We'll go no more a-Rove-ing

Aug. 13, 2007 | With the departure of Karl Rove the Bush administration now enters its last throes. As a legacy for his patron, Rove has designed the public relations offensive for the fall presidential campaign to attempt to corner congressional Democrats through a combination of Gen. David Petraeus' forthcoming report on the "surge" in Iraq and presidential budget vetoes; but once those tactics are played the political string runs out. President Bush will be left with the unalloyed counsel of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose endgame transcends Rove's machinations. "I don't worry about the polls," Cheney said on CNN's "Larry King Live" on July 31. One more hypothetical restraint on Cheney has been removed.

Rove's resignation marks a tacit recognition of the failure of his theory of political realignment, though hardly of its consequences. Trailing him out of the West Wing is the cloud of a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee that seeks his testimony about his primary role in purging U.S. attorneys for partisan purposes. But even when Rove leaves government service at the end of August, Bush will extend the protective cover of executive privilege.

Rove's merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an intense and thorough politicization. Indeed, Rove's ambitious plan was tantamount to a proto-Sovietization. Even science has been suppressed in the name of the party line, recalling the Lysenko episode. Cheney and Rove acted as the pincers of the unitary executive. While Cheney sought to concentrate unaccountable power in the presidency, Rove brought down the anvil of politics on the professional career staff.

Rove's radicalization of government was early described by the first member of the administration to quit in disgust, John DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor and the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He discovered that "compassionate conservatism," Rove's slogan for Bush's 2000 campaign, was little more than a sham. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," said DiIulio.

Rove's saga is a rags-to-riches success story of a political serial killer. His first involvement in a political campaign was to conduct a dirty trick against a candidate running for Illinois state treasurer. After Rove dropped out of the University of Utah, his promise was recognized and he was appointed executive director of the College Republicans. Donald Segretti, ringmaster for the Committee to Reelect the President of a gang of dirty tricksters engaged in what he called "ratfucking," recruited Rove. Rove conducted one session training young Republicans to sift through the garbage of opponents. In the Watergate scandal, Segretti was sentenced to prison for forging campaign literature. The FBI questioned Rove, but dropped its investigation of the small fry. Yet he would become the greatest rat fucker of them all. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, named Rove chairman of the College Republicans and, even more fortuitously, appointed him as a handler of his obstreperous older son. It was love at first sight, at least from the nerdy Rove's point of view. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma -- you know, wow," he said later.

Rove weathered rough storms, including being fired in 1992 from the Bush for President campaign by the candidate himself for leaking damaging information to conservative columnist Robert Novak about the elder Bush's close friend and top fundraiser Robert Mosbacher.

In 1981, Rove established a direct-mail firm, Karl Rove & Co., in Austin, Texas, which became his cockpit for the destruction of the state Democratic Party. Over more than the next decade, he was involved in dozens of campaigns marked by dirty tricks, sexual innuendo and the use of friendly FBI agents and prosecutors to harass Democrats. In Texas and elsewhere, he laid the groundwork for his later efforts. The whispering campaign in 1994 against Gov. Ann Richards claiming that she was a lesbian and the rumor-mongering that an esteemed Alabama state judge was really a secret pedophile were harbingers of the smear campaign against Sen. John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Rove's exploitation of prosecutors pioneered his later politicization of U.S. attorneys.

Rove promoted the Bush campaign for president in 2000 as a national extension of his realignment of Texas politics. He cast Bush as William McKinley and by inference himself as the political boss Mark Hanna. Rove's historical analogy was either the autodidact's self-inflated misreading of history or a shrewd manipulation of a gullible and careerist press corps, or both. Whatever Rove's pretension, Bush lost the 2000 election, unlike McKinley in 1896, which was a major victory of the Republican Party. There was no parallel except in the name of the party: One election marked a genuine realignment of Republican support, firmly consolidating its uncertain majority since the Civil War. The other was a gift handed to the loser of the popular majority in a decision not so contrived since Dred Scott. George W. Bush is less William McKinley than Rutherford B. Hayes.

Nonetheless, Bush began governing as if he had a mandate for the most radical presidency ever. The story is told that before the inauguration Bush pollster Matthew Dowd (now another disillusioned and lost soul) wrote a memo to Rove explaining that there was no middle in American politics and that only those who turned out their maximum base through polarization would win. Yet, Dowd memo or not, Bush, Cheney and Rove were prepared to govern as radicals. The theory helped justify what had been decided already.

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