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Gandalf Grey
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Karl Rove and the Damage Done
By David Michael Green
Created Aug 17 2007 - 9:29am
Imagine you could be a gambler, and never lose. Now you understand Karl
Rove.
How can a gambler never lose? Only when he gets to throw the dice, and pick
up the winnings, while somebody else stakes the bet.
To a certain degree, that's the story of any political consultant. Somebody
else finances the campaign, somebody else is the candidate, and the
consultant becomes a political genius if the candidate wins, or the poor guy
who just happened to be stuck with a lousy horse should the candidate lose.
The only thing at stake for the consultant is his reputation, but even that
hardly seems vulnerable. Bob Shrum managed to amass an amazing 0-7 won-loss
record in the presidential sweepstakes and still got invited by John Kerry
to make it 0-8 in 2004.
But Karl Rove is much more than a successful consultant to presidential
candidates. His candidate made it to the White House, and to a very large
extent, Rove was handed the keys to both the policy and politics hot-rods
when they got there. That means that when we say that somebody else provided
the stakes with which Rove got to play, we're no longer just talking about
campaign contributors with dollars on the line, or candidates with
reputations to be made or lost. Now we're talking about American soldiers
and Iraqi civilians who've paid the highest price possible for Rove's policy
decisions. Now we are talking about American citizens who will be working
long hours to finance the debt that Rove ran up. Now we're talking about an
entire planet suffering the consequences of global warming negligence for
generations to come. And that's just the start.
Rove The Gambler came to the White House with the best deal imaginable from
his perspective. He could, in governing, gamble for the highest stakes, and
if he won he would be feared and revered as the greatest political genius of
his generation, perhaps of the century. But if he lost, other people would
pay the price. To those of us whose morality chip wasn't somehow misplaced
on the assembly line, such a game might seem momentarily tempting but
ultimately too reprehensible to play. Not so for Karl, who not only played,
but played with a vengeance, literally and figuratively.
Rove had a dream, and he brought it with him to the White House. The first
thing to notice if one wants to understand the character of this man - and
therefore also the character of the presidency he drove - is the nature of
this dream. It was not Karl Rove's great aspiration in life to cure cancer,
or eradicate poverty, or bring peace to the Middle East, or double the
number of college students in America. No, handed the keys to the government
of the world's sole superpower, Rove had something else in mind - something
infinitely more meager. His great dream in life was to emulate his hero,
Mark Hanna, and reestablish a generational-long hegemony for the Republican
Party in America.
If that seems like a small-minded aspiration for a man who fancies himself
as a student of history and the big picture, it is. But all the more so
because Rove was prepared to do anything in order to achieve his little
goal. It is not unfair to say, then, that Iraq has been smashed, a million
people murdered, the American military broken, the American treasury
depleted, the environment dangerously threatened, the Constitution tattered,
and the country's reputation eviscerated - all on a gamble that things would
break the other way and... what? Leave the GOP in power for the next
quarter-century. Oops. As Maxwell Smart might've said, "Missed it by that
much!" What an incredible amount wagered for so little potential return,
even if it had gone all right.
Of course, the greatest irony of all is that, not only did the Karl Rove
wrecking machine destroy all of those things that most people care about,
but it also wound up profoundly demolishing the very goals that Rove himself
most sought. The Bush presidency is utterly in the toilet, and it would seem
clear even with 17 months remaining that it will be regarded as the very
worst presidency across all of American history. As for the Republican
Party, its woes were only beginning to become evident with the election
blow-out of 2006. Not many people can say that they managed to lose control
of both houses of Congress in one election. That rarely happens. But Karl
Rove did it.
And 2008 will be even more devastating. Rove might even be correct in
arguing that the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton and that she is
enough of a liability to cost her party the White House, even in a can't
miss year. I doubt it, because if there's one thing Clinton is, it's smart,
and if there's another, it's ruthless, and she will therefore turn the
Republican candidate - with his help, no doubt, as we're already seeing
today - into a clone of George W. Bush. Faced with the choice of the
obnoxious but harmless Hillary, on the one hand, and four or eight more
years of Bushism, on the other, enough voters will hold their nose and
choose aggravation over devastation, handing Clinton the White House. But
regardless of what happens in the presidential race, congressional elections
will be absolutely devastating for the GOP, not only widening Democratic
majorities in both houses, and not only ending both the Republicans'
capacity and will to act as a block on legislative progress, but actually
threatening the very existence of the party itself. This happy problem,
which couldn't possibly be visited upon a nicer group of fasc..., er,
people, will only then be amplified in coming years and elections, as
today's young voters - who have already rejected the Republican Party -
matriculate through the electoral system, replacing dinosaur GOP devotees
who cut their teeth on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Ironically enough, then, Rove destroyed the very thing that he had mortgaged
everything for in seeking its empowerment. And even more ironic yet, he may
well have created the very antithesis of what he most coveted: There may
well be generational dominance of a single party in our future, yes - just
not the one that Rove happened to have in mind. While many of us can't be
bothered to shed even crocodile tears for the demise of the Republicans, the
collateral damage from Rove's all-in bet has been devastating to everything
else that we care about. But, again, no worries for him. He bet with other
people's stakes, and he can probably still get lots of work from those
candidates willing to do anything to win office (read virtually every
Republican).
