Karl Rove was the chief architect of George W. Bush's two presidential election wins, not to mention his success in Bush's campaigns for governor in Texas. Rove's well-documented negative campaign tactics have been criticized as dishonestly obscuring legitimate campaign issues by pounding away at his candidate's opponent with invented negatives, some designed to turn the opponent's strengths into liabilities.

His better-known gems include John Kerry the flip-flopper, Al Gore the self-proclaimed inventor of the Internet and former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, the alleged alcoholic. In 2004, Rove effectively transformed Kerry from a war hero into a cowardly liar with the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," who were funded by Bush supporters and whose claims that Kerry had lied about his experience in Vietnam have been largely discredited.

I submit that some of our local politicians have meticulously studied Rove's game plan and are employing it to camouflage some of their own weaknesses this election year.

Take the recent claims by convicted felon and prison parolee Christopher Gardner. He was interviewed ad nauseam last week on K-TALK radio, a mostly right-wing soap box, claiming that Democratic state Sen. Scott McCoy had gotten him fired from his job as a waiter at Market Street Grill because he had refused to say bad things to the media about Republican state Sen. Chris Buttars. K-TALK never asked McCoy if it was true.

The story was then picked up by the Deseret News, despite the fact that Market Street Grill officials said McCoy had nothing to do with Gardner's firing and a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office, which was supposedly investigating McCoy's deeds, said there was nothing to Gardner's claims.

Here's where it smells.

The McCoy-getting-the-waiter-fired story was pitched to me by Salt Lake County Republican Party Chairman James Evans, who was quoted in the Deseret News as saying he believed the story "has legs."

Another story Evans thought "has legs" was one he recently was pitching to news outlets: that Salt Lake County Sheriff's Capt. Steve Debry was reassigned from his administrative post in Holladay by Democratic Sheriff Jim Winder as punishment because Debry was running against Democratic Councilman Randy Horiuchi, even though Debry himself said that wasn't true.

Another "leggy" story Evans was peddling to news outlets two days before the 2006 election involved tapes Evans had of Winder, then a challenger in the sheriff's race, using offensive language in a training seminar for the sheriff's office. The part in the tape where Winder said he would begin role-playing to show what not to do during a traffic stop was conveniently missing.

In the latest "Got Legs?" story, McCoy was at a breakfast meeting with other Democrats when Gardner, the waiter, approached McCoy about some embarrassing things that Gardner allegedly knew about Buttars. Sensing a rat, McCoy called a Salt Lake Tribune reporter, who eventually spoke with Gardner. But the waiter said he didn't want to talk because he believed Buttars was going to help him get back into the military.

The Rovian twist? Buttars has been the most controversial member of the Senate the past couple of years, in part owing to his reputation as an extreme homophobe, who once referred to McCoy, who is gay, as "the gay."

So the story Evans was pushing so hard was aimed at making Buttars, the demonized homophobe, the victim of McCoy, who Evans, when he talked to me, referred to as "the bad guy."