Karl Goes Kaput
I’m going to boast just a wee bit here by making the claim that I was presciently dismissive of Karl Rove to the soon-to-be former top advisor to George W. Bush. Josh Marshall duly notes that Rove’s exit elicits much more of a whisper than a crash-bang.
No surprise. At least two years ago I argued on this blog, to a chorus of derision, that Rove had already failed. That far from being Bush’s brain, he was in reality much closer to the hindquarter of a stumbling GOP elephant. Only a party as cowed, as brain-dead and as pathetic as the Democrats could blame him for so many if its own failures.
I never saw in Rove any of the genius, the evil genius, ascribed to him by his terrified, cowering Democratic critics. Rove, for me, was always a podunk, parochial hack who had only one mode — and one that was hardly an original formula. Can anyone seriously argue that Rove added anything new, even a nuance, to the political dirty-play book that Lee Atwater had not fully scripted a decade earlier?
What exactly were his towering achievements? Certainly not the 2000 election of George W. Bush, a contest that his candidate lost in the popular vote, Only a fluke, or a chad, or if you so prefer a tilted Supreme Court allowed Bush to win office.
And then what? The unbelievably stupid squandering of 9/11 from every point of view — including that of cold, crass political opportunism and expediency. Rove wasn’t even competent in that sewer-level work. If he had been half the genius he was pumped up to be by Democrats, Bush would be sitting today with twice the 30% popularity rating in which he now dwells.
Need I go on? John Kerry lost the 2004 election quite ably on his own. If Donald Duck had been advising Bush instead of Karl Rove, I doubt the outcome would have been any different. From there to Katrina which — as I wrote at the time– marked the definitive collapse of the Bush administration and with it the legacy of the Reagan Revolution. The 2006 mid-terms only confirmed that simple notion.
If anything, Rove will be remembered for having engineered one political landslide — the one shaping up for 2008. If it materializes the Democrats will, indeed, have Karl Rove to thank. They would have never been able to pull it off on their own.
August 13th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
If there were no Karl Rove, it would be necessary to invent him.
August 13th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
Nice analysis. Like 2-3 years back I read this Atlantic Monthly article about his whispering campaigns in Alabama (was that the state?) that helped uproot several Democratic judges. It reminded me of dirty CIA tricks in Latin America fictionalized by Normal Mailer in Harlott’s Ghost. For some reason I have the impression that dirty tricks are “Republican” although perhaps there are examples of Democrats acting similarly.
Interestingly, the NYT online video analysis today ends off saying that Hilary is the greatest inheritor of Rove’s legacy, something about her “take no prisoners” approach or something.
August 14th, 2007 at 12:20 am
Note to all: I am ceasing posting the names of the dead here because the site’s software almost always puts the post into moderation if there are more than one or two names. Unfortunately, there often are, and it only makes work for Marc. However, I continue to post them on the News page of my Web site, under Civilization’s Discontents, and of course anyone who cares enough can look at them on the NYT Web site. Unfortunately, not enough people do care, which is why this war continues to drag on.
August 14th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Marc: …the 2000 election of George W. Bush, a contest that his candidate lost in the popular vote, Only a fluke, or a chad, or if you so prefer a tilted Supreme Court allowed Bush to win office.
Marc, I’m surprised at you. You sound like those poor losers at Kos. Under every rational counting method performed even by the media, Bush won the 2000 election.
If Wisconsin were contested by the Republicans, then Florida would not have been necessary, because the vote fraud by Democrats there is so great.
Also, if the popular vote was what counted, the campaign would have been run differently. For instance, why spend another million dollars in California to get another 15,000 votes if it still won’t win you the state’s electors, even thoughit would put you over the top with the popular vote?
If anything, it was a total disgrace the way the Democrats, involving the Democratic packed judges of the Florida Supreme Court, tried to steal the election for Gore. Then, Gore’s people tried to bribe and coerce the Republican electors to switch to Gore.