I don't know what happens in a childhood to produce a figure like Karl Rove,
but it can't have been good. Like a serial killer with ice-water running
through his veins, for whom the idea of compassion or remorse is a foreign
concept, Rove is the quintessential amoral man - the very definition of a
sociopath. Don't take the way he treats you personally - it's not that he
doesn't like you. He just utterly couldn't give a **** one way or the other,
dude. But woe unto you if you possess something that he wants, like money, a
vote, cannon fodder capability, or shock troop potential. He will simply say
or do whatever is necessary to liberate you from your dollars, your common
sense or your life in order to achieve his goals. There are myriad examples,
but one which is highly illustrative is Rove's response to Hurricane
Katrina. While you and I looked at our television screens and saw there a
disaster in which compassion and immediate action were the watchwords of the
day, Rove - the guy Bush put in charge of the crisis - was at that exact
same moment spinning the gears in his head, literally thinking instead about
the partisan political implications of relocating a quarter-million black
(and therefore likely Democratic) voters out of the state, thus perhaps
putting Louisiana back in the Republican column in future elections.
It's no wonder that a guy with such empathy defects could spot George W.
Bush coming from miles away, like freight train rolling down the mountain.
Bush was the perfect partner for the exploits of someone like Rove, who once
trained under both Donald Segretti and Lee Atwater. Jim Hightower (himself
one of the many unfortunate members of the Rovian Wreckage Club) once mused
that Bush pere - infinitely more sane and humane than his son, though still
borderline on both fronts - was born on third base, thinking he hit a
triple. If that's so, the mind strains to find the appropriate metaphor for
the Boy King. Perhaps we could say that he was handed ownership of the
entire ball club based on his family name, only to think he had earned it on
his own, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Trouble is, that's no
metaphor at all - it was quite literally true. Sigh.
In any case, it was just this child of privilege who - unlike a similarly
situated Roosevelt or Kennedy - utterly lacked the compassion thing, that
Rove picked out to be his perfect pony. There would be no political tactic
too cheap, no empty bumper-sticker slogan too banal, no policy choice in the
service of down-and-dirty politics too destructive, and no shattering of the
very fabric of constitutional governance too egregious with George W. Bush
as his candidate and president. Rove told him what to do and say, and Bush
did it. For a while, though only with the massive assistance of 9/11, it
worked.
Nevertheless, from the beginning, I found the notion that Karl Rove was a
political genius to be as offensive as it was shortsighted. (And what does
it say about the wisdom of our wonderful national punditry that they
continued to perceive him as such, in some cases even after November 2006?)
But the idea that Rove is a political genius is even more absurd today. In
fact, the man has been an abject failure, a flaming disaster, by every
metric that counts. Whether we compare his performance to his own
aspirations, or we add up the overt wreckage, or the more subtle damage, or
if we consider what could have been - in every case this "genius" is
revealed in reality to be a pathetic loser.
First, Rove can be easily demonstrated to have completely failed even
according to just the limited goals of his own ambition, leaving aside for
the moment the matter of its sheer moral vacuousness. In his cover story on
Rove's implosion in The Atlantic, Joshua Green reports that the Great Guru
had five particular initiatives in mind after capturing the White House, all
in service to forcing into existence his dream of a permanent Republican
realignment. He planned to "establish education standards, pass a 'faith
based initiative' directing government funds to religious organizations,
partially privatize Social Security, offer private health savings accounts
as an alternative to Medicare, and reform immigration laws to appeal to the
growing Hispanic population". Notice, again, that none of these were driven
by the desire to produce good governance or to better the lot of the
American people, and that all of them completely privileged politics over
policy.
But notice, also, that every one of them failed in one fashion or another.
The White House was able to channel public funds to religious organizations,
but not nearly in the quantity it had in mind. It did pass No Child Left
Behind, in an attempt to drive teachers out of the Democratic tent, but it
had the opposite effect and has now become one of the most hated pieces of
legislation in recent American history, likely soon to be unraveled or
modified completely out of recognition. The others on the list were all
complete non-starters, with two of them - Social Security and immigration -
blowing up in the president's face, and thus revealing his political
impotence (some political capital, George) along the path to substantive
failure. Thus, even if we leave aside Iraq (and anyone who believes the
White House line that Rove had nothing to do with that decision needs to
immediately see the nice man with the white coat and the cup of easy to
swallow pills), Rove is a complete and utter failure purely against the
benchmark of his own twisted aspirations.
None of his five particular goals was achieved, and the greater vision of a
generation of Republican hegemony to which these initiatives were always in
service has in fact instead been set back a generation, if not permanently.
