The news that White House political maven Karl Rove is resigning August 31st to basically spend more time with his family (supposedly…really…no kidding) has sent shock waves through political circles, the mainstream media and the blogosphere yesterday.
The stories and opinions are still percolating. But a lingering question now becomes:
So the Republicans’ political Elvis has supposedly left the building.
But HAS he?
And has he transformed the building so it’ll never look the same again?
First, some more of the opinions. The Washington Post:
But as Karl Rove resigns from the administration, a question lingers over his legacy: What, exactly, did the architect build?
His advocates credit him with devising a winning strategy twice in a row for a presidential candidate who seemed to start out with myriad weaknesses. His detractors blame Rove for a style of politics that deepened divisions in the country, even after the unifying attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Both sides attributed outsize qualities to him, and he enjoyed mythic status for much of the Bush presidency.
But few people — including his Republican allies — believe Rove succeeded in what he set as his ultimate goal: creating a long-lasting GOP majority in the country that could reverse the course set 70 years ago by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“He had visions of building a long-term coalition like the New Deal coalition for the Democrats,” said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), who spent two years at the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House. “The party right now is not moving forward. It’s moving backward. The branding for the party is at a generational low.” Davis said that is due largely to the war in Iraq.
Rove’s admirers and friends say he deserves credit for two undeniable accomplishments: building the Republican Party in Texas in the 1990s and securing GOP control at the national level, at least for a time, at the turn of the 21st century.
The Post’s Eugene Robinson:
Buh-bye, Karl Rove. On your way out of the White House, don’t let the screen door hit you where the dog should have bit you.
I can’t say that I’ll miss George W. Bush’s longtime political strategist — the man Bush used to call “Boy Genius” — because, well, that would be such a lie. And anyway, to quote one of the great country song titles — “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” — I don’t believe for a minute that Rove really intends to withdraw from public life. I predict he’ll be writing op-eds, giving interviews to friendly news outlets and calling Republican presidential candidates to warn them not to abandon Bush, no matter how low his approval ratings slide. Rove’s new job will be to put lipstick on Bush’s hideous legacy — and, in the process, freshen up his own.
Rove’s reputation as the great political thinker of his era took a severe beating in November, when, despite his confident predictions of a Republican victory, Democrats took control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
But let’s give the man his due. Karl Rove managed to get George Walker Bush elected president of the United States, not once but twice. Okay, you’re right, the first time he needed big assists from Katherine Harris (speaking of lipstick) and the U.S. Supreme Court, but still. Honesty requires the acknowledgment that Rove was very good at what he did.
The problem, of course, is that what Rove did and how he did it were awful for the nation.
Indeed: Rove essentially solidified moving the Talk Radio Culture into the political culture. Talk radio, which turned the at times wonkish, boring and cliche-ridden discussion of politics into verbal professional wrestling (THREE HOURS of a host bashing and demonizing one political party??) was now the political tactic and strategy of the day.
Instead of trying to mobilize like-minded partisans to tune into a program for red meat (something left and right wing talk radio both do these days), coalition building and consensus were eschewed in favor of mobilizing the passionate faithful to get them to the polls to save America (its physical security and its values) from The (Dreaded) Other Side.
The result: a polarization of America that continues, even with his departure (note by the way how some on the right and left now talk about the “mushy middle” since now people who don’t belong to either party or who aren’t totally left or right are labeled as enablers just as Rove & Co have labeled Democrats as enablers of terrorism…showing that there is a Take No Prisoners Era underway where even independent voters are painted as evil or dumb).
Bob Novak, who had a good professional and personal relationship with Rove, has a different view (and he is a good reporter):
The most useless speculation today in Washington is whom White House chief of staff Josh Bolten might choose to replace Karl Rove. He is genuinely irreplaceable. Nobody will attempt to combine the political and policy functions as Rove has done. Indeed, fellow Republicans question whether he should have attempted the feat himself….
….While Rove’s decamping back to Texas is unlikely to defang the opposition, the mere fact that it is mentioned as a possibility reveals the ambiguity of his legacy. Rove is one of the canniest and most successful managers in American political history. Yet he is viewed within his own party’s ranks, especially on Capitol Hill, as part of the problem afflicting the Grand Old Party.
Rove is unique, a rare political mechanic with a comprehensive knowledge of American political history.
He suggests Rove may have left to take away a Democratic issue:
The desire to get Rove has outlived the Plame case, with Democratic lawmakers trying to make him the target in the firings of U.S. attorneys. Since there will be no impeachment proceedings against the president, Rove has been the best available surrogate.
No wonder that a leading Republican has been asking around whether ferocious Democratic partisans in Congress might ease up if Rove were no longer there to kick around. That provides melancholy exit music for one of the most effective and most powerful of all presidential aides.
And Rove suggested as much in an interview, noting that to Democrats he’s “Moby Dick.” (Democrats probably agree that Rove is at least half of that name.)
Former Bush speechwriter David Frum:
Wedge politics unites a large constituency on one side, while splitting the coalition on the other side. In the 1970s, crime was a wedge issue: pushing white urban Democrats away from their black and liberal New Deal allies. In this strict sense, the only wedge issue Mr. Rove deployed was immigration, and he deployed it against his own side, dividing business donors from the conservative voting base.
Polarization, however, is Karl Rove’s specialty. He united his own base on one side — and united his opponents on the other. Al Gore and John Kerry each won 48 percent, the best back-to-back performance by a losing party since the 19th century. Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.
But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. The Democrats are the party of the top and bottom of American society; the Republicans do best in the great American middle, which is losing ground.
Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.
