How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans

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The serpent maybe a Clinton media-shill, but he makes some good points

How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans
By James Carville
Published: August 14 2007 18:54 | Last updated: August 14 2007 18:54


There is an old joke that campaign veterans toss around war rooms, bars and BS sessions. We say there are people who have worked in campaigns who say that they have lost some – and we call those folks operatives, managers, strategists, consultants; and then there are people who work in campaigns and say that they have never lost, and we call them liars.

The joke reflects an obsession with winning as the real benchmark of success in politics. By that measure, Karl Rove’s career has to be deemed a success. He built the Republican party of Texas into one of the most powerful state parties in America.

Nationally he has pulled off some of the most unexpected and impressive victories of modern political history. (I will not be debating the 2000 election for the purposes of this article, but I also will not be crediting him with it, so let us just move on to the next cycle.)

Mr Rove picked up seats in what was an almost historically impossible context in 2002. Then in 2004, he engineered one of the most remarkable feats in American politics. He got Americans to re-elect a president who they really did not want to re-elect. Even the Republican defeat in 2006 was predictable and well within the range of historical norms so, by this sport’s standard of winning and losing, there is still no black mark on Rove’s record.

If we concluded our analysis in 2007 and confined our judgment merely to Mr Rove’s immediate electoral record, we would have no choice but to judge him a spectacular success. There is no doubt that Mr Rove won elections. He has perhaps one of the most remarkable win-percentages in modern American politics.

If only things were so neat and simple. The evidence is now pretty conclusive that Mr Rove may have lost more than just an election in 2006. He has lost an entire generation for the Republican party.

A late July poll for Democracy Corps, a non-profit polling company, shows that a generic Democratic presidential candidate now wins voters under 30 years old by 32 percentage points. The Republican lead among younger white non-college-educated men, who supported President George W. Bush by a margin of 19 percentage points three years ago, has shrunk to 2 percentage points. Ideological divisions between the Republican party and young voters are growing. Young voters generally favour larger government providing more services, 68 per cent to 28 per cent. On every issue, from the budget to national security, young voters responded overwhelmingly that Democrats would do a better job in government.

It is not just Democracy Corps that has found this. A host of new polls and surveys over the course of the past few months has served as a harbinger of a rocky 2008 election for Republicans.

The March poll from the Pew Research Center showed that 50 per cent of Americans identify as Democrats while only 35 per cent say they are Republican. The June NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed 52 per cent of Americans would prefer a Democratic president while only 31 per cent would support a Republican, the largest gap in the 20-year history of the survey.

Mr Rove’s famous electoral strategy – focusing on the Republican base first – is also largely responsible for a shift in international public opinion against the US. It would not be fair to blame Mr Rove for the Iraq war. But it is clearly fair to blame his strategy for the Terry Schiavo fiasco and the Republicans’ adherence to the policies and doctrines of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson. The world and now most of the US are contemptuous of the theocratic underpinnings of the policy Mr Rove ushered into government.

There is also a distinction to be made between Karl Rove the political strategist and Karl Rove the government official. Mr Rove was not just an operative sitting at the Republican National Committee and scheming. He had a West Wing office. This distinguishes him from other political operatives, whose roles were outside the White House doing scheduling, advance work and presentation. They were not firing and hiring or shaping national security policy.

Mr Rove was as powerful a government figure as he was a campaign figure. The past six and a half years of Mr Rove’s career were spent as a very, very senior and extraordinarily influential Bush administration official.

He has been assistant to the president, senior advisor and deputy chief of staff. Mr Rove was the architect of social security reform, immigration, the hiring and firing of justice department officials and the placement of literally thousands of ideologically driven buffoons throughout the US government. As deputy chief of staff he was also responsible for handling the White House post-Katrina reconstruction efforts. On these actions, history has already rendered its judgment on Mr Rove. And, as we say in Louisiana, “it ain’t pretty”.

When it comes to judging Mr Rove’s political career, I am reminded of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai’s meeting with Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, when Mr Kissinger asked, “What do you think of the French Revolution?” Zhou replied: “It’s too soon to tell.”

If the trends hold, the one thing that we can be sure of is that Mr Rove’s political grave will receive no lack of irrigation from future Republicans.

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"Mr Rove’s political grave will receive no lack of irrigation from future Republicans."

http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif

Where does the line form? I want to take a dump!

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The Jaundiced Rove of Texas

By Michael Winship
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Tuesday 14 August 2007

Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Karl Rove?

Not bloody likely. If you think otherwise, you've got greater faith in the power of wolf's bane, garlic and wooden stakes than I have.

But why is he leaving that Cloud Cuckooland of Make-Believe known as the White House on such seemingly short notice? Part of me conjures Claude Rains asking Bogart why he exiled himself to Casablanca: "I like to think you killed a man. It's the romantic in me."

No such luck, but everyone's pretty much in agreement that it's not for the official reason: that he wants to mosey on back to Texas to spend more time with his wife and son, who's already in college. There's a well-informed body of opinion that he's getting out of Dodge just a few hoof beats ahead of the sheriff's posse.