The Democrats were disgraceful and dishonest, and it’s below you to join in their pathetic sound bites about being robbed.
August 14th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Balter, just list the number of our soldiers who have died each day if it’s too much problem to list the names. I care about their sacrifices for our nation. However, there are future considerations of human suffering and death that must be considered in deciding when to pull out, which may take years–even under the Democrats.
August 14th, 2007 at 6:18 am
Keep It Fair! Keep It Fair!
August 14th, 2007 at 6:59 am
Marc, you’re forgetting Karl Rove’s most noteworthy achievement: rapper and MC.
Also, speaking of dying U.S. soldiers in Iraq, bet you can’t guess which cut-n-run liberal said this:
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take all of Iraq…. How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was not very many and I think we got it right.”
John Kerry? Dennis Kucinich? HREF=”http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9a8_1186873756″>Guess again.
August 14th, 2007 at 7:00 am
Marc, you’re forgetting Karl Rove’s most noteworthy achievement: rapper and MC.
Also, speaking of dying U.S. soldiers in Iraq, bet you can’t guess which cut-n-run liberal said this:
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over, and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take all of Iraq…. How many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? Our judgment was not very many and I think we got it right.”
John Kerry? Dennis Kucinich? HREF=”http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9a8_1186873756″>Guess again.
August 14th, 2007 at 7:00 am
Oops, sorry about the double post screw-up. You’ll just have to cut-and-paste that second link.
August 14th, 2007 at 7:23 am
When will Karl come out?
August 14th, 2007 at 8:37 am
I liked this comment: Leave it to hate-filled liberals to rejoice the retirement of a man who’s dedicated his life toward serving the nation he loves.
August 14th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Okay, Woody, that sounds like a good suggestion. Although we obviously disagree about nearly everything concerning the war in Iraq, I do not at all doubt your concern for the soldiers. I do have plenty of doubts, however, about whether many leftists and liberals care about them very much or whether they see them more as ways to score points against George Bush. If this were not true, we would see an antiwar movement that really kicked ass. Yet another reason why we need a draft, so the “sacrifices” are shared equally or as much so as possible.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:07 am
It’s hard, given the current state of the Republican Party, to argue Rovism isn’t an overarching failure. And Marc certainly deserves credit for noting that early on. However, it’s worth noting that elements of Rovism will remain part of the political arsenal.
I expect his method for dealing with the press will resurface. Lying, stonewalling, and avoiding the press were hallmark governance tactics under Rove. What Jay Rosen called “decertification” of the press, treating it like it’s just another constituency and not a sacred fourth branch. The press never adapted to these tactis and, I suspect, is a long way from figuring out how to keep reporting when the executive office isn’t interested in keeping the nation even moderately informed. The next president may not be so inclined, but the next one who is will turn to the Rove playbook.
In adddition, Rove’s excessive partisanship is now hardwired into the Republican Party. It’s a loser of a strategy, but the midterm elections booted out the moderates and the hard right has loved the tough talk of the past seven years. Perhaps some of this will abate when the Republicans have chosen their nominee, but I don’t think so. I think it will take another election cycle before the Republican establishment realizes that you can’t run on unity for a month before the election, and defaming the Democrats the rest of the year. So, that’s another failure (and it’s not pure Rove) but one I expect Republicans still consider good politics.
Marc’s right that the dirty tricks are unadulterated Atwater. And I think the unprecidented appointment of political hacks in important policy positions isn’t a mistake too likely to repeat itself (sort of a Rove-Delay hybrid). What are some of his other tactics? Anybody have different evaluations of the ones I’ve mentioned or some other classic Rove tactics that come to mind?
August 14th, 2007 at 9:10 am
As usual the Woodster got it ass backwards. When the consortium of newspapers did their recount of the Florida vote they showed that the Gore people continued their unending series of blunders by only asking for a recount in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. That would produce a Bush win. BUT if the Supremes had followed the wish of the FLa Supreme Court and held a statewide recount then, by any method you would choose to count disputed ballots Gore would have won.
