Hmmmmm … Looks like

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Hmmmmm … Looks like still more confirmation of the Talking Points doctrine on the quickly diminishing prospects of the Bush tax cut bill. And now it’s coming from the New York Times editorial page. It must be true.

The question now is whether anything has really changed at all or whether people just got spun by a good bluff from the Bush communications office. This isn’t the first time this has happened. Think back to last November when Karl Rove had his man spend precious time in sure-lose states like California and New Jersey on the eve of what promised to be a squeaker on November 7th.

As I wrote at the time:

Coming into the campaign’s final week, Karl Rove, George W.’s oily Svengali sold the governor’s campaign on a pet theory of his that went like this: Not having much of a mind of their own, late-deciding voters look to see who’s out front in the waning days of a campaign and cast their lots with the winner. Call it a bandwagon effect. The implication is clear: Act like the winner and you’ll become the winner, and maybe even a big winner. And that’s just what the Bush campaign did for the first week of November. Rove told the traveling press that the governor would win the popular vote by six or seven percentage points, and the electoral college even more comfortably. Bush coasted in and out of states like California and New Jersey, which he hadn’t a prayer of winning, and kept a planeload of canny political reporters squinting their eyes and wondering whether Bush’s chief strategists were magicians or morons.

They turned out not to be magicians, of course. Bush didn’t win big. In fact, he didn’t win at all, at least not if you’re figuring the popular vote. Rove’s bandwagon theory turned out to be just what it looked like: a souped up version of an old-fashioned confidence game. Only the Bush folks had conned themselves.

Something very similar happened after the election when Bush hung out in Austin for the first few days of the Florida stand-off assuming people would just agree he was president-elect if he pretended like he was.

This is the emerging MO.

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