The KKKing is DEAD, long live the king or business as usual in Repub camp?

[Jeffersons Ghost]

With all the great OP (Opening Post, to help newbys) titles available for this thread on DICK WADHAMS, I have, as usual, used the worst. It really doesn't matter. Here's not only my original source but also the place I'd like to see get some kicks and votes:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2900228

That thread sent me on a quest for pictures of Dick Wadhams, where I learned this:

Dick Wadhams: Karl Rove's heir apparent.
By Alexandra Starr
Posted Friday, June 10, 2005, at 7:30 AM ET

Is this Dick the next Rove?
John Thune's 2004 challenge to former Sen. Tom Daschle looked a little like a kamikaze mission. Two years previously, Thune had lost to Sen. Tim Johnson, another South Dakota Democrat who is a far less impressive campaigner than the former minority leader, in a year when Republicans racked up victories nationwide. But for his race against Daschle, Thune heeded the advice of the Bush White House, dumped his first campaign team, and hired Dick Wadhams. The 49-year-old operative comes across as an aging country boy, but he is renowned for running nasty and effective campaigns. In South Dakota he honed his slash-and-burn reputation, relentlessly attacking Daschle about his Washington, D.C., home, luxury car, and lobbyist wife. At one point, Wadhams accused the former minority leader of having "emboldened Saddam Hussein." Thune won, by a slim margin, and gratefully dubbed his campaign manager "the best pit bull out there."

Rove may have figured that recommending Wadhams for the South Dakota race would be the next best thing to taking Daschle down himself. The two operatives, who have known each other since their days in College Republicans, run similar campaigns. Both shield their candidates from the press. Both like to work with clients who may not be powerhouse political talents, but who sell well as regular guys and thrive on being underestimated. And both win, a lot. In addition to engineering President Bush's election and re-election, Rove masterminded the GOP's 1998 sweep of every elected statewide office in Texas. Wadhams has lost only one of the nine statewide campaigns he has worked on. Now that Rove's tenure as pre-eminent consigliere is drawing to a close—at a press breakfast shortly after the November 2004 election, he said he wouldn't run another presidential campaign—Wadhams is emerging as his most obvious successor.

http://www.slate.com/id/2120558/

In my quest for a picture, I found these two by ONLY TYPING DICK WADHAMS NAME into a google graphics search:

Dick Wadhams


OTHER GRAPHIC
AVAILABLE BY
SEARCHING FOR
DICK WADHAMS'
PHOTO


All kidding aside, the similarity is truly striking. Both images resize, EXACTLY THE SAME, when transfered to a server like photobucket, which may mean nothing to the average reader but to an old-hand at posting graphics the phenomenon is incredible, because it defies the law of averages.

IS THIS A ROVE-LIKE ATTEMPT TO FOCUS ATTENTION AWAY FROM A HOTLY CONTESTED RACE, WHERE FOCUS SHOULD REMAIN ON ISSUES BECAUSE ALLEN OBVIOUSLY CAN'T COMPETE WITH WEBB?

like I said, don't vote my OP up because these graphics appear to be a trap to direct attention away from a major-league loser in a VERY IMPORTANT race, where BOTH parties have spent plenty.

[MADem]

1. He worked for THUNE, eh??? Hmmmm....

Here's another shot of the creep, above.

Who ELSE was embroiled in that Thune-Daschle contest...up to his ballsac, that creature was? Why, none other than:



our old pal JIMMY JEFF!


But what Gannon was up to was not just writing opinion columns or using a different technique to get information. He was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played. It is also a classic example of how political operatives are using the brave new world of the Internet and the blogosphere. Gannon and Talon News appear to be mini-Drudge reports; a "news" source which partisans use to put out negative information, get the attention of the bloggers, talk radio and then the MSM in a way that mere press releases are unable to achieve.

One of Gannon's first projects was an attempt to discredit the South Dakota Argus Leader, South Dakota's major paper, and its longtime political writer, David Kranz. According to the National Journal, which reported on this last November, Gannon wrote a series of articles in the summer of 2003 alleging that Kranz, who went to college with Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, was not only sympathetic to him but was an actual part of the Daschle campaign. These articles then got a huge amount of play on the blogs of John Lauck and Jason Van Beek, and were picked up by other conservative sites and talk radio. The paper was bombarded with messages about its bias and acknowledges that these had an impact on its coverage.

Daschle opponent John Thune's campaign manager was Dick Wadham, an old political crony of Karl Rove's; the kind of pal Rove could ask to hire his first cousin, John Wood, a few years back. Wadham put the bloggers on the campaign payroll and the symbiotic relationship between the campaign, the bloggers and "reporter" Gannon continued. On September 29, Gannon broke the story that Daschle had claimed a special tax exemption for a house in Washington and the bloggers jumped all over it. According to a November 17 posting on South Dakota Politics – a site that Van Beek, who has become a staffer for now-Sen. Thune, has bequeathed to Lauck – "Jeff Gannon, whose reportage had a dramatic impact on the Daschle v. Thune race (his story about Sen. Daschle signing a legal document claiming to be a D.C. resident was published nearly the same day Thune began to run an ad showing Daschle saying, "I'm a D.C. resident) has written an analysis of the debacle."

Daschle aides told Roll Call, "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research." The connections are so strong that there is an FEC challenge which could be a test case on the limits of the use of the Internet in federal campaigns. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/18/opinion/lynch/main675050.shtml

I'd hardly call this guy the next Atwater. He may be a mushfaced asshole with a penchant for negative campaigning, but he's done something less of a bang up job with Senator Macacadoodle Doo Macacawitz, if he's still working for that nitwit:

In January, he signed on with Sen. George Allen, a Virginia Republican whose staunch conservatism is leavened by his good ol' boy manners. Outside his home state, Allen is a relative unknown, but he's generating plenty of interest among party apparatchiks. In an April poll in the National Journal, pollsters, consultants, and media pundits picked Allen as the No. 1 choice to head the 2008 GOP ticket.

Can Wadhams take Allen from a little-known senator to a spot on the national ticket? It's a gamble, for sure: Even some Republicans snicker at Allen's tendency to turn every thought into a football metaphor (primaries are "intersquad scrimmages"; Senate recess is "halftime"). Questions about whether Allen is smart enough to be president are sure to dog a potential bid. And Wadhams has never run a national campaign before—or for that matter, a campaign outside a red state. The Republican presidential primary will be crowded, which means that his reflexive go-negative strategy could be risky: Voters who are turned off by the mudslinger as well as the mud will have other options to choose among. ...

[underpants]

2. I love their penchant for graniose self titling

Notice how brilliant everyone is, no seriously they are just ask them.

Karl Rove's #2 might just be as brilliant as Karl Rove is brilliant imagine being that smart and powerful and great just like Karl Rove.

:eyes:

[Jack Rabbit]

3. Hmm . . .

The Chimp's Gorilla?

[Jeffersons Ghost]

4. ALL the possibilities for primal leftist humor are really freaky...

not just the automatic reduction of in image-size (both images were different sizes before photobucket automatically reduced them, which it rarely does) but also the posture of the figures. My regular readers know that I work a GREAT DEAL with online imagery. To find the ones I eventually select for my picture-intensive OPs, I go through hundreds. These were so easy to find it blew my mind and there were VERY few choices at google to offer confusion.