It is by no means unimaginable that the GOP could now enter into a tailspin
of mortal collapse over the coming years, ultimately joining the Federalists
and the Whigs on the ash heap of American political party history. But even
if it doesn't unwind that far, no one has done this much damage to their own
cause since Hitler at Stalingrad. And you can bet that there are a boatload
of reformed Republican lemmings on the Hill right now, desperately trying to
salvage a mere job from what was only a few years ago an empire, complete
with imperious swagger, who rue the day they ever heard the name Karl Rove.
Rove also failed in countless very overt ways (even though many of those
bills will not come due until the days and years ahead) against any
reasonable measure of what constitutes good governance and a successful
presidency. It's fun to watch regressives twist themselves into contorted
pretzels with more convolutions than 26-dimensional string theory, trying in
desperation to slather on the pancake makeup two inches thick all over the
rotting corpse of their political project. But not even the winning
mortician from this year's National Taxidermy Championship could revive this
mess after the IED of hard reality turned it into so much political
hamburger. It's gonna take the computer graphics of Hollywood to have a
prayer of convincing voters that the last seven years have been the Good Old
Days. Enter Fred Thompson, stage right, of course, as the walking Hail Mary
pass late in the fourth quarter. But he is far more likely to produce an
Ishtar than the next Star Wars. He's no Reagan, and even Reagan couldn't put
a happy enough face on this disaster. Indeed, Thompson, or whoever is
unlucky enough to win the nomination, will actually be the anti-Reagan - the
Republican Carter of 2008 - forced to defend a status quo that most voters
are already more anxious to abandon than a good case of the clap. And if
it's that bad today, just wait till 15 months from now when they go to vote.
By then they'll be trading in their first-born children to get Republicans
out of Washington.
Call that Rove's Achievement. Dress it up any way you like. Slop on the
greasepaint by the bucketful. Spin it around till it's more twisted than
Jerry Falwell's sexual fantasies. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day
the record of this presidency - Rove's presidency - is as utterly dismal as
it is completely consistent in its dismalness. Turning a record surplus into
a record deficit. Failing to defend the country against the 9/11 attacks.
Failing to crush or apprehend the alleged perpetrators of that attack.
Failing to win a war in Afghanistan. Launching a completely needless war in
Iraq. Failing to win the war in Iraq. Destroying the American military.
Failing to rescue an entire American city from destruction. The first
president since Hoover to lose jobs on his watch. Wages stagnant. Gas prices
doubled. Exacerbating global warming, the worst environmental crisis in
human history, and undermining attempts by others to deal with it.
Undercutting environmental standards on clean air and water. Leaving the
Middle East in shambles. Shredding relations with historical allies.
Producing the greatest trade deficit in history. Offering tax credits to
corporations assisting them in exporting American jobs. Destroying legal and
constitutional doctrines dating back as far as seven centuries. Allowing the
assault rifle ban to lapse. Standing by while North Korea went nuclear.
Tearing up treaties that have kept the peace for half a century. Undermining
international institutions. And more, and more, and more.
This is an astonishing, jaw-dropping record of disaster. In saner days, a
president would have been run out of town on a rail for nearly any single
one of these, let alone the whole lot of them. But we live in strange times,
and nobody is more responsible for creating that strangeness than Karl Rove,
because nobody has benefitted more from the fear, disorientation and
detachment from common sense he produced than he has. That makes it hard,
despite this glaring record of sheer failure, for many Americans to
comprehend the magnitude of what has been wrought. Indeed, since Democrats
utterly lack an instinct for the jugular (or most any other body part), what
would be truly amusing would be to see Rove doing a Rovian hit job on his
own legacy. Can you imagine the TV ads? The scurrilous rumors leaked to
friendlies in the press? The character assassination by innuendo? The fear
mongering? Too bad it will never happen - it is perhaps the only way we
could truly measure the full extent of this disaster.
So Karl Rove - the man appointed "genius" by the geniuses of the American
media - has been a complete failure as measured against his own standards
and aspirations, and against even the most charitable reading of the
objective benchmarks we associate with any presidency, such as leaving the
country safer, healthier, wealthier, more powerful, etc. But, of course,
that is just the beginning of the story. The damage done by an amoral man -
or, better yet, the wounded child crouching in fear within the shell of an
amoral man - who happens to control the greatest military and economic
machine ever to bestride the planet is potentially catastrophic in theory,
and has been quite literally so in practice. It is true that it could have
been worse. Then again, it's highly unlikely that we know the full story of
9/11 today, and 17 months remain for Cheney to engineer a military assault
on Iran, either or both of which gets us that much closer to the worst
outcomes imaginable.
But there is another way in which Rove has harmed the country, though
accounting for this particular set of transgressions is a more subtle
process. The overt damage done is bad enough, but we would be highly remiss
not to note as well the psychological effects, both at home and abroad, of
the methods consistently applied by Rove and his minions and master.
