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Monday, August 13, 2007


"MR. ROVE? HE DEAD."

I was going to write about Karl Rove this weekend, but I was drunk and lazy, so I decided against it. There's a great profile and analysis on how Rove effectively destroyed his boss's presidency in the upcoming issue of The Atlantic (subscription required.) According to Joshua Green, all roads - with the exception of Iraq - lead directly to Rove.

Rove is one of those really smart guys who is so married to a long-term vision that he doesn't see his immediate ruination staring him right in the face. Except in Rove's case, he took the Bush presidency and large swaths of the country with him.

Since the launch of George Bush's first gubenatorial race in Texas, Rove has been a believer in "transformational politics," which would create a governing majority like that enjoyed by William McKinley and his successor, Theodore Roosevelt, and later, Franklin Roosevelt. For whatever reason, Rove believed that Bush was the perfect vehicle for that.

Rove is essentially a political guy with pretensions of shaping policy. Unfortunately, the two are mutually exclusive and by Bush's second term, nothing of consequence was getting passed and the White House's political fortunes had turned to shit. This is why smart presidents never place political operatives with no policy experience in high administration posts. You can point to people like James A. Baker III in the Reagan White House, or George Stepanopulous in Clinton's, but both were involved in policy before they were campaign strategists. They both actually graduated college, too, which is seen as being a plus when shaping the future of a superpower.

As Mr. Green lays out in great detail, President Bush and Rove's self-destruction began right at the beginning of the second term. As part of their "transformational politics," they began with a suicidal attempt to reform Social Security with little enthusiasm from the Republicans in Congress and no cooperation from the Democrats. Social Security - the so-called "third rail of politics" -is incapable of serious reform without a bipartisan effort where both sides have a lot to lose If you don't have that, the opposition gets Christmas early.

Ronald Reagan learned this the hard way in 1981 when he proposed a reform package that the Republican Senate wouldn't even send to committee. In 1983, Reagan came back to the idea, but he had the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, on board and they gave each other the political cover needed to get the deal done. Bush and Rove refused to even consider that course, being too stupid or arrogant, or both, to try. Rove is a practioner of "50%+1" politics, which is fine in an election campaign. Unfortunately, you need 60% to pass pretty much anything in the United States Senate. And there hasn't been a filibuster-proof Senate since 1965, when Lyndon Johnson was president.

Bush and Rove, who should have known better, went out with a package unilaterally, and they got killed for their trouble. And it only took them a year to notice. Then came the diasterous Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, Hurricane Katrina, and the ruinous Immigration Reform bill. Within a year, Bush was a president that no one - Democrats, Independents or Republicans - trusted. While Iraq certainly didn't help, it isn't the root cause of Bush's troubles. Even when Johnson was mired in the morass of Vietnam, he was still able to pass the Fair Housing Act and create PBS. Bush did what Rove told him to do and he's now an irredeemably failed president for his trouble.

I can't recommend the Green essay enough. As soon as it comes out, you should all run out and buy the Sepember Atlantic.

As much as Bush and the conservative movement like to bitch and moan about how the Democrats are being mean to them, they really have no right to. In the aftermath of 9/11, Bush used the tragedy to pass ridiculous programs that had nothing at all to do with national security. The president and his surrogates would go out and say things like "unless the Democrats give me another $100 billion tax cut, insane highway and farm bills and a illegal steel tarrif, they're with the terrorists." Once he got all of those things, he ran the 2002 campaign on the platform of "the Democrats are with the terrorists." In short, he acted like a duplicitous cocksucker.

If President Bush expected flowers after that, he's even dumber than he looks. If anything, I've been shocked at how tepidly the Democrats have been fucking Bush back. If I were Nancy Pelosi, the president of the United States would be offering me anything if I could only let his asshole stop bleeding.

Karl Rove demonstrated his evil mastery of electoral politics no fewer than four times. He took perhaps the most unelectable candidate in history and humiliated some pretty impressive heavyweights with him. One should always remember that Ann Richards started the '94 Texas race 33 points ahead of Bush. Using history as a barometer, there's no way Al Gore should have lost the 2000 presidential campaign, but he did. Sort of. Despite having done almost everything wrong during his first term and being the weakest incumbent since Carter, Bush was still re-elected.

