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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