Never before has America had such a divisive presidency, certainly not one
that was intentionally so. More ironies abound here. Newt Gingrich, the
quintessential bomb-thrower and a guy cut from precisely the same
sociopathic cloth as Rove, blew-up congressional comity in the 1990s, and
then foisted his political ethos on the rest of the country in the form of
the shameful Clinton impeachment, a raw attempt at a constitutional coup.
Then, after Republicans had spent the previous six years ripping apart the
fabric of American political culture, in waltzes another Republican to heal
the wounds, a supposed "Washington outsider", a "uniter, not a divider",
only to become the most divisive president in history. And intentionally so.
The story goes that Rove made the decision early in the Bush presidency that
the American middle was evaporating, and therefore the key to winning
subsequent elections would not be swaying independents, as had been the
approach theretofore, but rather doing a better job than the other side of
mobilizing the base. That meant throwing more red meat to Wall Street geeks
and Schiavo freaks than a whole herd of live Texas longhorns could supply.
But it also demonstrated the complete lack of concern for governing well, as
this arrogant approach necessarily polarized both Washington and the
electorate. That was bad enough before 9/11. No president should ever seek
to polarize the country into hostile and angry ideological camps in order to
win elections. But after that terrorist attack, when an agonized nation was
looking to heal its wounds, it was unconscionable.
To this divisiveness can also be added lost credibility in government.
Today, more than 60 percent of Americans do not trust the government to
honestly describe foreign threats. That's an astonishing number for any
question about institutional trust, let alone one concerning the domain most
people consider the core responsibility of government. If we're lucky, most
of that will dissipate when the Bush administration finally stops torturing
the American public with its very existence, as if all 300 million of us
were on lock-down in Guantanamo. It seems to me unlikely that the effect
will ever completely disappear, however, especially for younger Americans
who've never lived other than under the insane regime of the radical right.
And this is precisely the sort of damage I meant when I referred to more
subtle forms of destruction. Ever since Ronald Reagan, America has been
treated to a steady diet of words and actions undermining the relationship
between public and public servants, between the people and their government.
This cannot produce anything but a corrosive effect on the health of the
polity in the long run, as it very much has already.
Needless to say, if Americans are disenchanted with the actions of the Bush
administration, those living abroad are even more horrified. This additional
damage shows up repeatedly in polls, and in the destroyed careers of
politicians, like Tony Blair, and parties, like Jose Maria Aznar's People's
Party in Spain. On September 12, 2001, the United States had the deeply felt
sympathy and the support of much of the world, including even the people of
Iran. Today the country is largely reviled across the planet. That, too is
the legacy of Karl Rove.
Which brings us back once more to a final measure of Rove's failure, a
comparison of what is with what could have been. Even without 9/11, Rove had
the capacity, especially after marketing Bush as a compassionate
conservative, to draw the country together around a series of moderate
initiatives, cooling down the national acrimony launched for political
advantage by his own party in the 1990s. But then after 9/11 this was vastly
more true, and it was true, moreover, internationally as well as
domestically. The American public, if not much of the world, was ready to
rally around a president seeking to defend and protect the common good. To
claim that the reality of this presidency in comparison thus represents an
opportunity squandered is the understatement of the century. Rove not only
failed massively in terms of his own goals, in terms of the direct effects
on millions of lives, and in terms of the more subtle destructive effects on
the fabric of American democracy, but he also failed massively against the
potential for success the administration completely wasted.
In short, no matter what your yardstick (other than, of course, winning
elections at any cost), Rove's career represents a complete failure, with
tragic consequences for the country and the world.
Earlier this week, I saw an ad in the New York Times for a new book. Two
things about this ad were notable. One was that the book's subject is the
Marshall Plan, a story of international diplomacy from half a century ago -
in short, nothing whatsoever to do with Bush, Rove or contemporary American
politics. And yet the other remarkable thing about the ad was the
bold-letter text at the top, above a graphic of the book, employed today to
market a book about a wholly different topic from a wholly different era. It
read: "There was a time when the world believed in America and what it stood
for".
That text would not have appeared in an advertisement for this or any other
book, back in 2000. But, today, it makes perfect sense. The words well
capture, in a single phrase, the legacy of Karl Rove and the damage done.
Rove is often described as a genius, but the record emphatically
demonstrates just the opposite. He destroyed everything in sight, including
the political party for whose would-be fortunes he willingly sacrificed all
else, not least the things that matter most - peace, truth, democracy,
integrity, decency, lives.
No, this was no genius, except in the most nefarious sense. The real genius
was of the American Founders, who - with just this scenario in mind - built
a political infrastructure that could hope to prevent Karl Roves from
happening.
As it was, nearly every intended bulwark in that system, nearly every check
and balance both inside and outside the government, failed to perform its
intended function these last years, and Karl Rove - the smallest amongst
us - ran wild for the better part of a decade, cutting a swath of enormous
destruction in his path.
Perhaps these ramparts, tattered as they were, were just sufficient enough
to slow down the runaway train, though. Perhaps we'll survive this nightmare
and reclaim our government and our sanity, after all.