Still I can’t fault Woody too much as this info was buried somewhere down in the 17th or 18th graph – truly a mind-boggling example of lede burying.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Now let us talk about the “Brain” – er, Karl Rove. Just where does the reputation for his “Genius” come from? Well lets look at our friends in the media. I can think of at least three books that came out in 2006 – one by a LAT reporter – that all praised him as the second coming of Mark Hannah (the man who realigned the GOP in 1896 with McKinley). Titles like “The Architect” and “One Party Nation” sort of say it all.
And his friends in the punditocracy were legion. See Broder. See Fineman. Hell see Bob Novak today obviously broken up by the loss of such a valuable leaker. And all because of those “Mean” Dems! And when Chris Matthews isn’t drooling over Manly GOP men or sexually harrasing female guests (see last Friday, truly amazing) he’d bloviate with his political buddies on Rov’e “Dominence.”
Hell, why do you think that even though all the polling data showed a Dem blowout last November the chattering class continued to doubt a takeover. Its because Rove was telling them of his “New Math” and they all believed him.
And that is what we have to deal with today. It is changing but not fast enough. And I’m afraid its your colleagues that are responsible for all this nonsense.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:32 am
Rove was a great mirror to the Democratic party. I think his dirty tricks were successful at paralyzing the Dems – we can blame the Dems for letting it happen, while at the same time crediting him for doing what he did.
How did the Democrats become the party of the Mini-driving Whole Foods crowd, while the Repubicans drive trucks and go fishing on the weekend? (present company excepted) Why would a poor kid without a college degree want to join the Republican party instead of the other one? That’s the Dems’ fault. I blame identity politics and the single-issue activists of the New Left.
Rove was an effective populist: the faith-based programs were welcomed by many people as a way to circumvent the broken-bureaucracy of the Government.
This makes sense if you live in Sioux Falls, SD, or Peoria, IL; you have poverty, but not the entrenched masses of urban proletarians like in L.A. or New York. In Peoria I see fundraisers constantly where the community gets together to fund someone’s operation or funeral expenses. The Dems have to end their allergy to class warfare in order to effective compete again.
Kids today are more and more conservative. My former teachers at my old high school all tell me that kids today are more and more interested in making money, in pleasing their parents, rather than living interesting lives for themselves. Kids like structure and black-and-white positions; they prefer math to English. The conservatives having managed to starve the public-school budgets, now we get instruction in “basic skills”, so that kids will be well-prepared for their lives as employees, rather than being prepared to become citizens in a democracy. This is a conservatizing force, as is the growing religionism in the country.
I think the Left is losing the 30-year culture war. I don’t know what to do to turn things around. I think we have to see things as they are, the way ordinary folks perceive political reality, and I think Rove certainly did that. The left and the Dems engage in so much wishful thinking, it’s like Abby Hoffman trying to levitate the Pentagon.
Sorry for the pessimism.
August 14th, 2007 at 9:36 am
Let’s remember that the main component of the Dems’ current Congressional majority are conservative Dems. The Blue Dogs. I think there was a Faustian bargain in the last election. Are those people going to support workers’ rights, universal healthcare, environmental responsibility?
I don’t know too much about that professor Lakoff, with whom I know Marc disagrees, but from what I saw about his ideas on “framing” issues, I think he was right on. Maybe Lakoff’s work is a case of ‘slowly and painfully working out the surprisingly obvious’, but the Dems have let themselves be out-maneuvered so often these last years.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:00 am
rlc, you’re dead wrong. Gore lost Florida under every rational counting method–even after the Democrats got military ballots tossed out because the military post offices don’t always apply postmarks. To claim otherwise is pure lying or pure stupidity–both of which you are fully willing and capable.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:26 am
I think it’s just as inaccurate to diminish Rove’s abilities as it is to overestimate them. Rove’s reputation was won in Texas, where his success was considerable and relatively longterm. Of course, he’s not a magician and was exploiting shifts in terrain and weaknesses in opponents that weren’t his creation. Rove was undeniably a master campaign tactician – arguably of the worst sort. The problem with the Bush presidency, in a nutshell, is that Rovian electoral tactics were seen as applicable as a governing strategy. Most of what Marc notes above as terrible failures – disagreements over policy goals aside – can be traced to some version of that petty, narrow impulse on the part of the Bush circle.
