2012

The Ninety-Nine Percent Party
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Karl Rove rushed into the small meeting room and began to set things up for the meeting he had scheduled. Rove had been busy. His meeting with Buddy Roemer had set in motion the various actions needed to form the third party that Rove hoped would draw significant votes away from Obama in the 2012 Presidential Election. Rove had recruited a team of people to infiltrate the Occupy Wall Street movement and, having established their bone-fides, file the necessary paperwork and pay the fees required for third party registration.

Rove’s deep pockets donors had ponied up all the money needed to pay Rove’s infiltration team, pay filing fees, and pay for getting people registered in the new party. This would take a lot of door-to-door, and shopping mall-to-shopping mall legwork and Rove already had people out doing it. It was all about money, and Rove had more ‘Bush Pioneers’ ready, willing, and able to contribute. In addition, Rove had already drafted a party platform and it was in Buddy Roemer’s hands for review. Rove had stressed to Roemer that the draft be kept “Close hold -- your eyes only.”

Rove was spending the morning conducting a brainstorming session with a few of his confidants to come up with a name for the new party. The meeting participants straggled in carrying cups of Starbuck's coffee. It was a good thing, because Rove hadn't had time to arrange 'refreshments.'

Rove thanked everyone for coming and then said, "Grab a seat anywhere. Let's get right into this. I have another meeting this morning."

Rove explained the rules for brainstorming, which he felt anyone used to this sort of exercise should know, but still. After a little prompting, ideas started to come fast and furious. Some of the participants seemed to get carried away proposing names like, America’s Party, Patriot Party, and so on, forgetting apparently, that the Occupy Wall Street party, whatever they called it, had to have a socialist flavor.

The idea was to de-emphasize traditional American entrepreneurial values. Rove had stopped writing proposed names on the electronic white board and reiterated the theme he was after. Finally this sunk in and the group started coming up with more appropriate names, like Citizen’s Party, American Socialist Party, People’s Party, Worker’s Party, and Labor Party, all of which, Rove had to point out, had already been used at one time or another.

One of the participants said, “We could name the party after an animal, like the Bull Moose Party.”

“Yeah, only we should call it the Bull Shit Party, said another man, whom Rove had brought in from the DCI Group. This guy was named John Murphy. Rove called him, ‘Murph,’ a tendency to use a shortened version of a person’s last name that he’d picked up from George W. Bush. Murph had a perpetual smirk on his face that along with his comb-over hair made him look like a standup comedian. But he was about as funny as a heart attack. He was meeting with Rove after the brainstorming session to discuss the ‘metrics’ that Rove was seeking on congressional house and senate elections.

“The name, Bull Moose Party, was just a kind of catch phrase used for Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party,” Rove said. “But coming up with a name like that isn’t a bad idea.”

“What about just calling it the Occupy Party?” one of brainstormers suggested.

“Sounds like we’re talking about American troops in Iraq,” Chris Burgess said.

Rove frowned, despite his explanation of how brainstorming was supposed to work, no one could refrain from criticizing the ideas of others. And Burgess was one of the most negative people Rove knew. He had him in the session to stroke his ego; Burgess had a lot of money, which he’d made perfecting methods of anonymous spamming, SPAM filter avoidance measures, and botnets that surreptitiously collected data from targeted computers.

“How about the Ninety-Nine Percent Party?” Giles Jeter said.

“Ninety-nine percent of what?” said Burgess.

Rove ignored Burgess and wrote down the suggestion on the white board. “Okay, we’ve got enough to go on,” Rove announced, hitting the print button on the white board. “Thanks for all your help. I’ll throw these at Buddy and we’ll see what sticks.”

As meeting participants filed out of the room, Rove walked over to John Murphy and handed him the white board printout. "Murph, see that your guy...what's his name..., Chris or Chip something, registers domain names for all of these. And have him register for dot com and dot org," Rove said.

Rove was aware of the problem that Rick Perry and some other Republican candidates had when they failed to stake their claim to a domain name and found supporters or potential supporters being redirected to the web sites of other candidates, advertising, or even pornography. Potential Democratic voters had to take the new third party seriously, if they were to be lured away from the primary Democratic ticket.

"Okay, Murph, outline what your guys have come up with on the metrics," Rove said, looking down at his BlackBerry to check messages.

"Yeah, so we've got credit card purchases, cell phone records, mortgage reports, that kinda crap, and we hacked into that VoteBuilder data--"

"I don't want to know how you got your data," Rove said.

"Right," Murphy said, drawing out the word to indicate he understood Rove's need for deniability. "So, we have data on Democratic voters, you know, stuff like name, address, phone number--"

"Do you have ethnicity, age, employment?" Rove asked.

"Oh yeah, Murphy said. "We know whether they're massage therapists or welders, whether they hunt or bird watch, what charities they donate to, their arrest records, all that stuff."

"Good, good," Rove said.

Murphy went on to described the analyses that DCI was producing to help Rove's American Crossroads PAC target potential Democratic voters who might be persuaded to swing over to an Occupy Wall Street third party. "Hey, we're using social network analysis, and some kind of visualization software that--"

"Yeah, well that's nice," Rove said. "But what I really want to know is when I can get my hands on the results."

"I'll check with Chip, but I think we can get most of it to you this week," Murphy said.

Rove was texting, and didn't respond.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously, and any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.