Matthew Dowd Is a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person

What follows is a Twitter exchange between a human windsock and professional journalist named Matthew Dowd and a rabbi who has some very simple, straightforward moral inquiries which Mr. Dowd would not touch with a barge pole:

@matthewjdowd But the fact they overlooked/dismissed such racism, sexism, xenophobia, is deeply, profoundly troubling & morally concerning.

— Rabbi Latz (@RavMABAY) November 26, 2016

@RavMABAY totally disagree. We are all responsible for making the repair. Sometimes one side has to step forward first.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) November 26, 2016

@RavMABAY you are missing the point. I am talking about the majority of trump voters who are good people. Staying in hate isn't helping.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) November 26, 2016

@matthewjdowd Would you tell your daughter to love someone who beat her? tell her she's responsible for making it better? NO WAY!

— Rabbi Latz (@RavMABAY) November 26, 2016

@matthewjdowd they are willing to allow violence & hatred of other people. Those wounds-those people-matter. Why let them off so easily?

— Rabbi Latz (@RavMABAY) November 26, 2016

Of course, as the man who helped cultivate and harvest these people's fear and rage on behalf of the 2004 Bush campaign, Mr. Dowd knows perfectly well who they are and what motivates them.  So perhaps someone would be so good as to direct Rabbi Latz to this article from Sidney Blumenthal in Salon from 2007 (I have highlighted a passage which is especially delectable given recent events):

Matthew Dowd’s not-so-miraculous conversion 

Is the former Bush pollster a true believer turned disillusioned critic, or was he an opportunist from the get-go?

...As the pollster who helped bring Bush to power and sustained him there, Dowd is expert in framing stories, and he has framed his own as a classic conversion narrative. But the political consultant cleanses his story of politics, so it is hardly surprising that there are gaps in the telling and characters missing. Dowd does not offer any explanation of why Bush has changed, only how he, Dowd, perceives the changes. Bush has become remote and untouchable, but he is not the hidden God, Deus Absconditus. Who has seduced Bush into his seclusion? Who has absconded with him? His Satanic Majesty, almost always present in conversion stories, is absent here. Dowd says nothing about Karl Rove, for to bring Rove into the narrative would alter it. Dowd attempts to blot out the politics with the personal, his soul-searching obscuring his poll taking. Yet he provided the diagrams for Rove’s machinations, the bright signs for Rove’s dark wonders.

...

A more mundane version of Dowd’s story begins with a little-known pollster in a state capital, laboring for a political party headed for seemingly perpetual minority status. Attached to the conservative wing of the Texas Democrats, Dowd was a partner in the Austin-based Public Strategies P.R. firm. Along with one of his partners, media consultant Mark McKinnon, he seamlessly shifted into the presidential campaign of Gov. Bush.

Dowd has given a couple of accounts of this painless conversion, attributing it variously to the shining impression made by Bush and the persuasive skills of Rove, whom he came to know well in the hothouse atmosphere of Austin. McKinnon told his friends he wasn’t a Republican, but a “Bush guy,” while Dowd, for his part, simply left it at that he had become a “Bush Republican.” Had they not jumped at the main chance that materialized, they would have been mired as provincial losers. Instead, they chose fame and fortune. Observers viewed their leap as symbolic of Bush’s unusual capacity for bipartisanship.

Bush’s loss of the popular majority by 543,895 votes in the 2000 election was a shock to his political advisors and prompted an internal rethinking of his strategy. During the Florida contest and before the Supreme Court delivered the presidency to Bush, Dowd wrote a confidential memo to Rove that analyzed data from the recent vote and argued that there was no significant center in the electorate. “Dowd’s analysis destroyed the rationale for Bush to govern as ‘a uniter, not a divider,'” wrote Thomas Edsall in his book “Building Red America.” Bush’s confected campaign persona as a “compassionate conservative” was suddenly discarded. The “architect,” as Bush called Rove, had an architect. Bush’s brain had an outsourced brain. Rove’s and Bush’s radical imperatives derived from Dowd’s conclusions...

The “war on terror” was the glue that held the Bush message together. In the political rinse cycle, Dowd transformed the disinformation justifying the Iraq war into platitudinous Republican talking points. In the interviews he granted, Dowd repeated them effortlessly. “Events in Iraq,” he told National Public Radio during the Republican Convention in September 2004, “and removing Saddam Hussein is all part of the war on terror. You can’t separate out removing a brutal dictator from a place that harbored terrorists from the war on terror.” One plus one equals three; the clock struck 13...

...After Rove executed Dowd’s carefully calculated targeting to produce Bush’s narrow victory in 2004, Dowd was triumphant. “Issues don’t matter in presidential campaigns,” he exulted in 2005, “it’s your brand values that matter.” For Dowd, facts didn’t matter either, only “brand” identity.

...Asked about the TV ads ripping Kerry, Dowd said on Sept. 22, 2004, on CNN, “I think it’s totally tasteful. And the American public is going to be fine with it.” He also blithely defended the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth defamation of Kerry’s sterling Vietnam War record.

...Dowd neither detailed nor did the Times mention his consulting work in the campaign last year of Richard DeVos, billionaire heir of the Amway fortune, for governor of Michigan. DeVos is a zealous follower of and major donor to the most extreme organizations of the religious right. His campaign against incumbent Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm was marked by nasty ads falsely stating: “Under Governor Granholm’s administration, you can stay on welfare as long as you want.” These weren’t a new paradigm but old racial code words.

... His self-involved and tortuous explanation of his disillusionment helps cast light on the banality of his motives in his original defection from Democrat to Bush Republican. However traumatic his private drama, he appears fundamentally the same opportunist, a point subtly driven home by those who know him well...

Dowd has much to add to history as an eyewitness. What was Rove’s involvement in the independent expenditure negative campaign against Sen. John McCain in the Republican South Carolina primary of 2000? White House chief of staff Andrew Card said in 2002 about the propaganda campaign for the Iraq war, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” What was the marketing done to hone various rationales for the invasion of Iraq? In the 2004 campaign, exactly how was homosexuality targeted? What were the links between the Bush campaign and the Swift-boating of John Kerry? What polling was performed to determine how to discredit Kerry’s war record? After the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, what polls did Dowd take to inform White House positioning? These are only a few of the questions that Dowd can illuminate with his special knowledge. But so far, his conversion lacks a confession...

Like Captain Renault in Casablanca,  Mr. Dowd appears to have no convictions beyond his next gig.  He blows with the wind, and these days the prevailing wind blows like a hurricane from the politically and professionally safe precincts of Both Siderism.

You see, a little over 62 million American meatheads and bigots and phony Christians took an 18-month-long look at a lying DayGlo fascist con-man with a lurid comb-over and a penchant for racism and decided "Yes!  I want that!  I want that supersized!"

But you can't very well go on the electric teevee machine and perform an act of genuine journalism by saying such a thing, because a large fraction of the those 62 million American meatheads and bigots and phony Christians are also potential customers of the purveyors of  dick pills and reverse mortgages who pay for the programs you see on the electric teevee machine.

Which is why, instead of journalism on the electric teevee machine, we get creatures like Matthew Dowd, who always knows which way the wind is blowing.