_______
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Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By David Michael Green
Created Aug 17 2007 - 9:29am
Imagine you could be a gambler, and never lose. Now you understand Karl
Rove.
How can a gambler never lose? Only when he gets to throw the dice, and pick
up the winnings, while somebody else stakes the bet.
To a certain degree, that's the story of any political consultant. Somebody
else finances the campaign, somebody else is the candidate, and the
consultant becomes a political genius if the candidate wins, or the poor guy
who just happened to be stuck with a lousy horse should the candidate lose.
The only thing at stake for the consultant is his reputation, but even that
hardly seems vulnerable. Bob Shrum managed to amass an amazing 0-7 won-loss
record in the presidential sweepstakes and still got invited by John Kerry
to make it 0-8 in 2004.
But Karl Rove is much more than a successful consultant to presidential
candidates. His candidate made it to the White House, and to a very large
extent, Rove was handed the keys to both the policy and politics hot-rods
when they got there. That means that when we say that somebody else provided
the stakes with which Rove got to play, we're no longer just talking about
campaign contributors with dollars on the line, or candidates with
reputations to be made or lost. Now we're talking about American soldiers
and Iraqi civilians who've paid the highest price possible for Rove's policy
decisions. Now we are talking about American citizens who will be working
long hours to finance the debt that Rove ran up. Now we're talking about an
entire planet suffering the consequences of global warming negligence for
generations to come. And that's just the start.
Rove The Gambler came to the White House with the best deal imaginable from
his perspective. He could, in governing, gamble for the highest stakes, and
if he won he would be feared and revered as the greatest political genius of
his generation, perhaps of the century. But if he lost, other people would
pay the price. To those of us whose morality chip wasn't somehow misplaced
on the assembly line, such a game might seem momentarily tempting but
ultimately too reprehensible to play. Not so for Karl, who not only played,
but played with a vengeance, literally and figuratively.
Rove had a dream, and he brought it with him to the White House. The first
thing to notice if one wants to understand the character of this man - and
therefore also the character of the presidency he drove - is the nature of
this dream. It was not Karl Rove's great aspiration in life to cure cancer,
or eradicate poverty, or bring peace to the Middle East, or double the
number of college students in America. No, handed the keys to the government
of the world's sole superpower, Rove had something else in mind - something
infinitely more meager. His great dream in life was to emulate his hero,
Mark Hanna, and reestablish a generational-long hegemony for the Republican
Party in America.
If that seems like a small-minded aspiration for a man who fancies himself
as a student of history and the big picture, it is. But all the more so
because Rove was prepared to do anything in order to achieve his little
goal. It is not unfair to say, then, that Iraq has been smashed, a million
people murdered, the American military broken, the American treasury
depleted, the environment dangerously threatened, the Constitution tattered,
and the country's reputation eviscerated - all on a gamble that things would
break the other way and... what? Leave the GOP in power for the next
quarter-century. Oops. As Maxwell Smart might've said, "Missed it by that
much!" What an incredible amount wagered for so little potential return,
even if it had gone all right.
Of course, the greatest irony of all is that, not only did the Karl Rove
wrecking machine destroy all of those things that most people care about,
but it also wound up profoundly demolishing the very goals that Rove himself
most sought. The Bush presidency is utterly in the toilet, and it would seem
clear even with 17 months remaining that it will be regarded as the very
worst presidency across all of American history. As for the Republican
Party, its woes were only beginning to become evident with the election
blow-out of 2006. Not many people can say that they managed to lose control
of both houses of Congress in one election. That rarely happens. But Karl
Rove did it.
And 2008 will be even more devastating. Rove might even be correct in
arguing that the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton and that she is
enough of a liability to cost her party the White House, even in a can't
miss year. I doubt it, because if there's one thing Clinton is, it's smart,
and if there's another, it's ruthless, and she will therefore turn the
Republican candidate - with his help, no doubt, as we're already seeing
today - into a clone of George W. Bush. Faced with the choice of the
obnoxious but harmless Hillary, on the one hand, and four or eight more
years of Bushism, on the other, enough voters will hold their nose and
choose aggravation over devastation, handing Clinton the White House. But
regardless of what happens in the presidential race, congressional elections
will be absolutely devastating for the GOP, not only widening Democratic
majorities in both houses, and not only ending both the Republicans'
capacity and will to act as a block on legislative progress, but actually
threatening the very existence of the party itself. This happy problem,
which couldn't possibly be visited upon a nicer group of fasc..., er,
people, will only then be amplified in coming years and elections, as
today's young voters - who have already rejected the Republican Party -
matriculate through the electoral system, replacing dinosaur GOP devotees
who cut their teeth on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.
Ironically enough, then, Rove destroyed the very thing that he had mortgaged
everything for in seeking its empowerment. And even more ironic yet, he may
well have created the very antithesis of what he most coveted: There may
well be generational dominance of a single party in our future, yes - just
not the one that Rove happened to have in mind. While many of us can't be
bothered to shed even crocodile tears for the demise of the Republicans, the
collateral damage from Rove's all-in bet has been devastating to everything
else that we care about. But, again, no worries for him. He bet with other
people's stakes, and he can probably still get lots of work from those
candidates willing to do anything to win office (read virtually every
Republican).
