Karl Rove's legacy

Posted at 1:04 PM on August 13, 2007 by Bob Collins (7 Comments)

OK, I'll bite. Like you, I've followed Karl Rove's career, at least the one that started with the Bush for president campaign up until this morning when he announced he's leaving. And the pundits have -- perhaps correctly , perhaps not -- pointed out that he's such a genius, he cannot possibly be replaced.

But why is he considered a genius?

The Bush presidency, I think it's safe to say although I realize many will disagree, is one that America survived (so far) more than embraced. And Karl Rove is the architect of that presidency.

Discuss

(Photo credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

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Comments (7)

As an 18-25 year old, I think it is safe to say that Mr. Rove has created an entire generation galvanized against the modern GOP and many of its so-called, "conservative," principles. Ironically, this derives from a career dedicated to creating a Republican Presidential dynasty. On issues such as war and peace, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, domestic spying, taxes, and education - his design has completely turned off today's youth in a way that will affect the political atmosphere in this country for decades to come. That is his legacy.

Posted by Adam | August 13, 2007 1:39 PM

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I think Mr Rove's genius is in how he got GW to the Oval Office.

A comment on Adam's comment: while Carl Rove has upset liberal 18-30 year olds, he has energized conservative 18-30 year olds.

Posted by Brian Hanf | August 13, 2007 3:09 PM

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The Rove legacy is the same old lesson, one which we continue to fail to learn. That lesson is that it is foolish to sacrifice long term goals in favor of short term success. A lasting Republican Majority? Short term success, but long term the outlook is unclear, to be charitable. I'd put the so-called global war on terror in that category too, though that is surely an assessment that will meet with some resistance...

Posted by bsimon | August 13, 2007 3:58 PM

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There's no doubt Rove was effective, but his methods didn't require any special kind of genius to conceive or implement: Define your opponent immediately and unrelentingly, regardless of the truth. That doesn't require much finesse. There are a lot of other operatives out there who are skilled at that, but don't have the good fortune to be aligned early with genial, high-name-ID presidential candidates. Rove also had the luck to face off against two Bob Shrum-advised Democratic opponents.

If there's any fatal flaw in Rove's work, it was the tendency to overreach:

# In late '99, he spent the campaign's time and money building up 50 state offices in order to intimidate all the other Republicans and wow the media. In so doing, he neglected the retail politics that prickly, independent New Hampshirites demand and let John McCain sneak up on him.

# In late 2000, with W. ahead in the polls and the Gore campaign running around all the battleground states like a chicken with its head cut off, Rove had Bush appear in heavy blue states like California and New Jersey on a relaxed, leisurely pace. The theory was that projecting an image of confidence would cause the remaining undecideds to swing to Bush. It was a huge miscalculation that almost lost them the election.

# In early 2001, he played a little too much hardball in lobbying Jim Jeffords on the tax cut bill, and swung the Senate Democratic for the next 18 months.

In each case, Rove was eventually able to salvage the situation, usually by doubling down and resorting to even more brutal tactics against his opponents. I was wondering what Rove's grand finale would be these last months in office. If he's really giving up and buggering off before it's fully over, that can only be a good thing for the country.

Posted by Chris | August 13, 2007 7:43 PM

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Karl Rove was not and is not a political genius. That aspect of his reputation has always been a mystery to me and to many other observers.

To understand why it’s a mystery, you have to evaluate the nature of Rove’s “success.” Rove had certain broad goals in a career devoted to Republican politics. Number one with a bullet was to get George W. Bush into the White House.

But the other goals were just as important: to convince Americans that after eight years of liberal government by the Clintons, the Bush White House was the second coming of Ronald Reagan: the return of a broadly popular conservative President that heralded the coming of another Republican “era of good feelings.” Rove set out to sell his chief to the American public as a strong, effective, decisive leader with compassionate but firm conservative principles. (Remember how many times Bush talked about leadership and used the term “leader” in his debates with Gore? It was practically a mantra.)

A third Rove goal was the goal of all American conservatives: to further the political fortunes of the American conservative movement and the most conservative elements in the Republican Party. The ultimate goal here was to preserve and foster a political trend that had been growing in American life for twenty seven years—the growing trend toward political conservatism in American politics.

So how did he do, in achieving these three goals? Well, Bush got in the White House in 2000—but he did that despite the popular vote total and largely as a result of conservative majority on the Supreme Court. That doesn’t argue well for “Rove’s genius;” it should have been relatively easy for a Republican candidate with vast funds to get a conservative into office in a conservative-trending American. Bush was reelected in 2004, but even the most cynical political observers put that down to Bush’s courtship of evangelicals during his first term—that was the famous “values” election, and Rove and the other higher-ups had no other choice than to flatter political evangelicals, however much they despised them privately. No genius there; but Rove’s contribution was significant in that he effectively demonized John Kerry, turning a war hero with a Purple Heart into a suspect American.

