Salon.com > Lou Dubose

The collapse of Karl Rove

Tue, 14 Aug 2007 11:47:00 +0000

A month ago, a friend who has spent his entire career working for the Republican House leadership pulled up beside me at the intersection of Seventh and Pennsylvania in Washington. A House institutionalist, and a fiercely partisan secular Republican, he was oddly cheerful. "Call me next time you're in town," he said. "We'll talk about how George Bush destroyed the Republican Party."

It will be a long conversation.

But the president doesn't get all the credit. If Karl Rove was responsible for the remarkable ascent of the Republican Party since 2000, he is equally responsible for what is beginning to look like its vertical collapse. With the Christian right deeply disappointed at Bush and in search of a candidate for the 2008 election, economic conservatives alienated by the White House's failure to impose fiscal discipline on the Congress when the Republicans were in charge of both houses, and congressional Republicans caught in the undertow of a failing president's failed war, the party Rove predicted would become a permanent majority is no more. Rove could put the party together, but in the end he proved incapable of holding it together.

The Texan who actually governed

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:41:00 +0000

"Welcome to the first day of the new Texas!" Ann Richards growled into a microphone as she began her 1991 inaugural address.

She had just led a parade of supporters north on Congress Avenue, something of a fifth column moving on the Capitol. She had promised them she would use a pair of bolt cutters to open the gates of the Greek-revival governor's mansion to "the people" of Texas. "The people" were blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians, along with the shrinking Anglo majority, in a state that had and would again be dominated by leaders beholden to oil, gas and banking interests.

Old Texas had been run by a cabal the state's then-agriculture commissioner, Jim Hightower, referred to as the "bankers, bullies and bastards who run this state." Richards had defeated a corporate cowboy (and banker) from West Texas and succeeded a Dallas oilman who served as Richard Nixon's undersecretary of defense. (Her 1990 opponent, Clayton Williams, had offended women with a campfire joke made to reporters at his ranch: "Rape is like the weather, you can't do anything about it so you might as well lay back and enjoy it.") Richards' new Texas would broker a division of power among those bankers, bullies and bastards -- and the trial lawyers, environmentalists, consumer activists, feminists, and gay and lesbian political operatives who made Richards governor. If Ann Richards failed to manage that delicate balance of power in the one term she served as governor of this state, she gets some credit for trying.

Willie’s story

Thu, 12 May 2005 19:21:00 +0000

Willie Searcy never got to meet Priscilla Owen. And that's unfortunate. Because as an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Owen once exercised almost complete control over the fate of the working-class kid who always played above his weight on the local rec-league football team -- until the car accident that changed his life and crossed his path with Owen's. The account of Willie Searcy's experience with the Texas high court provides real insight into what sort of federal appeals court judge Owen will be if the Senate approves her lifetime nomination to the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. But Searcy's story has been largely overlooked.

Next week, Majority Leader Bill Frist may call up Owen's nomination for Senate consideration, a move expected to spark the long-awaited showdown over the so-called nuclear option. Owen's Democratic opponents, who have blocked her nomination since 2001, have been focused on her creative attempts to restrict abortion rights for minors in Texas. That also goes for the extreme Christian right, which considers Owen's "pro-life" record a justification for its campaign to persuade the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to eliminate the filibuster rule and confirm Owen. Yet the case that pitted the skinny black kid from Dallas against Ford Motor Co. is as important as Owen's attempt to rewrite the law the Texas Legislature enacted to define a specific process by which minors could get abortions. (Not, as Owen held, to make such abortions almost impossible to obtain.)

Broken Hammer?

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 19:57:00 +0000

The laws of political gravity don't seem to apply to Tom DeLay. If they did, the burden of scandal he bears would have sunk him long ago -- and recently things have gotten even worse for the Republican majority leader from Texas. In the week before congressional Republicans made their rash intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, the Washington Post ran no fewer than seven Page One stories about DeLay. The only story that didn't directly connect DeLay to scandal ran under the headline "DeLay Treated for Irregular Heartbeat." More critical reporting followed after Schiavo's death, while DeLay and Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, implied that judges had killed her.

The most recent stories about DeLay include accounts of:

A $106,921 educational and golfing trip that DeLay, his wife and staff took to Korea on the tab of a registered foreign agent -- a violation of House rules. (The money was funneled through a Washington tax-exempt group and the trip arranged by longtime DeLay associate Jack Abramoff.)

A $70,000 golfing trip DeLay took to England and Scotland, paid for by lobbyists and $50,000 solicited from two Indian tribes. (The Indian money was solicited by Abramoff and moved through a Washington think tank he worked with.)

All about DeLay

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 17:23:00 +0000

"It might surprise and even disappoint a few people to learn that this case is not about Tom DeLay." So began Terry Scarborough's opening argument for the defense in a civil suit against the treasurer of the political action committee Tom DeLay set up in Texas in 2001. The House majority leader won't be in court in Austin, where a former Texas legislator who roomed with him 25 years ago, in the party house called "Macho Manor," is defending himself in a suit filed by five Democrats who lost statehouse races in 2002. But no one looking for a DeLay connection to the proceedings could have been surprised or disappointed. In fact, after the first day in court, it's surprising that no DeLay DNA sample was introduced into evidence and testimony that included an account of DeLay himself accepting an illegal $25,000 contribution.