I don't know what happens in a childhood to produce a figure like Karl Rove,
but it can't have been good. Like a serial killer with ice-water running
through his veins, for whom the idea of compassion or remorse is a foreign
concept, Rove is the quintessential amoral man - the very definition of a
sociopath. Don't take the way he treats you personally - it's not that he
doesn't like you. He just utterly couldn't give a **** one way or the other,
dude. But woe unto you if you possess something that he wants, like money, a
vote, cannon fodder capability, or shock troop potential. He will simply say
or do whatever is necessary to liberate you from your dollars, your common
sense or your life in order to achieve his goals. There are myriad examples,
but one which is highly illustrative is Rove's response to Hurricane
Katrina. While you and I looked at our television screens and saw there a
disaster in which compassion and immediate action were the watchwords of the
day, Rove - the guy Bush put in charge of the crisis - was at that exact
same moment spinning the gears in his head, literally thinking instead about
the partisan political implications of relocating a quarter-million black
(and therefore likely Democratic) voters out of the state, thus perhaps
putting Louisiana back in the Republican column in future elections.
It's no wonder that a guy with such empathy defects could spot George W.
Bush coming from miles away, like freight train rolling down the mountain.
Bush was the perfect partner for the exploits of someone like Rove, who once
trained under both Donald Segretti and Lee Atwater. Jim Hightower (himself
one of the many unfortunate members of the Rovian Wreckage Club) once mused
that Bush pere - infinitely more sane and humane than his son, though still
borderline on both fronts - was born on third base, thinking he hit a
triple. If that's so, the mind strains to find the appropriate metaphor for
the Boy King. Perhaps we could say that he was handed ownership of the
entire ball club based on his family name, only to think he had earned it on
his own, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. Trouble is, that's no
metaphor at all - it was quite literally true. Sigh.
In any case, it was just this child of privilege who - unlike a similarly
situated Roosevelt or Kennedy - utterly lacked the compassion thing, that
Rove picked out to be his perfect pony. There would be no political tactic
too cheap, no empty bumper-sticker slogan too banal, no policy choice in the
service of down-and-dirty politics too destructive, and no shattering of the
very fabric of constitutional governance too egregious with George W. Bush
as his candidate and president. Rove told him what to do and say, and Bush
did it. For a while, though only with the massive assistance of 9/11, it
worked.
Nevertheless, from the beginning, I found the notion that Karl Rove was a
political genius to be as offensive as it was shortsighted. (And what does
it say about the wisdom of our wonderful national punditry that they
continued to perceive him as such, in some cases even after November 2006?)
But the idea that Rove is a political genius is even more absurd today. In
fact, the man has been an abject failure, a flaming disaster, by every
metric that counts. Whether we compare his performance to his own
aspirations, or we add up the overt wreckage, or the more subtle damage, or
if we consider what could have been - in every case this "genius" is
revealed in reality to be a pathetic loser.
First, Rove can be easily demonstrated to have completely failed even
according to just the limited goals of his own ambition, leaving aside for
the moment the matter of its sheer moral vacuousness. In his cover story on
Rove's implosion in The Atlantic, Joshua Green reports that the Great Guru
had five particular initiatives in mind after capturing the White House, all
in service to forcing into existence his dream of a permanent Republican
realignment. He planned to "establish education standards, pass a 'faith
based initiative' directing government funds to religious organizations,
partially privatize Social Security, offer private health savings accounts
as an alternative to Medicare, and reform immigration laws to appeal to the
growing Hispanic population". Notice, again, that none of these were driven
by the desire to produce good governance or to better the lot of the
American people, and that all of them completely privileged politics over
policy.
But notice, also, that every one of them failed in one fashion or another.
The White House was able to channel public funds to religious organizations,
but not nearly in the quantity it had in mind. It did pass No Child Left
Behind, in an attempt to drive teachers out of the Democratic tent, but it
had the opposite effect and has now become one of the most hated pieces of
legislation in recent American history, likely soon to be unraveled or
modified completely out of recognition. The others on the list were all
complete non-starters, with two of them - Social Security and immigration -
blowing up in the president's face, and thus revealing his political
impotence (some political capital, George) along the path to substantive
failure. Thus, even if we leave aside Iraq (and anyone who believes the
White House line that Rove had nothing to do with that decision needs to
immediately see the nice man with the white coat and the cup of easy to
swallow pills), Rove is a complete and utter failure purely against the
benchmark of his own twisted aspirations.
None of his five particular goals was achieved, and the greater vision of a
generation of Republican hegemony to which these initiatives were always in
service has in fact instead been set back a generation, if not permanently.
