Karl Rove: a book report

Odd as it sounds, I've been approached by actual human beings who have asked me to write a book report about Karl Rove. "What does this guy do, exactly?" "Why did he quit?" "Does any of it matter?"

To take the last question first - no, at this point I don't think it really matters. For one thing, it's too late in Bush's term for much of anything to matter. For another, many liberals have a far, far outsized idea of what this guy is able to accomplish. They are in what I call the "Karl Rove controls the weather" camp. So instead of ranting about the fellow, let's just take his actual resume one step at a time.

Rove's Republican partisanship was reportedly cemented when, as a 9-year old Utahian in 1959, he was beaten up by a little girl who supported Kennedy. Rove had been carrying a Nixon button.

He went on to a scholarship in poli sci at the University of Utah. Rove never got a degree, but did begin landing electoral gigs with the Republicans, including in Illinois where at age 19 he used false credentials to steal letterhead from the office of the Democratic candidate for state Treasurer - and went to rock shows and homeless shelters distributing this letterhead with the legend, "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" imprinted thereon. (The Democrat won anyway.)

In 1973 Rove became a candidate for the national chairmanship of the College Republicans, a campaign in which he was mentored by Lee Atwater (of later Willie-Horton-ad fame). Rove became a brief sideshow to the Watergate investigation during this campaign because he was reportedly out teaching the kids "dirty tricks" as campaign techniques - going through your opponents' trash for publicizable dirt, etc. George H.W. Bush, then head of the GOP, was tasked to investigate the matter... with the result that Rove was brought on as the College Republican chair three weeks later with Bush Sr.'s blessing.

This association with the elder Bush brought Rove into his first contact with W. - back in 1973. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow," Karl would later say, obviously still awed - god-knows-how - by the incident.

Anyway, Karl next gravitated to Texas. Here he led a brilliantly-successful 15-year campaign, using direct mail and message-crafting, to turn that Democratic stronghold (think Lyndon Johnson) into a Republican Mordor (think Tom DeLay). My favorite highlight comes in 1986, when Rove is working on the comeback gubernatorial campaign of former Governor William Clements, Jr. Clements is slipping in the polls, and is given to various kinds of blundering public remarks that are setting him further behind. On the morning of a critical televised debate, Rove calls an emergency press conference at his office and says he's discovered that the place has been bugged, implying that the Democrats are responsible. Needless to say, this throws that night's debate coverage into disorder. In the fracas, nobody really notices how Rove goes on to file no charges against anyone. Or that further details of the bugging simply don't add up... like that the batteries inside the surveillance device are estimated to run for about eight hours, and were fresh on the morning of the press conference. Was somebody sneaking into Rove's office and changing the batteries twice a day? Had he caught the bug just hours after it was first planted? Or had he - gasp! - put the thing there himself?

I dunno. But to speculate on this would, I suppose, put me dangerously close to the "Karl Rove controls the weather" camp. So I shall not speculate.

Anyway: Rove goes on to plunk W. into the Texas gubernatorial mansion in 1994 - a state where the governor's duties are nearly as slender as Shrub's resume (it's a weak executive there, and even the legislature only meets four months a year - every other year. Then again, Bush's job experience at that time consisted of running three oil companies into the ground, and using his dad's name to parlay some wealthy friends into helping him buy a baseball team.) On the strength of this executive experience, and his sterling record at offing death-row prisoners, Bush Jr. was duly regarded ready for the oval office. Abu Ghraib, here we come.

And, in a nutshell, that's Rove's background.

--Now, if you can remember back that far, the question was, "What does this guy do, exactly?" Essentially he's held two jobs in the Bush presidency. The first was to get Bush elected; and at that job, say what you like, he at least succeeded. This isn't the place to quibble about how Gore won Florida, or that '04 was closer than the vote should have been for an incumbent who was riding 90% approval a couple years before. Instead bear in mind how the Republicans gained seats in '02 - a remarkable feat for the majority party in an off-year election (of course, they lost big in '06 - but again, let's not get off track).