Having successfully eluded indictment in the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame case, perhaps he can hear the whisper of the ax as the investigation of the US attorneys' firings and subsequent cover-ups gets closer to home. He's still under subpoena - and still refusing, citing executive privilege - to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If indicted, his resignation puts a little air between him and his president, but not a lot.

And that's not the only potential legal minefield for Rove. Lest we forget, the Jack Abramoff corruption probe is ongoing, with Federal investigators continuing to examine the lobbyist's dealings with at least half a dozen members of Congress, staff members, and other government officials. Abramoff's former assistant, Susan Ralston, was Rove's confidential assistant in the White House and frequently acted as a go-between for the two men. Last fall's report from the House Government Reform Committee cited 485 contacts between Abramoff, his staff, and key White House officials, including Rove.

Ms. Ralston's testimony may also prove useful to the investigation being conducted by the Office of the Special Counsel into whether private briefings on the 2006 midterm elections held by Rove's office for senior officials, in at least 15 government agencies, were in violation of the Hatch Act, which is supposed to protect federal agencies from the outside intrusion of partisan politics.

As the Washington Post reported in late April, the inquiry began when one such briefing, at the General Services Administration, triggered "an investigation into whether officials at the briefing felt coerced into steering federal activities to favor those Republican candidates cited as vulnerable."

But wait, there's more! Yet another investigation is examining alleged improper White House use of Republican National Committee email accounts. Rove's on the list of potential culprits. So much skullduggery, so little time.

Nevertheless, whether all the sleuthing, subpoenas and depositions lead to any smoking guns could be no more the reason for his departure than the simple truth that Rove may just have played out his string and had nowhere to go but toward the exit sign. His dreams for a permanent Republican majority, a fundamental realignment of the domestic body politic and a conservative Camelot with himself as Machiavellian Merlin are a bucket of ashes. And to a large extent, he has no one to blame but himself.

A remarkable, prescient article in the new Atlantic Monthly lays it all out. In "The Rove Presidency," Joshua Green writes, "Rove's tendency, like Bush's, is always to choose the most ambitious option in a list and then pursue it by the most aggressive means possible - an approach that generally works better in campaigns than in governing. Instead of modest bipartisanship, the administration's preferred style of governing became something much closer to the way Rove runs campaigns: Steamroll the opposition whenever possible, and reach across the aisle only in the rare cases, like No Child Left Behind, when it is absolutely necessary ...

"After 9/11, any pretense of shared sacrifice or of reaching across the aisle was abandoned. The administration could demand - and get - almost anything it wanted, easily flattening Democratic opposition, which it did with increasing frequency on issues like the PATRIOT Act and the right of Department of Homeland Security workers to unionize. The crisis atmosphere allowed the White House to ignore what normally would have been some of its most basic duties - working with Republicans in Congress (let alone Democrats) and laying the groundwork in Congress and with the American public for what it hoped to achieve."

With a deadly mixture of arrogance and ignorance of legislative protocol and tradition, Rove alienated both Democratic and Republican members of Congress. Post 9/11 goodwill was squandered in divisiveness, so when the time came to seek Congressional cooperation on Social Security and immigration reform, Rove's steamroller stalled big time. As far as Congress was concerned, in the words of former House GOP Majority Leader Dick Armey, "You can't call her ugly all year and expect her to go to the prom with you." http://spurstalk.com/forums/images/smilies/smilol.gif

Combine this with Iraq, Katrina and a White House policy process former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described as "kids rolling around on the lawn" and you get the disaster we have before us today. "Rove," Green concludes, "forever in thrall to the mechanics of winning by dividing, consistently lacked the ability to transcend the campaign mind-set and see beyond the struggle nearest at hand. In a world made new by September 11, he put terrorism and war to work in an electoral rather than a historical context, and used them as wedge issues instead of as the unifying basis for the new political order he sought."

We see the Rove (and Cheney) legacy of using terrorism and fear as a wedge continued in the way Democrats folded like a cheap suitcase a week and a half ago, when the White House rammed through legislation authorizing warrantless searches and surveillance of phone calls and emails. As Senator Russ Feingold noted, "They have figured out that all they have to do is start talking about an imminent terrorist threat, back it up against a Congressional recess, and they know the Democrats will cave."

( aka "All fear, all terror, all the time" )


We see it, too, perhaps most frighteningly, in the growing neo-con clamor for military action against Iran. Writing last week on the Talking Points Memo web site, Anne-Marie Slaughter, respected dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, described a hellish scenario: "The Cheneyites succeed in creating a situation in which Bush does decide to bomb Iran. Iran retaliates, as they openly threaten to do, with terrorist attacks against us on US soil. That tilts the election. I can imagine a Karl Rove political calculation that would buttress a Cheney-Addington [David Addington, Cheney's neo-con chief of staff] national security calculation ...

"This scenario is one that any Democrat, of any type, and any moderate Republican ... should be taking seriously and fighting against."

Mario Cuomo famously said that campaigning is poetry; governing is prose. Karl Rove, with the help of his friends, has taken the poetry and prose and rendered both the stuff of nightmares.