Rove says he'll resign end of August

[Watser?]

Top White House aide Karl Rove has said he will resign at the end of August.

"I just think it's time," Mr Rove said in an interview for the Wall Street Journal, adding that he was quitting for the sake of his family.

Mr Rove is a senior political adviser to President George W Bush and has worked with him for more than a decade. link (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6943814.stm)

[beyelzu]

seen by many as the brains behind George W Bush's presidency

one hell of a legacy that.

[Sock Puppet]

Damn, it didn't even take a holly stake through his heart. Color me surprised.

[Abdul Alhazred]

I'm trying to come up with something about "suspicious timing". :P

[D. Scarlatti]

http://home.att.net/~jrhsc/rove_arrested.jpg

[Kyuss Apollo]

Over the weekend I just read Joshua Green's article (see below) on Rove in this month's Atlantic Monthly. Rather insightful and timely now that Turd Blossom has gone on to greener fields--there's alot of other Rove stuff at the Atlantic online (http://www.theatlantic.com) this month, but a lot of it is inaccessible unless you have an account. Here's an excerpt that lays out the basic premise, that Rove had a road map to create a political realignment that would ensure Republican dominance for the next generation or two. However, his application of ram-it-down campaign strategies in DC's rarified air of compromise and decorum derailed most of his planned and squandered whatever political capital Bush might once have had with even his own party.

The Rove Presidency

...One of the goals of any ambitious president is to create a governing coalition just as Roosevelt did, one that long outlasts your presidency. It’s the biggest thing you can aim for, and only a few presidents have achieved it. As the person with the long-term vision in the Bush administration, and with no lack of ambition either, Rove had thought long and hard about achieving this goal before ever arriving in the White House, and he has pursued it more aggressively than anyone else.

Fifty years ago, political scientists developed what is known as realignment theory—the idea that a handful of elections in the nation’s history mattered more than the others because they created “sharp and durable” changes in the polity that lasted for decades. Roosevelt’s election in 1932, which brought on the New Deal and three decades of Democratic dominance in Washington, is often held up as the classic example. Modern American historians generally see five elections as realigning: 1800, when Thomas Jefferson’s victory all but finished off the Federalist Party and reoriented power from the North to the agrarian South; 1828, when Andrew Jackson’s victory gave rise to the modern two-party system and two decades of Jacksonian influence; 1860, when Abraham Lincoln’s election marked the ascendance of the Republican Party and of the secessionist impulse that led to the Civil War; 1896, when the effects of industrialization affirmed an increasingly urban political order that brought William McKinley to power; and Roosevelt’s election in 1932, during the Great Depression.

Academics debate many aspects of this theory, such as whether realignment comes in regular cycles, and whether it is driven by voter intensity or disillusionment. But historians have shown that two major preconditions typically must be in place for realignment to occur. First, party loyalty must be sufficiently weak to allow for a major shift—the electorate, as the political scientist Paul Allen Beck has put it, must be “ripe for realignment.” The other condition is that the nation must undergo some sort of triggering event, often what Beck calls a “societal trauma”—the ravaging depressions of the 1890s and 1930s, for instance, or the North-South conflict of the 1850s and ’60s that ended in civil war. It’s important to have both. Depressions and wars throughout American history have had no realigning consequence because the electorate wasn’t primed for one, just as periods of electoral unrest have passed without a realignment for lack of a catalyzing event.

Before he ever came to the White House, Rove fervently believed that the country was on the verge of another great shift. His faith derived from his reading of the presidency of a man most historians regard as a mediocrity. Anyone on the campaign trail in 2000 probably heard him cite the pivotal importance of William McKinley’s election in 1896. Rove thought there were important similarities.

“Everything you know about William McKinley and Mark Hanna”—McKinley’s Rove—“is wrong,” he told Nicholas Lemann of The New Yorker in early 2000. “The country was in a period of change. McKinley’s the guy who figured it out. Politics were changing. The economy was changing. We’re at the same point now: weak allegiances to parties, a rising new economy.” Rove was suggesting that the electorate in 2000, as in 1896, was ripe for realignment, and implying, somewhat immodestly, that he was the guy who had figured it out. What was missing was an obvious trigger. With the economy soaring (the stock-market collapse in the spring of 2000 was still months away) and the nation at peace, there was no reason to expect that a realignment was about to happen.

Instead, Rove’s idea was to use the levers of government to create an effect that ordinarily occurs only in the most tumultuous periods in American history. He believed he could force a realignment himself through a series of far-reaching policies. Rove’s plan had five major components: establish education standards, pass a “faith-based initiative” directing government funds to religious organizations, partially privatize Social Security, offer private health-savings accounts as an alternative to Medicare, and reform immigration laws to appeal to the growing Hispanic population. Each of these, if enacted, would weaken the Democratic Party by drawing some of its core supporters into the Republican column. His plan would lead, he believed, to a period of Republican dominance like the one that followed McKinley’s election.

Rove’s vision had a certain abstract conceptual logic to it, much like the administration’s plan to spread democracy by force in the Middle East. If you could invade and pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, the thinking went, democracy would spread across the region. Likewise, if you could recast major government programs to make them more susceptible to market forces, broader support for the Republican Party would ensue. But in both cases the visionaries ignored the enormous difficulty of carrying off such seismic changes.

