White House political maven Karl Rove’s sudden and unexpected announcement via a friendly news organization (the Wall Street Journal) that he’ll quit at the end of the month because it’s time has been met with surprise.
And few believe he is just quitting because he has had enough of politics.
The Bush administration is staving off a host of Congressional and other investigations into its policy and political dealings. If Rove is “Bush’s brain” does his departure amid these investigations mean the administration is being politically lobotomized?
Reaction in news outlets and around the blogosphere is spreading now at lightning pace (read examples at the end of this post).. (Be sure to read posts on Rove’s departure on this site by Shaun Mullen, Clarrissa Pinkola Estes, Michael van der Galien, and Robert Stein with perhaps more posts on Rove’s departure from other TMVers during the day).
Rove (his bio is HERE) insists he has not been forced out but wants to write a book and teach. But it’s likely few will buy that given his high profile (including in recent months at some public events), his continual role behind the scenes and reports of his contact with Republican members of Congress.
A few thoughts on Rove:
(1) He threw out the old conventional wisdom that to win parties must try to create winning coalitions that also include attracting independent, moderate and centrist voters.
(2) He put into place a new kind of politics where not just campaigning but governing meant appealing to and serving members of a given party’s base with little effort to placate, win over or work with Americans or elected officials who weren’t in the party’s base.
(3) This worked well when he could get enough party and base members to win an election by a) demonizing opponents & b) demoralizing or dividing opponents. Was it the wave of the future?
(4) It proved to be a highly-flawed strategy since there was NO POLITICAL SAFETY NET. Rove and Bush’s political style basically gave a half-a-peace sign to Democrats, independents, moderates, moderate Republicans, members of Bush 41’s administration, and Goldwater-descended conservatives.
(5) Winning and governing by being in a constant state of war against enemies who are painted as a danger to the country could only work if he and and the administration enjoyed widespread credibility. Rove and Bush found their credibility had crumbled and could not count on not just a solid base, but a base of the SAME SIZE.
(6) Rove admired President William McKinley due to the assassinated President’s role in transforming the political scene in favor of the Republicans. He felt his time was such a historical watershed where he could engineer a Republican-dominant era that could last years. History will likely conclude that he overreached and misread modern political history.
(7) Rove was a legend until it seemed like he lost his political touch. His calculations on the outcome for Republicans in 2006 seemed more the product of Pollyanna than the Rove of old, his decision to have Bush push for Social Security reform after his 2004 victory WITHOUT truly trying to bring Democrats on board (having Bush go out on the hustings as if he was campaigning again and demonizing opponents) destroyed even a thin hope that Bush could build coalitions with the Democrats, his dream of attracting Hispanic voters to the GOP via comprehensive immigration reform enraged the base, and his constant comments that Iraq really didn’t count as much with voters as some nervous Republicans thought were either a tin ear or a loss of political realism.
See roundups at Pajamas Media and memeorandum.
Here’s a cross section of some other reaction from the media and from weblogs:
MEDIA REACTIONS AND STORY LEADS:
—The New York Times:
Karl Rove leaves the White House in anything but victory. His legendary reputation was seriously diminished by the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, and has been eroded almost every day since then, as President Bush has struggled through his second term.
There probably was no better sign of how far this White House has fallen than at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames this weekend, a gathering of probably the most committed Republicans in the country. This was where Mr. Rove displayed his political skills to the country in 1999, steering Mr. Bush to a victory in a nonbinding poll that nonetheless cemented his position as his party’s prohibitive favorite.
Mr. Bush’s name was barely mentioned in Ames on Saturday, much less Mr. Rove’s. The winner of the contest, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, offered a pretty grim verdict on the last seven years in Washington when he said, “If there has ever been a time that we needed to see change in Washington, it is now.â€
Karl Rove, who set the political strategy for U.S. President George W. Bush’s two White House victories and became a favorite target for critics, said on Monday he was resigning.
Rove, the White House deputy chief of staff known as “The Architect” for guiding Bush from governor of Texas to two terms as president, is the latest senior aide to quit as the clock ticks toward the end of Bush’s presidency.
Dubbed “Bush’s brain” by critics, the fiercely partisan Rove is known for his command of political machinery and his drive for an enduring Republican dominance of government.
“I just think it’s time,” Rove, 56, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal announcing his August 31 departure.
“There’s always something that can keep you here and, as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family.”
Rove’s departure could complicate Bush’s agenda for his remaining 17 months. Some critics have pointed to troubles with the Iraq war as well as legislative failures to reform Social Security and immigration as part of Rove’s legacy.
