The undoing of the Architect’s plansc

The undoing of the Architect’s plans
By Clive Crook
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: August 15 2007 19:12 | Last updated: August 15 2007 19:12


It is difficult to exaggerate the role Karl Rove played for George W. Bush – but, as commentators have proved this week, not impossible. Friends and foes alike give “the Architect”, as the president called him, the credit for the Republicans’ remarkable election victories of 2000, 2002 and 2004 and (a pleasing irony, as far as foes are concerned) much of the blame for the electoral debacle of 2006. In most of what has been written about Mr Rove’s departure and legacy, the president himself gets hardly a look in. Dick Cheney, the man normally said to be running the show, seems to have vanished altogether.

Credit for the Bush administration’s successes (such as they are) and blame for its failures belong with the president. Yes, Mr Rove was an unusually influential adviser – uniquely combining the roles of chief political strategist and domestic policy adviser – and a close friend of the president as well. It is difficult to imagine this White House without him. But he was still just an adviser. One must remember, too, that governments rarely succeed or fail according to whether they have good or bad electoral strategies. What matters is how well they govern and in particular how well they handle, or fail to handle, unexpected events.

Judging the administration’s rise and fall from a strategic point of view leads one to look for internal contradictions. So it is argued, for instance, that Mr Rove’s preference for energising the base of committed Republican supporters carried the seeds of its own failure, either because it made winning the support of moderate independents more difficult, or because it energised the government’s opponents even more. There is some truth to both points – but the question is: why did this approach succeed so well in 2002 and 2004 (both times against the odds, though for different reasons) and fail so abjectly in 2006? The answer is simple. It is not that the strategy’s contradictions were somehow exposed, but that between 2004 and 2006 the White House showed itself, beyond any remaining doubt, to be irredeemably incompetent.

The issues that sank the president’s poll ratings off the chart were the deteriorating war in Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina. The war, to be sure, has turned out terribly – based in the first place on false intelligence, then mismanaged woefully throughout. I wonder, though, if that alone might have been survivable politically. Saddam Hussein, after all, was not an imaginary enemy. Voters understand that things go wrong in wars and the American instinct is to rally behind the armed forces and their leaders at such times. What made the question moot was the response to Katrina, a further display of seeming indifference and blithering ineptitude. (Perhaps it would have been handled more cleverly if “the Architect” had not been distracted by the scandal over who leaked the name of Valerie Plame, a former covert CIA agent, to reporters.) In any event, Mr Bush’s endorsement of Michael Brown, the flailing head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency – “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” – made the country reel and was the moment I myself gave up on this president.

These awful, unforgettable instances were mutually reinforcing: anyone inclined, however implausibly, to give the White House the benefit of the doubt on Iraq (“they are doing their best in difficult circumstances”) was mocked by the response to Katrina. And once the idea that the administration was unfit to govern became firmly lodged in enough minds, other big initiatives that the White House wished to pursue were doomed as well, regardless of their merits or their strategic import.

Reform of Social Security, championed in the White House by Mr Rove and once intended as the second term’s domestic-policy centrepiece, was already in trouble before the hurricane, but Katrina sealed its fate. “Trust us to do this right,” was the administration’s message on partial privatisation of pensions: “It’s complicated but we know what we’re doing.” “You must be joking,” was the electorate’s reply. Immigration reform was another of Mr Rove’s grand political projects, aimed at bringing Hispanics inside the Republican tent. It failed for more than one reason, but the fact that the plan was premised on complex new measures to control the border certainly did not help. The country’s mood was: “We’ll believe that when we see it.”

Social Security and immigration show, incidentally, that the political strategy urged by Mr Rove and prosecuted by Mr Bush went far beyond stirring the Republican base into a get-the-vote-out frenzy. The plan was not just to energise the base but to broaden it. Privatising Social Security would create a vast new class of private investors – voters with a stake in corporate America, less susceptible to the Democrats’ traditional pitch. Immigration reform would have given Republicans a claim on the support of America’s fastest-growing demographic group.

Mr Rove was correct: both those initiatives made good sense strategically and still do. In my view, they were desirable on their merits as well, as long as they were done right. That was the problem. Politically challenging as these planned reforms no doubt were, they did not fail because they were bad ideas, or divisive ideas, or because they jarred with other aspects of the Bush-Rove agenda. They failed because too many Americans thought the Bush administration would make a hash of them. Who could disagree?

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