It is by no means unimaginable that the GOP could now enter into a tailspin
of mortal collapse over the coming years, ultimately joining the Federalists
and the Whigs on the ash heap of American political party history. But even
if it doesn't unwind that far, no one has done this much damage to their own
cause since Hitler at Stalingrad. And you can bet that there are a boatload
of reformed Republican lemmings on the Hill right now, desperately trying to
salvage a mere job from what was only a few years ago an empire, complete
with imperious swagger, who rue the day they ever heard the name Karl Rove.
Rove also failed in countless very overt ways (even though many of those
bills will not come due until the days and years ahead) against any
reasonable measure of what constitutes good governance and a successful
presidency. It's fun to watch regressives twist themselves into contorted
pretzels with more convolutions than 26-dimensional string theory, trying in
desperation to slather on the pancake makeup two inches thick all over the
rotting corpse of their political project. But not even the winning
mortician from this year's National Taxidermy Championship could revive this
mess after the IED of hard reality turned it into so much political
hamburger. It's gonna take the computer graphics of Hollywood to have a
prayer of convincing voters that the last seven years have been the Good Old
Days. Enter Fred Thompson, stage right, of course, as the walking Hail Mary
pass late in the fourth quarter. But he is far more likely to produce an
Ishtar than the next Star Wars. He's no Reagan, and even Reagan couldn't put
a happy enough face on this disaster. Indeed, Thompson, or whoever is
unlucky enough to win the nomination, will actually be the anti-Reagan - the
Republican Carter of 2008 - forced to defend a status quo that most voters
are already more anxious to abandon than a good case of the clap. And if
it's that bad today, just wait till 15 months from now when they go to vote.
By then they'll be trading in their first-born children to get Republicans
out of Washington.
Call that Rove's Achievement. Dress it up any way you like. Slop on the
greasepaint by the bucketful. Spin it around till it's more twisted than
Jerry Falwell's sexual fantasies. It doesn't matter. At the end of the day
the record of this presidency - Rove's presidency - is as utterly dismal as
it is completely consistent in its dismalness. Turning a record surplus into
a record deficit. Failing to defend the country against the 9/11 attacks.
Failing to crush or apprehend the alleged perpetrators of that attack.
Failing to win a war in Afghanistan. Launching a completely needless war in
Iraq. Failing to win the war in Iraq. Destroying the American military.
Failing to rescue an entire American city from destruction. The first
president since Hoover to lose jobs on his watch. Wages stagnant. Gas prices
doubled. Exacerbating global warming, the worst environmental crisis in
human history, and undermining attempts by others to deal with it.
Undercutting environmental standards on clean air and water. Leaving the
Middle East in shambles. Shredding relations with historical allies.
Producing the greatest trade deficit in history. Offering tax credits to
corporations assisting them in exporting American jobs. Destroying legal and
constitutional doctrines dating back as far as seven centuries. Allowing the
assault rifle ban to lapse. Standing by while North Korea went nuclear.
Tearing up treaties that have kept the peace for half a century. Undermining
international institutions. And more, and more, and more.
This is an astonishing, jaw-dropping record of disaster. In saner days, a
president would have been run out of town on a rail for nearly any single
one of these, let alone the whole lot of them. But we live in strange times,
and nobody is more responsible for creating that strangeness than Karl Rove,
because nobody has benefitted more from the fear, disorientation and
detachment from common sense he produced than he has. That makes it hard,
despite this glaring record of sheer failure, for many Americans to
comprehend the magnitude of what has been wrought. Indeed, since Democrats
utterly lack an instinct for the jugular (or most any other body part), what
would be truly amusing would be to see Rove doing a Rovian hit job on his
own legacy. Can you imagine the TV ads? The scurrilous rumors leaked to
friendlies in the press? The character assassination by innuendo? The fear
mongering? Too bad it will never happen - it is perhaps the only way we
could truly measure the full extent of this disaster.
So Karl Rove - the man appointed "genius" by the geniuses of the American
media - has been a complete failure as measured against his own standards
and aspirations, and against even the most charitable reading of the
objective benchmarks we associate with any presidency, such as leaving the
country safer, healthier, wealthier, more powerful, etc. But, of course,
that is just the beginning of the story. The damage done by an amoral man -
or, better yet, the wounded child crouching in fear within the shell of an
amoral man - who happens to control the greatest military and economic
machine ever to bestride the planet is potentially catastrophic in theory,
and has been quite literally so in practice. It is true that it could have
been worse. Then again, it's highly unlikely that we know the full story of
9/11 today, and 17 months remain for Cheney to engineer a military assault
on Iran, either or both of which gets us that much closer to the worst
outcomes imaginable.
But there is another way in which Rove has harmed the country, though
accounting for this particular set of transgressions is a more subtle
process. The overt damage done is bad enough, but we would be highly remiss
not to note as well the psychological effects, both at home and abroad, of
the methods consistently applied by Rove and his minions and master.