Where the Democrats have gone most wrong is when they assume that they can mirror a version of that approach “with a human face” by replacing coherent policy with what often appears as a bundle of political tactics. Opportunism will never be erased from politics – it’s soulless opportunism – for which Mitt Romney has become the new posterchild – that increasingly turns people off and should be banished, ideally, from both parties.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Woody, read the report.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:30 am
rlc – don’t try to convince Woody of anything. He doesn’t care about the truth. Not even a little bit.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:34 am
There is one thing that Rove – and Cheney, among others, have been very good at. Their “Policies” have enriched a small slice of society far beyond anyone’s dreams of avarice and someday someone is going to look at the Carlisle Group, at Halliburton/KBR, and at Blackwater – to name some of the more prominent pigs at the trough and see how much money these cronies made from our peculiar form of capitalism.
Ron Susskind’s book on Paul O’Neil reports that when another round of tax cuts came up Bush asked why. “Its our Due,” replied Cheney. And Rove was there to grease rthe wheels.
Yes, money makes the world go round.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:15 am
Nice little review, Marc. Same for Marshall link.
I think of Rove as the embodiment of loyalty, always loyalty, over competence. That and either ‘you’re with us or against us.’ They played these tricks a few dozens of times too often. And the trajectory of the next election shows the rewards. Some council, indeed.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Michael N. Escobar:
“I think the Left is losing the 30-year culture war.”
I think they/we’re doing well on the gay marriage front. And the immigration front. Bush tried to dismantle social security. As Borat would say, “NOT.”
Then Bush added government with the prescription pill thingy. Might not be pure lefty stuff, but it relfects something in the culture.
Pace Marc, I think 2006 was (and 2008 will be) mostly about Iraq. It’s not pretty. Years and years of Saddam + sanctions left Iraq a mess, with the different groups paranoid and unable to deal. American voters want a quiet life. Plus there was Katrina.
August 14th, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Circa 98 I heard Marc Cooper and Christopher Hitchens on a Nation panel. Hitchens, encoraging the crowd to “find a good republican and vote for him”. Confronting the arguement that the upcoming vacent Supreme Court seats might go to Republican by saying this ddn’t mean much. There are always vacancys coming up on the Court.
Well, there was a lot of less than stealer thinking from the Cooper/Hitchens camps in those days; and of course the most debilitating legacy of the Bush years may well be the two reactionary, Federalist society pin ups who now tilt the Court rightward. Amazing that a Capital Punishment stalward like Cooper would look at Bush’s legacy and leave that out; Bush and Rove wanted to make America more like Texas; here they almost certainly sucseded. Ajacent issues this will likely effect in the lives of Americans are too numorous to list here.
As for the rest, where to begin? Cooper writes about Katrina as if it some sort of ending. Does he really thing the anti-goverment Goverment of Bush eroded only Fema? (as if the little matter of lives destroyed by the bungling there were some small natter.)
The hack acadmenic, black-is-white natterings of a simplton like Balter ( the Dems like the Republican “authentic” feelings about the war… whatever happened to the Republican movement for peace I was promised by the blog anyhow?) speak for a pretty small constiuancy at this point. Indeed, the Dems can only beat themselves; but the usual corperate media shlock fest will no doubt do what it can. John Kerry might even insult the troops again by renting a copy of “Cat Balou.”