I don't think that any of that would be possible without Karl Rove. And he'll go to his grave knowing that he's responsible for that. That might bother him were he encumbered with something as troublesome as a soul.

Politics is a hard game designed for hard, cold men. And Karl Rove is as hard and as cold as they come. In a meticulously detailed report for the November 2004 issue of the The Atlantic (again, subscription required,) Joshua Green described some of Rove's more horrible tactics.

A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up—absent any trace of who was behind them—viciously attacking See and his family. "We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people," the staffer says. "You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, 'Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags.' So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street … I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees." The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. "They just beat you down to your knees," Ingram said of being on the receiving end of Rove's attacks. See won the race.

(...)

But no other example of Rove's extreme tactics that I encountered quite compares to what occurred during another 1994 judicial campaign in Alabama. In that year Harold See first ran for the supreme court, becoming the rare Rove client to lose a close race. His opponent, Mark Kennedy, an incumbent Democratic justice and, as George Wallace's son-in-law, a member in good standing of Alabama's first family of politics, was no stranger to hardball politics. "The Wallace family history and what they all went through, that's pretty rough politics," says Joe Perkins, who managed Kennedy's campaign. "But it was a whole new dimension with Rove."

This August, I had lunch with Kennedy near his office in Montgomery. I had hoped to discuss how it was that he had beaten one of the savviest political strategists in modern history, and I expected to hear more of the raucous campaign tales that are a staple of Alabama politics.

Neither Kennedy nor our meeting was anything like what I had anticipated. A small man, impeccably dressed and well-mannered, Kennedy appeared to derive little satisfaction from having beaten Rove. In fact, he seemed shaken, even ten years later. He quietly explained how Rove's arrival had poisoned the judicial climate by putting politics above matters of law and justice—"collateral damage," he called it, from the win-at-all-costs attitude that now prevails in judicial races.

He talked about the viciousness of the "slash-and-burn" campaign, and how Rove appealed to the worst elements of human nature. "People vote in Alabama for two reasons," Kennedy told me. "Anger and fear. It's a state that votes against somebody rather than for them. Rove understood how to put his finger right on the trigger point." Kennedy seemed most bothered by the personal nature of the attacks, which, in addition to the usual anti-trial-lawyer litany, had included charges that he was mingling campaign funds with those of a nonprofit children's foundation he was involved with. In the end he eked out a victory by less than one percentage point.

Kennedy leaned forward and said, "After the race my wife, Peggy, was at the supermarket checkout line. She picked up a copy of Reader's Digest and nearly collapsed on her watermelon. She called me and said, 'Sit down. You're not going to believe this.'" Her husband was featured in an article on "America's worst judges." Kennedy attributed this to Rove's attacks.

When his term on the court ended, he chose not to run for re-election. I later learned another reason why. Kennedy had spent years on the bench as a juvenile and family-court judge, during which time he had developed a strong interest in aiding abused children. In the early 1980s he had helped to start the Children's Trust Fund of Alabama, and he later established the Corporate Foundation for Children, a private, nonprofit organization. At the time of the race he had just served a term as president of the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect. One of Rove's signature tactics is to attack an opponent on the very front that seems unassailable. Kennedy was no exception.

Some of Kennedy's campaign commercials touted his volunteer work, including one that showed him holding hands with children. "We were trying to counter the positives from that ad," a former Rove staffer told me, explaining that some within the See camp initiated a whisper campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. "It was our standard practice to use the University of Alabama Law School to disseminate whisper-campaign information," the staffer went on. "That was a major device we used for the transmission of this stuff. The students at the law school are from all over the state, and that's one of the ways that Karl got the information out—he knew the law students would take it back to their home towns and it would get out." This would create the impression that the lie was in fact common knowledge across the state. "What Rove does," says Joe Perkins, "is try to make something so bad for a family that the candidate will not subject the family to the hardship. Mark is not your typical Alabama macho, beer-drinkin', tobacco-chewin', pickup-drivin' kind of guy. He is a small, well-groomed, well-educated family man, and what they tried to do was make him look like a homosexual pedophile. That was really, really hard to take."

