Karl Rovian Liberals

The news that political discourse is deteriorating will not come as a shock to anyone here, of course, but I keep getting unpleasant surprises as to the degree to which that decline is accelerating. I find venues where people seem willing to make the discussion about policies and appear to share a concern about the future course of the nation, and then there appears a post on that venue that describes Romney like this,

This is an arrogant isolated prick. I don't think we have ever seen anyone receive a nomination for president who was less in touch with normal life -- his wealth, his privileged background, his religion -- yes, I'm going there -- his abstemiousness, his bullying prep school background, his vulture capitalist CEO life-style, and his complete lack of demonstrable empathy make him the oddest duck I've ever seen in the chase for the White House. He makes Richard Nixon seem like the guy next door. Obama -- despite his color, his name, and his seemingly exotic upbringing seems, in the end, far more normal than Romney.

Does that sound familiar? Yes it does, doesn’t it. It is almost word for word the campaigns against Al Gore and John Kerry, campaigns which got George W. Bush elected because he was “the guy you’d like to have a beer with.” Liberals were horrified not only with the outcome of those elections but with the abominable Karl Rovian tactics which were used to win them.

I guess it makes liberals feel good to call Romney “an arrogant isolated prick,” but what useful political purpose does it serve? It not only is not going to persuade me to vote for the candidate they support, it is not even persuasive in convincing me to vote against Romney.

Liberals despise the venom which conservatives spout in their unadorned hatred of Obama, holding some self righteous position of how such personal attacks are somehow unseemly in the political arena and Republicans are wrong to engage in the kind of ad hominem attack rhetoric that they tend to do, and then they come out and say something like this. Why?

I’m no fan of Mitt Romney, but what purpose does this serve, other than to show that liberals can get down in the mud and filth like conservatives?