—Paul Wehner defends Rove. Read it in full. The beginning and the end:
Before taking my job as director of the Office of the Office of Strategic Initiatives – I had until then been deputy director for Presidential speechwriting — I asked others who knew Karl Rove about him; after all, I didn’t know Karl all that well and I was about to work directly for him. And so I spoke to Josh Bolten, then deputy chief of staff, who had recommended me for the OSI job. And Josh had a very short summary of Karl: “He’s brilliant, he’s a genius, and he’s a deeply wonderful human being.”
The ending :
Some day books will be written about what a phenomenon of nature this man is. But some day books should be written about what a really fine man he is. He was the most relentlessly upbeat person in the White House, giving counsel and encouragement to all, and showing great kindness to many of us and our families. And of course what we all learned as well as what a tremendously strong person this policy wonk and former nerd from Utah is. He withstood pressure, unfair pressure, that would have broken lesser men, and he did it with good cheer, extraordinary equanimity, and without every becoming cynical.
It turns out Josh Bolten was right.
A CROSS SECTION OF SOME WEBLOG REACTION:
—Glenn Reynold’s link to the story has this headline: “But No Frog March.”
—Andrew Sullivan:
Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war – and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency. His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president’s eager approval, into the political culture and into the conservative soul.
—Michelle Malkin is shedding no tears (read it all):
The Left will harp on Plameout. John Little rounds-up reaction and fresh conspiracy theories from the far Left.
But here’s what I find striking about Rove’s exit interview:
Not a word here about the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies.
And not a word about the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty, which will be the everlasting stain Rove leaves behind….
….Imagine how much better off the White House and the Republican Party might be now if he had, in fact, left a year ago.
—Michael Tomasky on The Guardian’s blog:
Karl 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.
His long MUST-READ post ends with this:
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.
. The phrase “spending time with the family” has become so hackneyed that it’s a staple of late night comedians. In the end, Bush will be left to run out the clock, virtually alone, on Iraq, outsourcing of jobs, tax cuts for the rich and a variety of other ills plaguing the country.
The one remaining question would seem to be… will Rove be pardoned now, or will the pardons wait until January ’09 and come in a massive batch as they turn out the lights?
For the first three months after September 11, 2001, George W. Bush behaved as if he was President of all the United States. By the time the decision to invade Iraq was underway, early in 2002, he had in effect begun to act as president of “the base.” (Had the decision to invade been made that early? Yes.) There was less and less effort to engage all Americans, despite differences; more and more stress on de-legitimizing critics and criticism itself…..
……Political strategists are divisive; that’s their job. But there are different ways of dividing, and the master of the 51-49 “turn out the base” “screw the moderates” win leaves the country weaker, nastier, and more mutually suspicious than he found it.
Hail and farewell, Karl Rove. Officials here in the propaganda ministry send you a salute.
CQ readers will remember that I have had the pleasure — and I use that word deliberately — of meeting Karl Rove twice, once in DC and once here in the Twin Cities. On both occasions, Rove kept the room laughing while displaying a remarkable recall of numbers and polling trends. Despite everything that had been launched at him, Rove obviously relished his work and enjoyed talking about it. He pulled no punches, and he answered every question asked of him. Many of us were skeptical of his optimism in 2006, and correctly so, as it turned out, but he never took offense or belittled anyone for it.
His departure will no doubt be the subject of celebration for the president’s most vociferous critics, but I think they’ll wind up missing him more than the president’s supporters. They won’t have Rove to kick around any more, and after the shock wears off, it will become apparent how silly all the Rove-kicking was from the beginning.
I’ve always felt that the attacks on Rove were misdirected—more attention should have been devoted to the President himself, less to his underlings. That’s the way a narrative that’s strayed somewhat from the observeable facts can tie you into knots. Although there are very, very few ways in which one can compare George W. Bush to Ronald Reagan, one that I think is fair is that both were personally underestimated during their presidencies. I think that lots and lots of things that have been attributed to Karl Rove or Dick Cheney or whomever are actually Bush himself. Has no one ever heard of a lightning rod?
Lefties casting this as a “get out while the getting’s good†move, but that presumes he was likely to be got, and there’s been no indication Dems have as much as a fingerhold. Does the Bush admin actually fear the emergence of skeletons? Maybe. Look for the theories to start emerging shortly. But I doubt it. Late admin exit not particularly unusual, even for key advisors.
Guess he’s getting out as the Titanic he set sail is pointing nose first and sinking fast. I doubt he’ll get off his Crackberry addiction — trust me, he’ll always be on speed dial to Bush
.
—R.J. Eskow:
And now the speculation starts. We may never know exactly why Karl Rove chose this moment to resign. The only thing we know for sure is that the reasons he gave weren’t the real ones – to be with his family, to write a book, and because Josh Bolten told everybody to leave now or stay until the bitter end….
….Pick one. All we know for sure is that Karl Rove is gone. That means that from now on at Correspondents’ Dinners, David Gregory dances alone.
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.