See, Rove thought like this. Post-Bill-Clinton, he asked, how many people are really swayable in a national election anymore? In the good old days, it used to be around 20%. Now the polls put it at more like 8: not enough to be worth it. So, Rove reasoned, you throw out the time-honored strategy of moving to the center in a national election. Instead you perhaps offer some centrist platitudes ("compassionate conservatism") while working solely to energize your base better than the other guy. I.e., let's talk up abortion, guns, Jesus, terrorism, wedge issues, and tacit charges of treason on the parts of your opponents. It's a hideous way to run a national dialogue, but it's a bang-up way to manage an election in a closely divided country.

Anyway, once Bush was safely in the White House, he gave Rove his second job, the one that put him on the public payroll. This was as Deputy Chief of Staff, where he was charged to craft elements of the administration's public policy and legislative agenda. What does that mean? It means Rove was supposed to use the same demographic savvy he'd brought to bear on the election, to use in shaping a Permanent (or at least Generational) Republican Majority.

I can give you three big examples of the sort of initiative Rove thought would accomplish this. Consider the Medicaid prescription-drug bill, rammed through the House of Representatives in a 5a.m. vote that was held open for three hours while Tom DeLay allegedly bribed and threatened congressmen to change their "nay" votes to "yea". Democracy at work. Anyway, despite the so-called "doughnut-hole" in its coverage, and the fact that the the bill forbids the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for bulk rates (presumably the only advantage of a government drug program in the first place) - despite this, the prescription drug benefit is supposed to make all of our seniors, and soon-to-be-seniors (Baby Boomers), grateful constituents of the Republican party.

In this line of thinking, Republicans show a very crude sort of "Democrat envy", if you will. The New Deal programs (social security, unemployment) and Great Society programs (general assistance, affirmative action) are believed by Republicans to have worked a sort of voodoo over certain segments of the electorate (seniors, minorities, women, the poor) and turned them into Democratic zombies. If we can just give them the right conservative handout - so a Rove reasons - they'll cleave off and become dedicated Republicans for the next 40 years.

Which brings us to his second initiative, social security reform. This of course entailed eliminating the "security" part, and creating an "ownership society" where we all feel like tycoons riding the national economic surge on our $5,000 private-account nest-eggs. We all know that this went over like a lead balloon. So much for making the Gen-Y kids into permanently-grateful Republicans.

Unsurprisingly, the third big initiative was targeted at the fastest-growing population bloc in the U.S.: Latinos. And thus did Rove help W. put together his proposal for "comprehensive immigration reform". By passing this legislative package, the Republican party could hope to endear itself to millions of Mexican immigrants - and their citizen relatives - who would be provided under these new laws both legal employment in the U.S. and an eventual path to citizenship here. Of course, the Republican base happens to consist in fair measure of xenophobes and racists, so this legislative push ended up panning out even worse than social security reform.

--And there you go. Karl Rove is a man who's held two jobs for Bush. The first was to win elections: that one went pretty well. The other was to use targeted policy initiatives to create a permanent Republican majority: that one went all to hell.

So what does it mean that Rove is leaving his job right now? I suppose it means there's a year and a half till the next election. Rove is too radioactive to work for one of the Republican presidential candidates directly - they all need to distance themselves from Bush - but he'll be quietly advising several of them, and surely working on the down-low for the eventual nominee. Plus, it's just time for him to cash in: collect some speaking fees, land some think-tank gigs. And begin pitching in on this $500-million effort called the "George W. Bush Presidential Library", which is actually a P.R. offensive designed to convince future Americans that Bush was not in fact the worst president in United States history.

Good luck, boy genius.

PS. He did out Valerie Plame, and was involved in the US Attorney Purge scandal; and I didn't say anything about his participation in the White House Iraq Group (i.e., how he helped start this war we'll never be able to get out of). Plus he's recently been ignoring a congressional subpoena about the purge scandal.... But it's late and I've gone on more than long enough.