There's a sticky attack goin' on 'round here

I suspect that Karl Rove, deep down, begrudgingly admired Hillary Clinton’s swipe at him yesterday. It was so simple and yet so effective – it had to remind him of his own handiwork. For those who haven’t heard, Clinton said yesterday that Rove “spends a lot of time obsessing about me.” I know this is Beltway junkie stuff that the public doesn’t care about. But as a Beltway junkie, I loved it. And at the risk of reading way way too much into a single line, I want to deconstruct Clinton’s one-liner to show why it was so effective and so deliciously Rovian.

One of Rove’s (and by “Rove,” I also mean the national GOP media strategists’) signature tactics is what I’ll call the “sticky attack.” The goal of the sticky attack isn’t really to draw blood immediately, it’s to undermine, re-define and ultimately discredit future attacks against you. The sticky attack is Lakoffian in that it attempts to create a “frame” that acts like conceptual quicksand or a spider’s web to bog down future attacks. In short, it gums up the works. It doesn’t cause direct harm, but it hinders opponents’ ability to go on offense by framing their attacks and arguments before they can make them and by forcing them to second-guess themselves.