Finantial Times Editorial Comment: Rove’s tainted legacy
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 13 2007 18:29 | Last updated: August 13 2007 18:29
The resignation of Karl Rove will be seen in many quarters as the end of George W. Bush’s administration. With 18 months to go before the next president takes office, the sudden air of finality is a measure of the man’s influence and reputation.
Mr Rove has been Mr Bush’s partner in politics since the president’s Texas days, and Mr Bush himself called Mr Rove “The Architect” after the Republicans captured the White House in 2000. In power, Mr Rove continued in his role of most trusted policy adviser and chief political strategist, helping to secure victory in the 2002 mid-term elections and to defeat John Kerry in 2004. Only as the wheels came off the administration in its second term, and the Republicans went down to defeat in last year’s congressional elections, did Mr Rove’s aura of tactical infallibility begin to fade – and even then more slowly than the president’s dismal poll ratings had long seemed to warrant.
He has been a quintessentially polarising figure. Mr Rove’s friends and foes alike attributed to him remarkable powers of judgment and foresight: his admirers thought him a mighty force for good, his detractors saw him as downright evil. These exaggerated and sometimes hysterical assessments are of a piece with the way the administration itself is judged. Mr Rove was not the monster his enemies thought him to be, nor the beneficent genius his Republican fans perceived. He was a shrewd adviser with an impressive record of winning elections. But he got many things wrong – and in the end the presidency in which he was a junior partner will be judged a failure.
Mr Rove’s distinctive tactical contribution, which also shaped the administration’s substantive record, was to energise the Republicans’ base of committed supporters. Stroke the prejudices of that part of America, play on its fears and demonise its enemies: that was the watchword. It was a bold and in some ways implausible strategy, because it always risked energising the party’s enemies more than its friends. Nonetheless, in three national elections – albeit assisted by weak opponents, and in the tied 2000 election by the Supreme Court – it worked. From the outset, though, it tainted the administration with dishonesty. Mr Bush memorably promised to govern as a moderate, as indeed he should have, given the narrowness of his mandate in 2000. But he did not. The Rove strategy precluded it.
Mr Rove helped secure two White House terms for George W. Bush. By the lights of his profession, he was a success. America is in no mood to thank him for it.
Karl Rove announces resignation
By Andrew Ward in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 13 2007 09:51 | Last updated: August 13 2007 18:29
Karl Rove, architect of President George W. Bush’s two election victories, on Monday resigned after six years as one of the most powerful and influential political advisers ever to have served in the White House.
His departure at the end of this month comes after a torrid year of political setbacks for the Bush presidency and mounting scrutiny of Mr Rove’s role in a series of scandals and controversies surrounding the administration.
Mr Rove is the latest of several senior officials to leave the White House this year as Mr Bush’s second-term agenda has ground to a halt amid resistance from a Democratic-controlled Congress and deepening chaos in Iraq.
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Editorial comment: Rove’s tainted legacy
Analysis: End of the road for the Republicans’ Architect
The Texan, nicknamed the “Boy Genius” because of his skills as a political strategist, said he was leaving to spend more time with his family after 14 years of service to Mr Bush in Texas and Washington.
“It's been an exhilarating and eventful time,” he said, standing beside Mr Bush outside the White House on Monday. “Now it seems the right time to start thinking about the next chapter in our family's life.”
Describing Mr Rove as his “dear friend”, Mr Bush said: “We've known each other as youngsters, interested in serving our state. We worked together so we could be in a position to serve this country. And so I thank my friend. I'll be on the road behind you here in a little bit.”
The White House said no decision had been made about whether Mr Rove would be replaced or whether his duties would be reallocated among existing staff. Analysts said his departure would increase the importance of Josh Bolten, chief of staff, and Ed Gillespie, White House counselor.
Mr Gillespie, a veteran Republican strategist and lobbyist, was appointed in June after the resignation of Dan Bartlett, another of Mr Bush’s longest-serving Texan allies.
“Ed Gillespie is a very fine political mind who is likely to play an enhanced role in White House deliberations,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican political strategist. “But there’s no way to replace Karl Rove because his breadth of political and policy experience and his relationship with the president are unmatched.”
Mr Rove has been one of Mr Bush’s closest friends and advisers since his successful run for governor of Texas in 1994. He was the last remaining member of the close-knit group of Texan aides that accompanied Mr Bush to the White House in 2001.
“It's not been an easy decision,” said Mr Rove, adding that he had been considering his future since last summer. “It always seemed there was a better time to leave somewhere out there in the future. But now is the time.”
Other senior aides to have left this year include Harriet Miers, former White House counsel, and Rob Portman, budget director.
The exodus has come amid a slump in Mr Bush's approval ratings to around 30 per cent and a growing sense of crisis within the Republican party about its prospects in next year's presidential and Congressional elections.