Nice! You and I might know that Karl Rove will go directly to hell for what he did to Mark Kennedy's reputation, but I'm sure he'll go happily, secure in the knowledge that he will enter the Gates of Hades as the winningest strategist in modern politics. A man must have priorities, after all.

After the disasters of 2005-06 and particularly after the loss of the Republican firewall in Congress, Rove surveyed the wreckage of a once proud presidency and recognized that all was now irretriveably lost. The survivors of the rout were so shell-shocked and ashamed of themselves that they couldn't even engage in the ritual of party infighting so common after electoral humiliation. But Karl Rove is smart man and he knows that they will rise soon to eat their own. He also must know that he's at the top of the cannibalistic menu.

2006 was a sea-change election. The smart and the righteous in both parties either retired or were defeated. Official Washington is now a kingdom of angry, morally stunted dwarves who have their knives out. There is a thirst for Rove's blood in both parties and he knows it. The only person left standing with a brain-damaged level of devotion to him is the president, and he is lacking in any kind of authority at all. In a town were decency died long ago and was buried in an unmarked grave, Karl Rove knows that he can only expect the level of mercy he afforded others, which is to say none at all. Possessed as he is with an encyclopedic knowledge of American political history and a ferret -like survival instinct, Rove knows that it is time to give up the ghost and flee.

Today, Karl Rove tendered his resignation as White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Special Assistant to the President.

If any of you think that Rove can leave without uttering an enourmous amount of bullshit, then you just don't know Karl Rove.
Sitting in the book-lined living room of his townhome on Saturday afternoon, a relaxed, cheerful and typically rambunctious Mr. Rove hands over two sheets of paper on which he has tapped out a pair of outlines. One says "Up to Now," and summarizes what he thinks are the achievements to date of the Bush presidency. The second, "Months Ahead," lays out an agenda for the next year and a half.

"He will move back up in the polls," says Mr. Rove, who interrupts my reference to Mr. Bush's 30% approval rating by saying it's heading close to "40%," and "higher than Congress."
That's a lot like saying that Michael Vick is still more popular than O.J Simpson. If having only sixty percent of the voting public thinking that your guy is a jabbering dupe of a president and an all-around skunk is your legacy, then I shouldn't need to point out that your priorities are deeply fucked.
As for the Democrats, "They are likely to nominate a tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate" by the name of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Holding the White House for a third term is always difficult given the pent-up desire for change, he says, but "I think we've got a very good chance to do so."
Compare this to Rove's assertion that the Republicans would "without a doubt" hold Congress last year. Karl knows that the Republicans can't win the White House on their own next year. They have to count on the Democrats actively losing, which, to be fair, they have a storied reputation for doing. I wouldn't put it past those idiots to nominate a McGovern/Mondale ticket that would campaign on the slogan of "Speaking for the People of Minnesota, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia: Make it an Even Fifty in '08." Y'know, just for giggles.

Because a third term for a party in the White House has only happened three times in the last century (1910, 1940 and 1988,) he can't tell you that it will "absolutely" happen. At least not without laughing.
Mr. Rove's political influence has been historic, notwithstanding the rout of 2006. His crucial insight in 2000 was recognizing that Mr. Bush had to be both an alternative to Bill Clinton's scandalous behavior and "a different kind of Republican." In 2002, the president's party gained seats in both the House and Senate in a first midterm election for the first time since 1934.
By a "different kind of Republican," Rove actually meant "Be a Democrat." Actually, that isn't fair to Democrats, who "tax and spend." Bush just spent, without knowing where the money was coming from or seeming to care. And as Karl has learned, winning by suggesting that the opposition party is a minor-league al-Qaeda isn't without its consequences.

A big debate among Republicans these days is who bears more blame for 2006 -- Messrs. Bush and Rove, or the behavior of the GOP Congress. Mr. Rove has no doubt. "The sense of entitlement was there" among Republicans, he says, "and people smelled it." Yet even with a unified Democratic Party and the war, he argues, it was "a really close election." The GOP lost the Senate by its 3,562 vote margin of defeat in Montana, and in the House the combined margin in the 15 seats that cost control was 85,000 votes.

A prominent non-Beltway Republican recently gave me a different analysis, arguing that the White House made a disastrous decision to "nationalize" the election last autumn; this played into Democratic hands and cost numerous seats.