The decay of DeLay

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 22:24:00 +0000

September was a bad month for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas. The year to come will likely be worse.

On Sept. 30, the House Ethics Committee issued a 62-page report rebuking DeLay for trading support for the congressional candidacy of the son of retiring Rep. Nick Smith, R-Mich., in exchange for Smith's vote on Bush's Medicare bill. "It is improper for a member to offer or link support for the personal interests of another member as part of a quid pro quo to achieve a legislative goal," the committee reported.

Back in 1996 DeLay got a walk in a fundraising scandal involving a front group known as Triad. That scandal cost a Texas businessman $400,000 in fines and resulted in an FBI investigation. But what the FBI turned up was never revealed because then-House Government Reform chairman Dan Burton, R-Ind., blocked attempts by the ranking Democrat on the Committee, Henry Waxman, D-Calif., to subpoena the FBI notes and files.

DeLay Inc.

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 20:00:00 +0000

Peter Cloeren was a virgin. At least when it came to politics. He had never participated in a political campaign. He had never written a check to a candidate for elected office. He lived in a beat-to-shit Texas Gulf Coast town abandoned first by the shipping industry and more recently by big oil.

He was CEO and majority owner of one of the remaining successful and growing businesses in Orange, Texas. Cloeren Inc. was built on the inventive genius of Peter Cloeren Sr. and expanded by Pete Cloeren's hard work and market savvy. The company, which does more than $40 million in annual sales, designs, manufactures, and markets extrusion dies, coextrusion dies and feedblocks. In the English we speak in Texas: tools that inject color into colorless plastic.

Until he was seduced by Tom DeLay -- a seduction that would cost him $37,000 in political contributions, $400,000 in fines, a two-year probated sentence, and a hundred hours in community service -- politics to Pete Cloeren meant showing up to vote for conservative candidates. After his brief involvement with Tom DeLay and an East Texas dentist he was trying to get elected to Congress, Cloeren was done with politics. If Brian Babin lost the 1996 race for the second congressional district in East Texas, Pete Cloeren lost a lot more. And DeLay walked away unscathed. Actually, he flew. Cloeren picked up the $1,320 tab for the executive jet service that made the 180-mile round-trip from Sugar Land to Orange less of a burden for the congressman.

Tom DeLay’s funny-money trail

Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:08:00 +0000

The weekly pen-and-pad press briefings in the office suite of the house majority leader are almost formal events. Thirty to 40 reporters take their seats at a long table and at a second tier of chairs placed against the east and west walls. "The leader" enters, escorted by two aides, Jonathan Grella and Stuart Roy. Roy closes the door at the south end of the elegant dining room and stands beside his boss, who sits at the head of the table; Grella takes his position at the opposite end of the room. Tom DeLay takes his seat, opens with a bit of friendly banter, and begins to work through his agenda. There's so much decorum that DeLay's arrival and departure are almost ceremonial. And there is never any doubt about who is in control. The 56-year-old congressman from Sugar Land, Texas, is smart, authoritative and in charge.

Recently the leader's grip has begun to slip. The first press conference in February ended with a Fox TV news reporter pressing DeLay for answers about the ethics committee's failure to investigate allegations of bribery on the House floor. DeLay didn't respond. The last press conference in February ended with Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter Maria Recio asking about a campaign finance investigation in Texas. "That's not on the agenda," DeLay snapped.

“Bushwhacked!”

Thu, 25 Sep 2003 22:37:00 +0000

In the long run, there is no capitalism without conscience; there is no wealth without character.

-- George W. Bush on Wall Street, July 9, 2002

In the long run, we are all dead.

-- John Maynard Keynes on the long run, 1924

There he was. On the Tuesday after a long Fourth of July weekend. In the ballroom of an ornate Wall Street hotel that once housed the New York Merchants Exchange. Standing in front of a blue-and-white backdrop with the words corporate responsibility printed over and over on it, in case you should miss the point. Promising us "a new ethic" for American business. Our president, Scourge of Corporate Misbehavior.

It was like watching a whore pretend to be dean of Southern Methodist University's School of Theology. But as Luther said, hypocrisy has ample wages.

"Harken," said the Bush camp over and over, "was nothing like Enron." Interestingly enough, it was exactly like Enron in each and every feature of corporate misbehavior, except a lot smaller. A perfect miniature Enron.

Molly Ivins & Lou Dubose

Thu, 05 Oct 2000 19:44:00 +0000

In Shrub, Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose focus their attention on the biggest politician in their home state: George Walker Bush, or "Shrub," as Ivins has nicknamed Bush the Younger. With wit and down-home wisdom, Ivins shares three pieces of advice on judging a politician: "The first is to look at the record. The second is to look at the record. And third, look at the record."

Ivins takes a good, hard look at the record of a man who could be the leader of the United States. Beginning with his post-college military career, Ivins tracks Dubya's unlikely path from a failed congressional bid to a two-term governorship and gives a perceptive and entertaining analysis of Governor George W. Bush.