As for the other two goals, Rove failed miserably. He was successful in selling America on the need to go to war with Iraq, but the campaign was largely based on the threat of Saddam’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction.” When the truth came out, the public’s trust in the White House began to crack, and it has been cracking ever since. The decision to go to war with Iraq was also the death knell of the Republican congress, though no one suspected it at the time. Between the three of them, Bush, Cheney and Rove did more to destroy the fortunes and prospects of the GOP and conservative power than anyone; even more than Richard Nixon. The Republican Congress is gone, the liberal Democrats rule despite Rove’s vast advantages in funding and his dominance of conservative political media. And the political climate, after seven years of Rove’s counsel, is such that a rise in White House approval rating from 26 per cent to 32 per cent is greeted with cries of joy.

Rove, like Bush, is one of history’s failures—a titanic failure; a failure on the operatic scale. Starting out with every political advantage—money, a conservative congress, a vast media operation to get out the message—he blew it, utterly. If he had succeeded, the GOP would be looking forward to the next round of elections; privately they are dreading it.

It’s also worth observing that it was not Rove’s “brilliant insight” that propelled Bush to White House in first place. If Rove was more successful than his predecessors in putting an unqualified, unskilled conservative “face” in the Oval Office, it was because he had stood on the shoulders of divisive giants. Rove propagated the conservative faith regarding liberals that had been spouted ever since the New Deal: that liberals were closeted socialists, stupid and naïve in dealing with America’s enemies, secret haters of America itself and its traditions. None of this was original with Rove; this notion that liberals are de facto domestic enemies of American was conservative boilerplate before he was even born. It’s a crackpot view, a lie—but it was being accepted into the mainstream as long ago as the 1980s, with the rise of Rush Limbaugh and the hundreds of Limbaugh knockoffs that imitated him around the country. By the 1990s a split in the conservative vote and a recession let Clinton into the White House, but the glory days of conservatism had arrived: Newt Gingrich, practicing a similar politics of “hate the liberals,” had led his party to victory and took over the Congress.

When Rove came along he was simply doing what they did—demonizing the political opposition and dividing Americans. Conservatives weren’t interested in building a consensus leadership; they were interested in power for conservatives and they knew that they could get that by playing to the anger and hatred of conservative voters—dividing America. Rove was no genius; many before him had recognized that this was a formula for obtaining power and Rove was simply practicing what conservative talk radio and Gingrich Republicans had preached; give the rank-and-file conservatives a domestic enemy to hate and fear; a focus for their hatred and class resentments.

Rove’s skill, if any, in the 2000 election was keeping Bush’s deep character flaws from impeding his way to the White House. Perhaps Rove’s “genius” was in keeping “character from counting” after a decade of a conservative insistence that it did. Bush was a life-long underachiever with no significant accomplishments, a foreign policy illiterate, a man who didn’t know that Social Security was in fact “a big government” program. Rove was able to brush aside the defects—the AWOLs from the National Guard during the Viet Nam war, the business failures, the drunk driving incident, etc. and convince much of the electorate that character did not matter. He was able to convince them that what mattered was the platitudes about compassionate conservatism, and that Bush seemed more personable than Gore. Is convincing people that character doesn’t count an achievement? Perhaps this is the real basis of Rove’s reputation for “brilliance”: he was able beat two qualified candidates and put a well-connected incompetent fool in the White House. And keep that fool there--with 400 million dollars to spend on re-election and the help of a sectarian political movement. In professional political circles, I suppose some people would consider the ability to promote a fool into high office a kind of “brilliance.”

The irony of course is that once Rove’s conservatives had consolidated power—the White House, the Congress, and penetration of the federal courts, a national propaganda network to further the agenda of the GOP—the conservatives proved hopelessly inept and corrupt. They bungled, they stole, they took America from a pinnacle of peace and prosperity into a toilet of debt, deficit and war without end—all in less than seven years.

The vision of Rove and his predecessors was that American division was good for the GOP and that perception was everything—the realities of governing the USA and the USA’s place in the world actually counted for very little with them. What counted for them was power, and they firmly believed (after Reagan) that maintaining their personal power—the only power that counted—was largely a matter of public relations. A matter of using their vast propaganda network to promoting and lauding their ineffectual and corrupt conservative candidates while demonizing (even criminalizing) the political opposition. But they were wrong. That strategy not statecraft, that’s not vision; the history of the last twelve years has shown us that it’s not even what conservative thinkers called conservatism. It’snot even what America is supposed to be about; American democracy has never been “about” partisan grasping for more power—that’s just one of its ugliest features.

Rove was no genius; he was just another right-wing demagogue, albeit one with a huge budget and a vast and hierarchical propaganda network. Hopefully this Karl Rove is the last Karl Rove we’ll see inside the corridors of American power. But I doubt it. They’ve trained their cadres for decades, and at least thirty five per cent of the electorate is still susceptible to “the strategy”—some of them may finally be disenchanted with Bush and the failures of the late GOP Congress, but they still believe in those little voices on the radio, telling them that liberal Americans are the “real” enemy…

Posted by Bill Prendergast | August 14, 2007 12:53 AM

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Carl Rove - most brilliant republican ever; mastermind of the insanely successful strategy, "I know you are but what am I". Yup, he sure knows the base.

Posted by Chuck | August 14, 2007 9:45 AM

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Does anybody else notice that Rove started with NIXON and will possibly end with BUSH2..... not exactly something a "genius" might want in the history books.......... He is not a genius. He is a nasty politico.

Posted by jane | August 14, 2007 1:31 PM

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