The Wall Street Journal (which broke the story of the resignation in what by any journalistic standard was a well-packaged and impressive “scoop”) writes in part:
Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign strategy was explicitly to be “a uniter, not a divider.” The contested election outcome made the Bush Presidency polarizing from the start, however, and some Democrats have never considered him legitimate. The debate over Iraq and Mr. Bush’s response to the war on terror has compounded the rancor. Mr. Rove is hardly any more “divisive” than any other political strategist; has everyone forgotten James Carville or Harold Ickes? The difference is that Mr. Rove’s remarkable run of success — first in Texas, then nationwide from 2000-2004 — has caused many on the political left to assume he must be cheating. Otherwise, how could anyone vote for these Texas yahoos?
…..Mr. Rove is no Merlin or Rasputin, as much as liberals and some reporters want to believe it. He is above all a George Bush man. His rare mastery of history, demographics and policy made him a formidable political force, and we suspect it is his success far more than his methods that infuriates his critics.
Along the way, Mr Rove constantly compared himself to the patron saint of US political consultants, Mark Hanna, who guided William McKinley to the Oval Office at the end of the 19th century. Like his idol, Mr Rove saw himself as engineering not just an electoral victory, but also a realignment of American politics that would leave Republicans in power for a generation.
By those standards, Mr Rove’s career has been a failure. Far from securing an enduring “natural” majority, the Republicans were defeated in last year’s congressional elections, dragged down by a presidency that has become one of the most unpopular of modern times. The current crop of Republican presidential contenders are competing with each other to distance themselves from Mr Bush and the Iraq war.
Nevertheless, Mr Rove has left a mark on American political history. His departure marks the true end of an era and his name will live on in the adjective Rovian, albeit with negative connotations. It carries with it the whiff of dirty tricks, which were blamed on Mr Rove, although mostly without conclusive proof.
Bad things tended to happen to rival campaigns when Mr Rove was in charge, but the dirty work tended to be done by surrogates and supporters with no demonstrable link to his office. (John McCain’s challenge in the 2000 primaries was derailed by a rumour campaign in South Carolina, accusing the Vietnam veteran of a lack of patriotism. In 2004, John Kerry was undone by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who questioned his Vietnam record.)
The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes writes:
KARL ROVE IS the first to admit it: he’s become a myth, a man from whom political magic is expected. Last fall, for instance, Republicans around the country and even in the White House waited for Rove to devise a campaign strategy that would keep Republicans from losing the House and Senate and George Bush from becoming a lame duck president. But instead of a Rove miracle, Republicans and Bush suffered a terrible defeat.
Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation. He not only is a breathtakingly smart strategist but also a clever tactician. He knows history, understands the moods of the public, and is a visionary on matters of public policy. But he is not a magician.
Political advisers like Rove offer advice, not magic. And Rove’s advice has been very good over the years. He got Bush to run as “a different kind of Republican” in 2000–that is, different from Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay. And he made sure that as president, Bush (unlike his father) stayed closed to the conservative base of the Republican party.
Rove’s most impressive achievement was his successful strategy for Bush’s re-election in 2004. It was an outside-in strategy of holding the base and reaching out from it to attract independents, soft Republicans, and conservative Democrats. His assumption–a correct one, in my view–was that the conservative Republican base was closer to the political center in America than was the Democrats’ liberal base.
I’m not sure Bush would have won if he’d pursued a more conventional strategy of largely ignoring conservatives, running from the center, and focusing on moderate and independent voters. He would have spent the campaign being attacked by conservatives as well as Democrats.
But Barnes seems to setting up a straw man argument.
Bush and Rove could have appealed to conservatives and also extended olive branches to the country’s moderates and center (centrists and moderates are not always the same as this Daily Kos diary notes).
But instead, the U.S. has seen under Rove and Bush something nearly unprecedented:
A government that was government of the base, by the base and for the base — essentially writing off and ignoring the views of Democrats, liberals, centrists, moderates and independent voters….and the result has been that as Bush’s base has shrunk, he has had no safety net of other voters to fall back on. If you demonize your political opponents, or dismiss them as being ideological wusses, why would they be there for you when you need their help? And why would they give you the benefit of the doubt when for so long they heard themselves being portrayed in inaccurate and negative terms?
The question now is: Rove will soon be gone.
But will he be gone?
The answer: it’s unlikely.
Does anyone REALLY think that Rove won’t be on the phone giving advice to Bush and other GOPers in 2008?
If so, you should know that on Easter a nice, furry rabbit will come into your house and hide eggs…..Or I have a pre-owned car that isn’t a used car…
Additionally, Rove is leaving the political scene with a polity more polarized and strident than ever, with each side insisting voters choose sides or be considered one of the enemy on the other side.
The culture of political polarization is now more firmly embedded in American life than ever. This week, show biz giant Merv Griffin died and it was noted that his influence helped shape American entertainment culture. Rove has helped shape our political culture — and not in a positive way.
But unless there is some major event to reverse it, GOP registration is now down, progressive talk radio shows get dozens of callers from former Republicans who say they’re going to become independents or switch parties, and polls show young people are increasingly liberal and favor the Democrats. . A new survey shows the electorate has shifted towards the Democrats.
So Rove mobilized voters — members of the younger generation, Goldwater-descended Republicans who weren’t as quick as Rush or Sean to jettison principles to embrace the latest White House position at variance with traditional conservatism, and some Democrats who might have been willing to work with Republicans but were enraged by suggestions that they didn’t care about terrorism, national security and were cowards who wanted to cut and run.
Rove might go down (in some circles) as a political genius — but he won’t go down as someone who tried to foster a kinder, gentler America.
Wait…where did we hear that phrase before?
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.