The question that was first being whispered isn’t being whispered anymore.
Now it’s being asked. How could the man called “Bush’s [political] Brain” go overnight from being the man Bush called “The Architect” due his design and construction of political victories to someone who turn out to be The Dismantler of the Reagan coalition? For months Bush & Co went on the assumption that Karl Knew Best and that other info out there had to be wrong. So what happened?
How did the man they call Bush’s brain get it so wrong?
Rove’s miscalculations began well before election night. The polls and pundits pointed to a Democratic sweep, but Rove dismissed them all. In public, he predicted outright victory, flashing the V sign to reporters flying on Air Force One. He wasn’t just trying to psych out the media and the opposition. He believed his “metrics” were far superior to plain old polls. Two weeks before the elections, Rove showed NEWSWEEK his magic numbers: a series of graphs and bar charts that tallied early voting and voter outreach. Both were running far higher than in 2004. In fact, Rove thought the polls were obsolete because they relied on home telephones in an age of do-not-call lists and cell phones. Based on his models, he forecast a loss of 12 to 14 seats in the House—enough to hang on to the majority. Rove placed so much faith in his figures that, after the elections, he planned to convene a panel of Republican political scientists—to study just how wrong the polls were.
Actually, Rove can’t be faulted for his questioning of whether present polling methodology is sufficiently adapted for the new world of people nixing telemarketers and eschewing land lines for cell phones. Others have raised that issue, as well.
The subtext here, however, is that Robe didn’t simply make an adjustment using his own numbers, the conventional wisdom, reports from the field and other polling data but went totally with his faith in the superiority of himself and his own methodology. Another word is personal “hubris.” AND:
His confidence buoyed everyone inside the West Wing, especially the president. Ten days before the elections, House Majority Leader John Boehner visited Bush in the Oval Office with bad news. He told Bush that the party would lose Tom DeLay’s old seat in Texas, where Bush was set to campaign. Bush brushed him off, Boehner recalls. “Get me Karl,” the president told an aide. “Karl has the numbers.”
So to Bush, too, Karl was the one who knew what was really going on. As Rove put it in a quote that will live in political history, others had “the math” but he had “THE” math.
But Newsweek goes on to say that not all GOP bigwigs — unlike Bush — simply assumed that Rove had to be correct because he was Rove or because the President believed Rove was correct. Because another subtext of this Newsweek piece is that there were many GOPers who were sort of like the lockstep conservative talk show hosts who would loyally and quickly adjust their line no matter what their gut told them because Bush or Rove made an assertion.
One of those was GOP chairman Ken Mehlman who emerges from this as a political realist and independent thinker:
The numbers looked a lot less rosy to the other architect of the campaign—RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. It was Mehlman who built the much-vaunted turnout machine. But he feared that many inside the party were relying too much on technology, like voter databases, and had lost sight of the bigger picture: that voters were turning against them. “We’ve built a great new car, but the gasoline for the car isn’t us; it’s the candidates and the issues,” Mehlman told NEWSWEEK. There was no bigger issue than the war, which Rove had pushed as a winning theme for the GOP. As he flew back to D.C. on a private jet two days before the elections, Mehlman scribbled his predictions on a card—not to be revealed until after the elections. His numbers were much closer than Rove’s: the GOP would lose 23 in the House (5 short of the final tally), 5 in the Senate (1 shy) and 6 governors (spot on). Last week Mehlman announced he would step down and pursue opportunities in the private sector.
So Mehlman used his own analysis and declined to put his own reasoning in a lockbox so that someone else (Rove) could set the definition of reality.
And Rove? Apparently he thinks “denial” is a river:
Rove blames complacent candidates for much of the GOP’s defeat. He says even some scandal-tainted members won when they followed what he calls “the program” of voter contacts and early voting. “Where some people came up short was where they didn’t have a program,” he told NEWSWEEK. But even Rove concedes that there were several hardworking incumbents, like Mike Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania’s Eighth District, who simply couldn’t overcome the odds. In an election overwhelmed by war and scandal, the program was no match for their party’s problems.
Couple this and other Rove post-election comments and it’s clear he feels the election is a kind of fluke.
If Bush has the same attitude, don’t look for the White House to work with the Democrats on many issues, but to instead throw down the gauntlet. Why work with people who simply got in because people on your side are guilty of political negligence? If voters really want Republicans and Democrats only won because some GOP candidates were lazy, then the logical course would be to battle them tooth and nail, because in the next election you KNOW you are going to win (rather than adjust your course to win over lost voters).
Most likely, Rove, like Bush, has trouble readily admitting errors and that parts of his previously-winning strategy of “mobilization elections” proved to be a miscalculation in 2006.
It was a strategy that assumed that the coalition was in fine working order, not frayed at the edges with libertarians, traditional Goldwater Republicans and even some Evangelicals starting to stray. Rove’s 2006 playbook was not adjusted to take into account widespread voter ire over corruption.
The most glaring flaw is that it failed to take into account something we have repeatedly noted here: the steady flight of some of the key voters who had held put the coalition over the top before — vital chunks of independent and moderate voters.
These are the voters sometimes called irrelevant by leftwing Democratic and rightwing Republican activists who seek purer paths for their respective parties. Perhaps that assertion will be retired now . But don’t hold your breath.
The net result is that Rove will likely retain a bright future helping Republican post-Bush-era candidates, but he’ll probably never again see the day when his opinion that something is reality will be unquestioningly taken as THE math — or THE reality.
And it’s likely that, for the next two years, he has lost part of Bush’s brain.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.