The vastly overused word “genius” is thrown around with particuliar reckless abandon in our modern political beauty contests. What really put a dunderhead like Bush in the White House in 2000?
“The Clintonites will never forgive Gerth for his Whitewater articules, but who cares?” wrtes the clueless Coop. Do you want this man teaching your kids journalism?
August 14th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
OT – ReadBy alert
Reg, it appears that Andrew Sullivan has tipped towards Obama.
My Hillary Problem
http://tinyurl.com/333f5p
But as long as there is a viable alternative – Obama – there’s still hope for something better.
August 14th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
“… and of course the most debilitating legacy of the Bush years may well be the two reactionary, Federalist society pin ups who now tilt the Court rightward.”
Good point. But Hillary will appoint evil lesbo feminazis to the Court, so not to worry.
I forgot the Terry Shiavo business. That was classic. No doubt the Repugs hurt themselves with that wackiness.
August 14th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Rove, more than any other single human being, was responsible for getting W elected in 2000, when the country was fully at peace in the world, with unprecedented prosperity and rapidly declining crime rates.
W can’t form full sentences, was a failure at the oil business, a mediocre success at school and a Vietnam war evader. How can anyone believe that electing him to the presidency could require anything less than political genius?
Rove recognized that cultural resentment could trump economic reality. Maybe that seems obvious, in hindsight.
True, Rove’s strategy may have run its course and may lead the GOP into a dead end, but what a great run they’ve had with it.
Also, Rove correctly assumed that the Democrats would respond to his strategy by trying to mimic Republicans on national security, rather than by offering a clear alternative to it. Maybe that’s nothing my than chutzpah, but when it pays off so well, you’ve got to give credit for it.
Getting poor and lower-middle class Americans to enthusiastically embrace policies that diminish their own economic opportunity and enrich their bosses bosses is a stroke of genius, no matter how you slice it. Without the ability to do that, the GOP is lost.
August 14th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
reg:
Hah! I have to totally agree with reg but I would add that Rove is not the first of the “political guru’s” and dirty tricksters, you can go way far back in history for that.
I’d like to see “political advisors” like Rove (Bush), Stephanopolus, Morris and Carville (Clinton), Watson and Jordon ( Carter) and the list goes on… see them all outlawed. Perhaps if the American people got to see their politicians in a free-for-all (real) debate instead of these contrived staged shows; without scripts, without preconditions… want to run, gotta take part then maybe we would have more than soundbytes to make up our minds on.
August 15th, 2007 at 6:56 am
While they’re still ice-skating in hell, let me add one more comment that is central to Marc’s derisive litany of Democratic incompetence. Every political success that we look back on as somehow the arrival of a significant new era in American politics can be ascribed more to the failure or percieved failures of the previous “regime” than to the political genius of the “new guy”. FDR didn’t win because of his incredible skills and brilliant platform that swept Americans off their feet – he won because he was running against GOP failure and culpability in the Depression. Ronald Reagan didn’t win because he’s such a brilliant campaigner and the U.S. populace was convinced by a new theory of taxation devised on a napkin and determined that it was a propitious time to destroy the Soviet Empire – he won because of the percieved weakness and failures of the Carter administration, both as regards the hostages in Iran and the oil-shocked, inflation-ridden economy. This is the general course of things in American politics.
August 15th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Tend to agree Reg, yet I am old enough to remember the constant media drumbeat against the shocking deficets Carter was runing. It was framed, and hammered home, as a great moral issue. So why do we hear so little about this during the time Chaney explained that “Reagan proved deficts don’t matter?”
Once again, much comes back to the press and pundantry…
August 15th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I think the press tend to be idiots on most of these issues, but I don’t think Carter lost because of deficits, which aside from any other issues involved aren’t felt, but because of inflation, which was.
August 16th, 2007 at 12:28 am
Well, he was certainly damaged more by the hostage crisis. Which reminds me… how many days has Bin Laden been free since 9-11?