"I disagree," Mr. Rove replies. "The election was nationalized. It was always going to be about Iraq and the conduct of Republicans." He says Republican Chris Shays and Independent-Democrat Joe Lieberman survived in Connecticut despite supporting the war, while Republicans who were linked to corruption or were complacent lost. His biggest error, Mr. Rove says, was in not working soon enough to replace Republicans tainted by scandal.
Hey Karl, aren't you the guy who personally talked Mark Foley into running again when he wanted to retire? You never did take your bow for that one. Don't get all fucking humble now!

Oh, and there's the small matter of congressional Republicans hating Rove. Again, from next month's Atlantic;

Rove's behavior toward Congress stood out. "Every once in a while Rove would come to leadership meetings, and he definitely considered himself at least an equal with the leaders in the room," a Republican aide told me. "But you have to understand that Congress is a place where a certain decorum is expected. Even in private, staff is still staff. Rove would come and chime in as if he were equal to the speaker. Cheney sometimes came, too, and was far more deferential than Rove - and he was the vice president." Other aides say Rove was notorious for interrupting congressional leaders and calling them by their first name.

Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office (and no more a shrinking violet than DeLay), told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them. "For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it." Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued. "Do I give a damn? No. But can you imagine refusing a simple request like that with an insult? It's stupid. From the point of view of your own self-interest, it's stupid. I was from Texas, and I was the majority leader. If my expectations of civility and collegiality were disappointed, what do you think it was like for the rest of the congressmen they dealt with? The Bush White House was tone-deaf to the normal courtesies of the office."
Congress is notorious for being populated by pussies. They won't stand up to someone like Rove while he's perceived as being powerful. But the second you lose an important race - and '06 was hugely important - it's only a matter of time before they eat the fucking flesh directly from your still breathing body. Karl Rove spent the last six years pissing off the wrong people, and now the only friend he has left has a tendancy of bankrupting everything he touches. Frankly, I'm amazed that Cheney didn't have Rove killed last Christmas. I'm told that the vice-president is a rather handy with a shotgun.

He's less persuasive on Medicare, where he insists that market reforms and health savings accounts are building a "critical mass" of popular support that will make them unrepealable. Yet Democrats are even now trying to kill Medicare Advantage, blocked only by the promise of a veto. If Mrs. Clinton wins in 2008, the Medicare drug expansion may prove to have been all spending and no reform.
In a word, horseshit. The Medicare drug bill was always "all spending and no reform." It was designed to do one thing and only thing only, win a majority of seniors in 2004. Even now, no one's sure what the fucking program will cost, although the best guess is nearly a trillion dollars over ten years - or three times over the initial projections.

Everything that Karl Rove and George Bush said about Bill Clinton applies equally to them. None of them give a shit about anything beyond the next Gallup poll. It was only in 2005 that they supported anything that polled below 70% approval and by then they had been too blinded by their own deranged hubris to care.

They got lucky when the Democrats stayed softheaded enough to nominate Kerry and they failed to see that for the gift it was. They came within 180,000 Ohio votes of being humiliated by the only man in America with fewer principles than they have and they saw it as a mandate. Even a fool like Jimmy Carter was a genius of government compared to these two, and all he did was schedule the White House tennis court, boycott the Olympics and blow up his own helicopters. Christ, George W. Bush makes Herbert Hoover look like George fucking Wasington.

Rove was a brilliant political consultant, but he fancied himself a philiospher king. The problem is that such people don't usually do well at 1600 Pennsylvania Blvd. Woodrow Wilson - whose presidency Bush seems to have modeled his own on - was a lot like Karl Rove. And the American people were so disgusted with Wilson that they elected Warren Harding, a man who didn't even think he was worthy of the presidency.

Watching the news today, I can't fail but notice how full of glee shitheads like Bill Bennett are that Rove is leaving without being indicted. Is that really the best that the Republican Party can hope for at this point? Has the party of Lincoln really been reduced to doing cartwheels when they don't go to fucking jail?

Karl Rove is "heading on down the road" leaving the White House utterly discredited in the eyes of people who have the gall to actually to actually believe in something. His boss, as he pointed out this morning, isn't far behind.



Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Bobby Brown By: Frank Zappa From: Sheik Yerbouti


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