Never before has America had such a divisive presidency, certainly not one
that was intentionally so. More ironies abound here. Newt Gingrich, the
quintessential bomb-thrower and a guy cut from precisely the same
sociopathic cloth as Rove, blew-up congressional comity in the 1990s, and
then foisted his political ethos on the rest of the country in the form of
the shameful Clinton impeachment, a raw attempt at a constitutional coup.
Then, after Republicans had spent the previous six years ripping apart the
fabric of American political culture, in waltzes another Republican to heal
the wounds, a supposed "Washington outsider", a "uniter, not a divider",
only to become the most divisive president in history. And intentionally so.
The story goes that Rove made the decision early in the Bush presidency that
the American middle was evaporating, and therefore the key to winning
subsequent elections would not be swaying independents, as had been the
approach theretofore, but rather doing a better job than the other side of
mobilizing the base. That meant throwing more red meat to Wall Street geeks
and Schiavo freaks than a whole herd of live Texas longhorns could supply.
But it also demonstrated the complete lack of concern for governing well, as
this arrogant approach necessarily polarized both Washington and the
electorate. That was bad enough before 9/11. No president should ever seek
to polarize the country into hostile and angry ideological camps in order to
win elections. But after that terrorist attack, when an agonized nation was
looking to heal its wounds, it was unconscionable.
To this divisiveness can also be added lost credibility in government.
Today, more than 60 percent of Americans do not trust the government to
honestly describe foreign threats. That's an astonishing number for any
question about institutional trust, let alone one concerning the domain most
people consider the core responsibility of government. If we're lucky, most
of that will dissipate when the Bush administration finally stops torturing
the American public with its very existence, as if all 300 million of us
were on lock-down in Guantanamo. It seems to me unlikely that the effect
will ever completely disappear, however, especially for younger Americans
who've never lived other than under the insane regime of the radical right.
And this is precisely the sort of damage I meant when I referred to more
subtle forms of destruction. Ever since Ronald Reagan, America has been
treated to a steady diet of words and actions undermining the relationship
between public and public servants, between the people and their government.
This cannot produce anything but a corrosive effect on the health of the
polity in the long run, as it very much has already.
Needless to say, if Americans are disenchanted with the actions of the Bush
administration, those living abroad are even more horrified. This additional
damage shows up repeatedly in polls, and in the destroyed careers of
politicians, like Tony Blair, and parties, like Jose Maria Aznar's People's
Party in Spain. On September 12, 2001, the United States had the deeply felt
sympathy and the support of much of the world, including even the people of
Iran. Today the country is largely reviled across the planet. That, too is
the legacy of Karl Rove.
Which brings us back once more to a final measure of Rove's failure, a
comparison of what is with what could have been. Even without 9/11, Rove had
the capacity, especially after marketing Bush as a compassionate
conservative, to draw the country together around a series of moderate
initiatives, cooling down the national acrimony launched for political
advantage by his own party in the 1990s. But then after 9/11 this was vastly
more true, and it was true, moreover, internationally as well as
domestically. The American public, if not much of the world, was ready to
rally around a president seeking to defend and protect the common good. To
claim that the reality of this presidency in comparison thus represents an
opportunity squandered is the understatement of the century. Rove not only
failed massively in terms of his own goals, in terms of the direct effects
on millions of lives, and in terms of the more subtle destructive effects on
the fabric of American democracy, but he also failed massively against the
potential for success the administration completely wasted.
In short, no matter what your yardstick (other than, of course, winning
elections at any cost), Rove's career represents a complete failure, with
tragic consequences for the country and the world.
Earlier this week, I saw an ad in the New York Times for a new book. Two
things about this ad were notable. One was that the book's subject is the
Marshall Plan, a story of international diplomacy from half a century ago -
in short, nothing whatsoever to do with Bush, Rove or contemporary American
politics. And yet the other remarkable thing about the ad was the
bold-letter text at the top, above a graphic of the book, employed today to
market a book about a wholly different topic from a wholly different era. It
read: "There was a time when the world believed in America and what it stood
for".
That text would not have appeared in an advertisement for this or any other
book, back in 2000. But, today, it makes perfect sense. The words well
capture, in a single phrase, the legacy of Karl Rove and the damage done.
Rove is often described as a genius, but the record emphatically
demonstrates just the opposite. He destroyed everything in sight, including
the political party for whose would-be fortunes he willingly sacrificed all
else, not least the things that matter most - peace, truth, democracy,
integrity, decency, lives.
No, this was no genius, except in the most nefarious sense. The real genius
was of the American Founders, who - with just this scenario in mind - built
a political infrastructure that could hope to prevent Karl Roves from
happening.
As it was, nearly every intended bulwark in that system, nearly every check
and balance both inside and outside the government, failed to perform its
intended function these last years, and Karl Rove - the smallest amongst
us - ran wild for the better part of a decade, cutting a swath of enormous
destruction in his path.
Perhaps these ramparts, tattered as they were, were just sufficient enough
to slow down the runaway train, though. Perhaps we'll survive this nightmare
and reclaim our government and our sanity, after all.
_______
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson