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Bush's Brain Goes Missing
As Karl Rove Retires

By Leonard Doyle

14 August, 2007
The Independent


"Karl Rove RESIGNS!!! Karl Rove Resigns - Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead [breaking news - no irony] Short and Sweet: Rove resigns!"

The bloggers were at it early yesterday morning, as the online bush telegraph breathlessly passed on the news that the man the Democrats love to hate, the tousle-haired and bespectacled Andy Warhol lookalike, Karl Rove, had announced his departure from the Bush White House.

For the past seven years, Karl Christian Rove, who holds the titles of deputy chief of staff and senior adviser, has been the unseen hand of American politics, the invisible mender of the Republican Party and the Rasputin of the White House all rolled into one. He steered George Bush to victory after victory. Using every weapon that came to hand, he helped engineer Mr Bush's re-election, before coming to grief in last year's midterm elections when the increasingly unpopular Republicans lost their grip on Congress.

The man known as "Bush's Brain" has been talking about leaving for the past year, and the spin yesterday morning was that he was quitting to spend more time with his family, especially his wife Darby and his 17-year-old son. Soon he will be packing up his beloved books from his elegant three-storey brick home and heading back to Texas.

"If he wanted to spend time with his family," one blogger asked, "he surely would have done it before his son went to college". Mr Rove, who is 56, narrowly escaped being indicted in the CIA leak case and he has been under intense scrutiny for his behind-the-scenes role in sacking US attorneys who were considered politically suspect.

He ignored a congressional subpoena, citing executive privilege. Two weeks ago, he defied Congress again by refusing to attend a hearing into the White House's use of the email accounts of the Republican National Committee to avoid the scrutiny.

In the White House, the belief is the increasingly pointed congressional investigations have been aimed at forcing out Mr Rove.

He now says he is finished with political consulting and intends to write a book about the Bush presidency. Yesterday morning, he wore a green tie as he appeared on the White House lawn with President Bush for an emotional farewell.

"We've been friends for a long time, and we're still going to be friends," Mr Bush said with Mr Rove by his side. "I would call Karl Rove a dear friend. 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."

Mr Rove's voice and face betrayed emotion as he then offered his farewell. "I'm grateful to have been a witness to history," he said. "It has been the joy and the honour of a lifetime." Choking up at times, Mr Rove recalled his 14 year association with Mr Bush. He was proud he said, of the way Mr Bush had brought America to a war footing, strengthened the economy and reformed public life.

Those are not attributes that currently fill Americans with pride and, with the ongoing disaster of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the financial markets in meltdown, many will have difficulty recognising the successes being pointed to.

When he leaves the White House, Mr Rove said, he will become one of those "ordinary Americans who tell you they are praying for you." The two men then hugged for the cameras before boarding the Marine One helicopter together. They then flew off to Andrews Air Force Base, to join their families for a flight on Air Force One back to Texas for a summer holiday.

Mr Rove's forte has been his ability to create a new political reality in the minds of voters. As he and his hobbled master headed out of town, there was a palpable feeling that the curtain had been finally been pulled back on the Wizard of Oz.

When the Vanity Fair journalist Todd Purdum, recently asked Mr Rove if he thought George Bush would be better off if he had done more to emphasise the gruelling realities that the Iraq war would entail. "I think he has, frankly," Mr Rove said "Go take a look at every one of those speeches," he said, invoking Churchill, "and there's an optimism about ultimately prevailing, which was there in all but a handful. You know, you have to go to April 1940 to get a speech in which there may be the hint of, you know, the night is descending on Britain. But there is an optimism in Roosevelt, there is an optimism in Churchill, there's an optimism in Bush."

But, as Republican Senators and Congressmen discover every time they return to their home constituencies, Mr Rove's interpretation of events have long since run out of road.

It is for his success at the dark political art of spin that Mr Rove may be best remembered, according to Bob Borosage a veteran of several progressive presidential campaigns who last ran Jesse Jackson's bid for the presidency. "With Rove it was all about politics and spin and never about policy," he said yesterday.

"He believed that America's overwhelming military might could create its own foreign policy reality. We saw this in his scorn for all the attempts at reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan after the invasions.

"The same is true on the domestic front where politics replaced policy as they tried to create their own reality and failed.

"Rove's legacy is that he has been an architect of one of the worst administrations in our history, one where short term political objectives dominated."

As he prepares to leave his windowless office in the White House, Mr Rove has let it be known that he wants to teach at university and, while he does not have a job lined up, the offers will not be long in coming. More notably, he has no plans to attach himself to any of the Republican candidates for the Presidency, nor will any be seeking his public endorsement. A kiss of death surely given the contempt in which the administration is held across the country.

Mr Rove is but the latest high-profile presidential aide to have headed out the revolving door as the Bush administration enters its death throes. Over the past few months, the presidential adviser Dan Bartlett has gone - as has the budget director Rob Portman, as well as a string of other longtime political operatives. But none have come close to the political clout of Mr Rove whom the Washington Post described yesterday as "the most prominent political strategist of his generation and a bête noire for liberals and even a number of conservative critics".

President Bush dubbed him "The Architect" for his crucial role in winning the fiercely controversial 2000 elections. He was also credited the midterm Congressional election victories for Republicans in 2002 and Mr Bush's triumphant re-election victory over John Kerry in 2004.

It was last year's hounding out of power of the Republican Congress that ended his Midas touch and finally gave power to his enemies.

Karl Rove's uncanny control over US politics came from his extraordinary ability to categorise, classify and finally harvest voters for the Republican party. From his earliest days, he was an expert in direct mail shots, fine tuning messages to nudge voters in the right direction. He helped design scurrilous attack TV ads and has excelled in digging up a cast of characters, be they gays, liberals, terrorists, or trades unions who his candidates could then use to needle a vulnerable electorate into submission.

As Tod Purdum comments, "As much as anyone, it was Rove who made a once implausible governor of Texas into the President of the United States."

Mr Rove came of age politically in the mid- to-late sixties, at a time when the United States believed itself to be going through a great flower-power revolution.

While left wing politics was getting all the attention in the turbulent university campuses of the US, there was an equally powerful resurgence on the right among the College Republicans.

These were people who thought that the time of the political right had come. Their history is similar to the Marxist-tinged groups that dominated student politics across Europe, full of intrigue, attempted coups and counter-coups. The king of the college Republicans was one Karl Rove. He had emerged from Utah by volunteering in a US Senate campaign. Always affable and extrovert - he has a bull horn voice and a face of apparent innocence. His pale-blue eyes, wind-blown straw blond hair, and quick to flush pale skin reveal little of the éminence grise of American hardball politics.

On Christmas Day, 1969, on Karl's 19th birthday, his father walked out of the family home. Shortly thereafter, Mr Rove discovered the man he believed was his father actually wasn't. He and his older brother - in a family of five - were in fact children of a secret lover of his mother.

Mr Rove's mother eventually committed suicide, in her car in Reno, Nevada, in 1981.

His ability to play dirty and his ruthlessness as a political operative was clear from the outset. In 1970, he pretended to volunteer for a Democrat who was running for office and stole some letter-headed stationery from the office. On that, he printed handouts promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," distributing them at a rock concert, and a soup kitchen, and to homeless people on the street, causing an unruly crowd to turn up at his opponents headquarters.

A few years later, he was caught on tape bragging that he had spied on opponents in an election of young Republicans.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the party's chairman, who would go on to head the CIA, concluded that nothing out of order had occurred and Mr Rove became leader of the college Republicans.

More than 20 years ago, he outlined his basic political philosophy in a memo in which he quoted Napoleon on warfare: "The whole art of war consists in a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive, followed by rapid and audacious attack."

He might have added that, in political warfare, there is a second requirement of never leaving fingerprints on your dirty work. It is widely believed it was Mr Rove who spread the rumours that Ann Richards was a lesbian, when George W Bush ran against her for governor of Texas in 1994.

There were also rumours that the presidential candidate John McCain was gay, mentally unstable, and the father of a mixed-race child, during his South Carolina race battle against Bush, in 2000.

It was under the presidency of George W Bush that Rove extended his influence into policy making. He helped design the deep tax cuts that boosted the President's ratings but also created an enormous budget deficit. He also provided the intellectual heft under which the Bush presidency tried to bring about an extended period of Republican political dominance.

As the neo-cons attempted to break the mould of US foreign politics and "remake the Middle East", Rove had a long term dream of a "rolling re-alignment" of the American body politic behind the Republican party.

Today, both projects are failing badly. Mr Rove's dream of creating a Republican coalition that brought together an unlikely alliance of evangelical Christians, red in tooth and claw capitalists and dreamers of an American empire is now in tatters.

© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited

 

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