Not the legacy he had in mindMichael Tomasky
August 13, 2007 1:45 PM
LinkKarl Rove's legacy? I have my own ideas about it, but let's start by asserting that his place in the history books will not be quite the one he envisioned for himself.
During the 2000 campaign, Rove was fond of saying that he thought of George Bush as today's William McKinley, the Republican who won the 1896 presidential election handily over the Democrat William Jennings Bryan. McKinley's victory ushered in an era of GOP dominance that lasted the better part of 35 years, until Franklin Roosevelt came along. Rove predicted that Bush's victory would do the same. The brains behind this paradigm shift, it went without saying, was Rove himself, who would be credited as the genius who kick-started a new era in which America embraced conservatism and fully and finally rejected anything having to do with the Democratic party.
Well, now. That's going well for him, isn't it?
Instead, Rove leaves two other legacies. They are incompetence and duplicity. It's hard to know which is worse. Actually, no it isn't. The duplicity has been worse, but let's emphasise here his incompetence, because it is operatic. As has so often been the case in America these last seven years, the facts are completely at odds with the cultivated image.
Let's remember first of all: Rove, and Bush, did not win the 2000 presidential election. Al Gore won the popular vote. Gore ran a mostly pretty bad campaign on the basis of mostly pretty bad advice. And still he won, by 500,000 votes. Were it not for a poorly designed ballot in one county in Florida - not whining; just pointing it out - that enticed many elderly Jews into voting for Pat Buchanan, Bush's defeat would have been clear. He and Rove would have been sent home and forgotten.
So Bush won the election in the supreme court. Well, that's the way it goes. We had to accept the court's verdict as a country and go forward. But the fact remains that Bush won that election by five votes, the five supreme court votes that installed him in the White House. Nothing Karl Rove did got him those votes.
So Rove engineered only one successful presidential election. By a bare 3 million votes (or just 70,000 votes in Ohio, if you care to count it that way). Against a mediocre candidate who ran another bad campaign. For an incumbent president during wartime. Not really a feat for the ages, but okay, a win is a win.
So what did Rove do with that win? He pushed his president to stake his "political capital," as Bush famously said during a post-election press conference, on dismantling social security. And yes, Rove really pushed it.
It was an unpopular idea from the start. It never polled well, and it made congressional Republicans very nervous. The White House never even produced a piece of actual legislation, but Bush spent the first six months of his new term travelling the country and giving speeches praising the marvels of private accounts.
The polls didn't budge. By late April, early May, it was obvious that this scheme was going nowhere. But no - Karl was just certain things were going to change any minute now! After all, it was written on the tablets of history! Bush was McKinley! The realignment was coming!
Then came Katrina. Rove's specific role in this debacle remains a bit of a mystery, but let's put it this way: His McKinley was out in Arizona giving speeches, yukking it up with hand-picked audiences of senior citizens, cutting a birthday cake with John McCain and blithely strumming a guitar with a country-and-western singer, while American citizens were dying in New Orleans. Rove, one had been led to believe, was a genius at "optics", at showing the president to be firmly in charge. Nice work!
But soon enough it was time think about another election. Here, surely, Rove would shine; this was his metier. Circumstances had changed a bit. The Iraq war wasn't going so well. But Rove knew what would work. Stick to the script: equate a Democratic victory with a win for the terrorists. Works every time. But those annoying voters forgot that they were supposed to be acting according to Rove's predetermined script.
In sum, he often gave his president terrible advice. And though Iraq is the main reason for Bush's collapse and was more directly the project of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and others, Rove certainly did his share to ensure that Bush will leave Washington as one of the least successful presidents in history.
On the duplicity front, the evidence is voluminous. It goes back to his days in the College Republicans, when he was running for national chairman of that organisation and at the same time conducting training seminars instructing campaign workers in techniques such as rooting through opponents' trash cans. This against his fellow Republicans.
But don't take it from me. Here's Rove himself, in memos to a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Texas who preceded Bush named Bill Clements: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack." And: "Anti-White [Clements' opponent] messages are more important than positive Clements messages. Attack. Attack. Attack."
Thus the whispering campaigns that always seemed to spring up. That Ann Richards, Bush's gubernatorial opponent in Texas, was a lesbian. That John McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock. And the worst - that a Democratic state supreme court judge in Alabama who worked with troubled youths was a paedophile.
And finally, the attacks on the patriotism of those who opposed Bush's post-9/11 initiatives. Including war heroes, like former Georgia Democratic senator Max Cleland, who left three limbs in Vietnam. Rove, of draft age during the war, managed not to go. Yes, politics is a rough sport, and yes, Democrats do skeezy things too. But Rove is part of a generation of Republican consultants, along with the late Lee Atwater, that plumbed new depths.
The end result? His president is at 31% and will go down in history as a failure. The country is in worse shape, majorities of Americans believe, than it's been in quite a while. The Middle East is a powder keg. Terrorism is on the rise.
There is, though, a silver lining: Rove may have indeed played a part in bringing about a political realignment. It just won't be the one he had in mind.