John Kerry, the Democratic senator whose defeat in the 2004 presidential election was masterminded by Mr Rove, said: “It's a tragedy that an administration that promised to unite Americans has instead left us more divided than ever before. Without doubt the architect of that political strategy was Karl Rove, who proved the politics of division may win some elections but cannot govern America.”
Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, vowed to continue the investigation into Mr Rove’s role in the controversial firing of several federal prosecutors last year. “Mr Rove's apparent attempts to manipulate elections and push out prosecutors citing bogus claims of voter fraud shows corruption of federal law enforcement for partisan political purposes, and the Senate judiciary committee will continue its investigation into this serious issue,” he said. “There is a cloud over this White House, and a gathering storm.”
Mr Rove was also embroiled – but never indicted for wrongdoing – in the CIA leak case – an investigation into the leaking of a covert CIA agent’s identity as part of the Bush administration’s attempts to make the case for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff to vice-president Dick Cheney, was convicted of perjury in connection with the case but had his jail sentence commuted by Mr Bush last month.
End of the road for the Republicans’ Architect
By Edward Luce in Washington
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 13 2007 18:34 | Last updated: August 13 2007 18:34
At a White House press conference last November, the day after the Republican Party’s convincing defeat in the mid-term congressional elections, George W. Bush made a double-edged quip about Karl Rove.
When asked who was winning the reading competition the president and his political “boy genius” had apparently embarked upon, Mr Bush said: “I’m losing. Obviously I was working harder in the campaign than he was.”
Last November’s electoral “thumping” – as Mr Bush dubbed it – brought to an end the historic six-year run of Republican triumphs that brought two White House and three congressional victories and the majority of state governorships.
In the eyes of critics, the 2006 defeat also sounded the death knell of “Rovianism” – an electoral strategy that involved polarizing the two parties in order to shore up and enthuse the Republican party’s base.
That approach worked brilliantly in 2002, when for the first time in nearly 70 years a sitting president’s party regained control of the Senate and increased its share of the House of Representatives. It also defeated John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, in 2004 – although by a whisker.
But by 2006 Rovianism was a spent force. On Tuesday, as Mr Rove returns to his home in Texas to write a book, the Republicans face what many are predicting will be as sweeping a defeat in 2008 as the victories Mr Rove engineered during the first half of Mr Bush’s presidency.
For the man whom Mr Bush proclaimed as the “architect” of a Republican realignment that would last a generation, Mr Rove’s departure comes at a low point in his party’s fortunes. What happened to cause its sudden collapse?
Critics of Mr Rove say that his strategy of polarizing the electorate was one of ever-diminishing returns.
By giving Mr Rove as decisive a role in the day-to-day running of the White House as he played in the election campaigns, Mr Bush ensured that policy would be subordinate to politics in his administration.
“Ultimately if you divide and polarize, it is more difficult to govern well, and if you govern badly then you start losing support,” said David Frum, a former speech writer for Mr Bush. “The failure of policy in the Bush administration was a direct result of the success of its politics.”
Rovianism also differed in critical ways from Reaganism, whose success Mr Rove hoped to emulate.
Rather than polarizing the electorate, Ronald Reagan’s approach in the 1980s was to divide the opposition by bringing up so-called “wedge issues”, such as welfare reform or being tough on crime, which would split the Democrats.
In contrast, Mr Rove’s approach simply united the opposition. Rovianism also alienated independents, roughly two-thirds of whom now lean towards the Democratic Party.
“Karl Rove’s idea was that you only need 50 per cent plus one voter in order to govern,” says Cal Jillson, a professor at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “He was wrong. That’s about winning elections. To govern is quite a different matter.”
One exception to Mr Rove’s polarizing tendency was his support for a relatively liberal immigration reform, which had more backers in the Democratic Party than among Republicans. But that bill, which was designed to lure the rapidly expanding block of Hispanic voters into the Republican tent, crashed in June – bringing to an end Mr Bush’s last big domestic ambition.
Other signature policies, such as the creation of private Social Security accounts and a market-based reform of America’s expensive health care system, also floundered on the rubble of the profoundly unpopular war in Iraq.
In a speech he gave in June 2006, Mr Rove talked about the creation of a permanent Republican majority and said the Democrats were on the wrong side of history. Mr Rove also reminded Republicans what had happened to the long-running Democratic majority that was supplanted in the 1970s.
He said the Democrats’ demise offered a “cautionary tale of what happens to a dominant party when its thinking becomes ossified, its energy begins to drain and when political power becomes an end in itself rather than a means to achieve the common good.”
A year later Mr Rove’s words offer a good summary of where conventional wisdom lies on the Republican Party.
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