The Rove Era

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 16, 2007 7:56 AM

When I left town a couple of days ago, Karl Rove was still running the world.

Now we're awash in political obituaries.

It's a fascinating glimpse of how the media treat high-level political operatives, as if they are masters of the universe. And rarely has there been an operative about whom partisan passions run so high, as evidenced by the praise being ladled out by (most) conservatives and the scorn being heaped on Rove by liberals.

Indeed, it's fair to say that most journalists can't imagine George Bush without rapmaster MC Rove providing the music and lyrics--and doubt that W. would have made it to the White House without him.

The trashing of Rove by the left is in some ways a sign of respect, carrying the recognition that this is a guy who made his mark on both politics and policy, and whose grand theories about a Republican realignment are worthy of debate. He gets credit for victories in 2000 and 2004 and a good share of the blame for 2006. He gets credit for tax cuts and using national security as a wedge issue, and blame for the second-term failures on Social Security and immigration. And no assessment of Rove's career would be complete without examining his role in the Plame case.

Even better from a media point of view, Rove does not immediately become yesterday's news. The Democrats, having long fantasized about cross-examining him, will still be after Rove with subpoenas on the U.S. attorney firings and other controversies. Plus, his parting shot at Hillary as a strong but fatally flawed candidate suggests he won't be quietly riding into the sunset.

Before we dip into what everyone and his brother-in-law is saying about Rove, here's a snapshot of the liberal media in action, as described on a Seattle Times blog by David Postman:

"Seattle Times Executive Editor Dave Boardman wrote in one of his morning notes to staff that there had been 'an awkward moment at yesterday's news meeting.' . . .

" When word came in of Karl Rove's resignation, several people in the meeting started cheering. That sort of expression is simply not appropriate for a newsroom.

"It sounds like a conservative's parody of how a news meeting would be run. I wasn't there, but I've talked to several people who were. It was only a couple of people who cheered and they, thankfully, are not among the people who get a say in news play."

What an embarrassment.

The conservatives give Rove three cheers. National Review Editor Rich Lowry points out that he was not, however, a god:

"The underestimated Rove was never just a political consultant, but a keen policy mind. In baseball, he'd be called a five-tool player. He talked about Medicare Part B as fluidly and persuasively as he did voting trends in Indiana's 8th Congressional District. He could just as easily have been secretary of health and human services as Bush's political guru, and in terms of his importance to both governing and politicking, the only figure that comes close to him in recent memory is former Reagan and Bush I official James Baker.

"The overestimated Rove saw his critics attribute practically anything they didn't like in American politics to him. For all his talent, he was one man. He didn't orchestrate every development harmful to liberalism throughout the past 6 1/2 years, nor did he stomp on puppies and kick children on the way to work every morning. His White House co-workers, almost to a person, say he was an honorable and kind colleague . . .

"If a Republican wins the presidency in 2008, it will have to be Rove-style -- a masterful, but narrow victory won in parlous political circumstances."

The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes also says Rove is, well, human:

"Karl Rove is the first to admit it: he's become a myth, a man from whom political magic is expected. Last fall, for instance, Republicans around the country and even in the White House waited for Rove to devise a campaign strategy that would keep Republicans from losing the House and Senate and George Bush from becoming a lame duck president. But instead of a Rove miracle, Republicans and Bush suffered a terrible defeat.

"Rove is the greatest political mind of his generation and probably of any generation. He not only is a breathtakingly smart strategist but also a clever tactician. He knows history, understands the moods of the public, and is a visionary on matters of public policy. But he is not a magician.

Political advisers like Rove offer advice, not magic. And Rove's advice has been very good over the years.

"The most important factor in elections is not who the strategist is. In most races, the quality of the candidate, the partisan landscape, the ideology of the time--those are far more significant factors. Strategists mostly affect campaigns at the margin."

Shhh! Don't spoil it for the rest of us!

Power Line's Paul Mirengoff says Rove was great on substance--but actually made a mistake or two:

"Rove was more than just a political operative, particularly in the second term. There are always risks when a 'politico' gets a policy role, but Rove shouldn't be blamed for Bush's second term slide. Second terms almost never match first terms either in terms of general efficacy or ideological quality. Moreover, there's no basis of which I'm aware for blaming the policy decisions conservatives don't like on Rove. We do know he's aligned with Bush on immigration policy, but every indication is that Bush believes in these policies independent of any political calculation or other input from Rove.

"The one policy matter for which Rove should perhaps receive blame is the firing of the U.S. attorneys. It seems likely that the impetus for these firings, and perhaps much of the direction, came from the White House, and from Rove's shop in particular. As I've argued repeatedly, there almost surely is no scandal here. It is the president's right to fire federal prosecutors so long as doing so is not an attempt to obstruct justice or engage in wrongful prosecution. And there's no evidence that these firings came anywhere near that line.

"Nonetheless, events have confirmed what a shrewd analyst and student of history should have sensed -- that it was a bad idea to fire prosecutors who were performing at acceptable levels of competence."

Moving toward the left, the New Republic's John Judis says Rove proved less than a genius last time around:

"Last November's election finally silenced Rove. In that election, the Democrats didn't merely win back the Congress--which Rove could blame on Congressional corruption--but met Rove's own standard for a genuine political reversal by winning back 321 state legislative seats . . .

"What, then, is Rove's political legacy? In his public statements about the 2002 and 2004 elections, Rove dutifully credited Bush and the 'Bush agenda,' but in his discussions with political journalists, he conveyed a different message: that these victories were the product of a novel new strategy that he had developed after 2000c

"After his narrow 2004 victory, Bush needed to move back to the political center on domestic and foreign policy. Instead, they tacked further right. That wasn't entirely Rove's fault--he probably had little say over the war in Iraq--but he certainly must get some of the blame.

