugged his office and hinted that Democrats might be responsible.

Another instance occurred in Alabama’s 1996 hard-fought race for a seat on the Supreme Court between Rove’s client, Harold See, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. In a 2004 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Green writes:

According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign’s progress, had flyers printed up-absent any trace of who was behind them-viciously attacking See and his family. “We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people,” the staffer says. “You’d roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, ‘Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you’re with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn’t have your tags.’ So I borrowed a buddy’s car [and drove] down the middle of the street – I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I’d cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees.” The ploy left Rove’s opponent at a loss. Ingram’s staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order “to create a backlash against the Democrat,” as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. “They just beat you down to your knees,” Ingram said of being on the receiving end of Rove’s attacks. See won the race.

Rove’s finger prints could also be found in the 2002 Iowa Senate race between Tom Harkin and GOP candidate Greg Ganske, just before the election, a story was leaked that the Harkin campaign hired a “mole” to spy on the Ganske campaign. There was no proof of course, and no one was ever actually accused.

Karl Rove’s approach to politics can be found in the strategy memo that Rove wrote for former Texas governor Bill Clements. Quoting Napoleon, the memo says: “The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack.”

Gov. Perry is no newcomer when it comes to using Rovian “dirty tricks” to win an election. During Perry’s run for agriculture commissioner in 1990 against incumbent Jim Hightower, Perry’s campaign was directed by Karl Rove. During a Washington, D.C., fundraiser, Rove told reporters that Hightower’s office was under investigation by the FBI and that Hightower and several aides “faced the possibility of indictment.”

During the 2002 gubernatorial race against Democrat Tony Sanchez, Perry claimed that Sanchez’s defunct Tesoro Savings and Loan had been used by Mexican drug lords to launder $25 million in drug money, which was used for the murder of a law enforcement agent. Mr. Sanchez was cleared of any wrongdoing, but Perry continued to link Sanchez to Mexican drug lords to instill fear by playing on stereotypes of Mexican-Americans as drug dealers.

Perry, Texas’ longest serving governor, is set to run for an unprecedented third four-year term in 2010. Like the 2002 election, Perry is facing a serious challenger, not from a Democrat, but from somebody in his own party, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. The Texas Democratic Party is such in disarray, Democratic governor hopefuls – former Bush ambassador Tom Schieffer, Smith County rancher Hank Gilbert, entertainer Kinky Friedman – are having a hard time convincing its party base they can win a statewide race. So word on the street, Hutchison is his only real challenger.

According to Rasmussen Reports, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison is now leading by 2-points – 40% to 38% – in the volatile 2010 Republican Primary race for governor. This is bad news for Perry, since Perry lost his mid-July 10-point lead over Hutchison.

One does have to wonder if last weeks hacking allegations by Perry was an attempt to pull a Rove on Republican challenger Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Before you dismiss this as the wild ravings of a conspiracy theorist, consider a few points.

Phillip Martin reports that the attack occurred 10 mins before the schedule event. When pressed on whether the campaign thought Kay Bailey Hutchison was behind the “sabotage,” Miner responded: “I hope not. I hope they would not be that stupid.” Miner may not have directly blamed that somebody from Hutchison’s campaign hacked Perry’s website, but is leading the reader to conclude that it is possible.

Another thing to consider, Perry’s website coincidentally was hacked the same week a bombshell that could have been politically damaging. The Houston Chronicle reported that Gov. Rick Perry had canceled a meeting of the Texas Forensic Science Commission because it was sure to produce headlines claiming that in 2004 he authorized the execution of an innocent man.

To make matters worse, Gov. Rick Perry replaced the head as well as two others on the nine-member Texas Forensic Science Commission. Perry said his move was a typical use of his power on appointments, the same argument used by former President George W Bush to replace US Attorneys.

We may never know if the hacking scandal will be traced back to Perry’s campaign, but the real question is, how much longer are we willing to put up with Perry’s win at all cost “dirty tricks?”

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Tags: Karl Rove, Kay Bailey Hutchison, primary elections, Rick Perry, Texas |  Print This Post |
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