"Rove's brilliance had lay earlier in his ability to adapt his strategy to new circumstances. But after his success in the 2004 election, he became as inflexible in his political strategy as he knocked his former client Phil Gramm for being in his public policies--and he and the Bush administration suffered the consequences."

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum offers a more sweeping indictment:

"History will judge Rove a colossal failure, a man who never understood how to govern and, for all his immense knowledge of polls and politics, never really understood the times he lived in. It was 9/11 that both made and broke the Bush presidency, not some kind of mystical McKinley-esque realignment. Rove was blind to that, and blind to the way Bush should have governed after 9/11. His one-track mind, in which every problem is solved by wielding the biggest, nastiest partisan club you can lift, just couldn't adapt. It's fitting that he insisted on making even his final act as calculatedly partisan as he could, announcing his resignation not through the White House press office, but in an interview with the editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page."

Will the liberals miss having Rove to kick around? The Huffington Post's Bob Cesca will:

"He'll be out there walking the streets.

"Personally, I'd rather have Karl Rove in the White House where he's preoccupied by this uproariously laughable effort to make the Bush administration sound capable and popular."

Dick Polman gets his dander up about Rove disputing reports that he mainly played to the conservative base:

"The problem is, they can't simply flush history down the Orwellian memory hole. Rove's new spin about himself is flatly contradicted by his past actions. It's true that he positioned Bush as a moderate during the 2000 campaign - selling Bush as 'a new kind of Republican,' a 'compassionate conservative' -- but after Bush came up 660,000 votes short in the popular vote, and had to be installed in the White House by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision, Rove began to chart a very different course.I know this, because I heard him say so.

"During a public appearance at a conservative think tank not long after the election, he fretted about the fact that, by his calculations, more than four million Christian evangelicals had failed to show up at the polls in November 2000. Rove made it quite clear that he would motivate those evangelicals to show up for Bush in 2004 -- and he made good on that promise by targeting their churches, even to the extent of asking the churches to fork over their membership directories for inclusion in the Bush campaign data base.Nor was it sheer coincidence that, in 2004, anti-gay marriage referenda appeared on the ballots in 11 states."

Rudy is now promising to end illegal immigration. But unfortunately for him, TPM's Greg Sargent found a 1996 videotape in which the then-mayor says that America will "never, ever be able to totally control immigration" and that the country needs to "accept" this.

Hey, the tape does not lie.

The new Hillary ad is drawing more attention than the Clinton camp might have expected.

"I watched it. It's OK," says Salon Editor Joan Walsh. "She talks about struggling Americans -- people needing healthcare, struggling single moms, even soldiers -- who feel they're 'invisible' to President Bush, and promises they'll be visible when she's president. It was soft and unremarkable to me.

"But not to White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, who bashed the ad as 'outrageous' at a briefing. 'As to the merits of it, I think it's outrageous. This is a president who, first and foremost, has helped millions of seniors across the country have access to prescription drugs at a much lower cost. ... As to whether or not our troops are invisible to this president, I think that is absurd and that it is unconscionable that a member of Congress would say such a thing.'

"What is Perino thinking? Why is the White House giving Clinton such a boost in the news cycle? It reminds me of Deputy Defense Secretary Eric Edelman slamming Clinton's request for information on Pentagon troop-withdrawal planning last month as abetting 'enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq.' Of course the scuffle helped boost Clinton's antiwar bona fides with the Democratic base; she plastered the exchange all over her Web site.

"Karl Rove slammed Clinton, too, in his exit interview with the Wall Street Journal, calling her 'fatally flawed.' Conspiracy theorists have to think Clinton is the Democratic candidate the White House favors."

Of course, it's also possible that Bush just doesn't like to be called insensitive to the needs of millions.

GQ is out with one of those silly lists, the 50 Most Powerful People in D.C. They are:

1. Condoleezza Rice

2. Harry Reid

3. Robert Gates

4. Anthony Kennedy

5. Nancy Pelosi

6. Howard Kohr

Howard Kohr? Ahead of Hillary Clinton? Well, he's executive director of AIPAC.

Rove is No. 9, though he's probably ripe for a demotion.

We turn our attention now to terminology. Liberal bloggers, take notice: Markos is eschewing the use of "MSM":

"First of all, it's a right-wing pejorative, and I'd rather we not adopt their language and frames.

"But more importantly, by calling them 'mainstream media,' we are saying that we ourselves aren't mainstream, and that's not something I'm willing to concede. This site gets far more readers than most 'mainstream media' publications, so why are they mainstream, while we are, by definition, the fringe?

"Let the right wingers place themselves out of the mainstream. That's where they belong, with Mr. 25% and the dead-enders . . . We, on the other hand, are firmly on the mainstream on just about every major issue facing our country, and our numbers are growing. We aren't outside the mainstream, we are representatives of the mainstream, and the country is embracing what we're selling . . .

"The right wing needs to co-opt or destroy the traditional media because, quite frankly, reality isn't a friend of conservative ideology. The last thing they need is anyone reporting 'the truth.' Instead, they need to create their own alternate reality to justify their beliefs. And any bit of reality that doesn't conform to their rigid conservative ideology is 'liberal' . . .

"We don't need to join those efforts. Sure, we need to keep the media honest, but as an institution, it's important they exist and do their job well."

But that sounds so . . . reasonable. Some liberal bloggers think the MSM--oops, there I go again--are too conservative, too cautious, too willing to roll over for the Bush administration. I wonder how many will follow Kos's lead.

Finally, I never heard of using a BlackBerry as a weapon (except to type nasty e-mails,) but Foxy Brown has found a way.