Rove’s systematic policy of sharply contrasting Republican and Democratic positions on national security was a brilliant campaign strategy and the critical mechanism of Republican victory in the 2002 midterms. But he could not foresee how this mode of operating would ultimately work at cross-purposes with his larger goal. “What Bush went out and did in 2002,” a former administration official told me, “clearly at Karl’s behest, with an eye toward the permanent Republican majority, was very aggressively attack those Democrats who voted with him and were for him. There’s no question that the president helped pick up seats. But all of that goodwill was squandered.”

From the outset, Rove’s style of pursuing realignment—through division—was in stark contrast to the way it had happened the last time. In Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, the historian William E. Leuchtenburg notes that Roosevelt mentioned the Democratic Party by name only three times in his entire 1936 reelection campaign. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt had large Democratic majorities in Congress but operated in a nonpartisan fashion, as though he didn’t. Bush, with razor-thin majorities—and for a time, a divided Congress—operated as though his margins were insurmountable, and sowed interparty divisions as an electoral strategy.

Rove never graduated from college. He dropped out of the University of Utah and campaigned for the chairmanship of the College Republicans, a national student organization whose leaders often go on to important positions in the party. He won, placing himself on a fast track to a career in politics. But he was and remains an autodidact, and a large part of his self-image depends on showing that his command of history and politics is an order of magnitude greater than other people’s. Rove has a need to outdo everybody else that seems to inform his sometimes contrarian views of history. It’s not enough for him to have read everything; he needs to have read everything and arrived at insights that others missed.

[Kyuss Apollo]

...As the September 11 mind-set began to lose its power over Washington, Rove still faced the task of getting  the more difficult parts of his realignment schema through Congress. But his lack of fluency in the art of moving policy and his tendency to see the world through the divisive lens of a political campaign were great handicaps. There was an important difference between the administration’s first-term achievements and the entitlement overhauls (Social Security and Medicare) and volatile cultural issues (immigration) that Rove wanted to push through next. Cutting taxes and furnishing new benefits may generate some controversy in Washington, but few lawmakers who support them face serious political risk. (Tax cuts get Republicans elected!) So it’s possible, with will and numbers alone, to pass them with the barest of majorities. Rove’s mistake was to believe that this would work with everything.

Entitlement reform is a different animal. More important than reaching a majority is offering political cover to those willing to accept the risk of tampering with cherished programs, and the way to do this is by enlisting the other side. So the fact that Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress after 2002—to Rove, a clinching argument for confrontation—actually lessened the likelihood of entitlement reform. Congressional Republicans didn’t support Rove’s plan in 2003 to tackle Social Security or immigration reform because they didn’t want to pass such things on a party-line vote. History suggested they’d pay a steep price at election time.

To understand this, Rove need not have looked back any farther than the last Republican president who had attempted something on this order. Before he was president, Ronald Reagan talked about letting people opt out of the Social Security system, a precursor of the plan Rove favors. In 1981, in the full tide of victory, Reagan proposed large cuts—and the Republican Senate refused even to take them up. The mere fact that they had been put forward, however, was enough to imperil Republicans, who took significant losses in 1982.

The following year, Reagan tried again, this time co-operating with the Democratic speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill. He now understood that the only way to attain any serious change on such a sensitive issue was for both parties to hold hands and jump together. To afford each side deniability if things fell apart, the two leaders negotiated by proxy. O’Neill chose Robert Ball, a widely respected Social Security commissioner under three presidents, while Reagan picked Alan Greenspan, the future chairman of the Federal Reserve. Key senators in both parties were looped in.

As Ball and Greenspan made headway, it was really O’Neill and Reagan who were agreeing. To assure both sides political cover, the negotiations were an all-or-nothing process. The plan that was eventually settled on addressed the solvency problem by raising the retirement age (which pleased Republicans) and taxing Social Security benefits for the first time (which pleased Democrats). Unlike in 1981, Republicans in Congress weren’t left exposed. Democrats couldn’t attack them for raising the retirement age, because Tip O’Neill had signed on. Republicans couldn’t complain about higher taxes, because Democrats had supported Ronald Reagan’s plan.

At the Christian Science Monitor lunch just after the reelection, Rove, then at the apogee of his power, had no time for nostrums like bipartisanship or negotiation. Armed with his policy title and the aura of political genius, he pressed for the Social Security changes so far denied him. In many ways, this decision was the fulcrum of the Bush presidency. Had Bush decided not to pursue Social Security or had he somehow managed to pursue it in a way that included Democrats, his presidency might still have ended up in failure, because of Iraq. But the dramatic collapse of Rove’s Social Security push foreclosed any other possibility. It left Bush all but dead in the water for what looks to be the remainder of his time in office.

Rove pursued his plan with characteristic intensity, running it out of the White House from the top down, like a political campaign, and seeking to enlist the network of grassroots activists that had carried the Bush-Cheney ticket to a second term. Bush gave Social Security prominence in his State of the Union address, then set out on a national road show to sell the idea. But after an election fought over the war, Social Security drew little interest, and in contrast to the effect Bush achieved on education in the 2000 campaign, public support didn’t budge. (It actually worsened during his tour.)

Unlike Reagan, Bush did not produce a bill that could have served as a basis for negotiation—nor did he seriously consult any Democrats with whom he might have negotiated. Instead, Rove expected a bill to emerge from Congress. The strategy of a president’s outlining broad principles of what he’d like in a bill and calling on Congress to draft it has worked many times in the past. But Rove had no allies in Congress, had built no support with the American public, and had chosen to undertake the most significant entitlement reform since Reagan by having Bush barnstorm the country speaking before handpicked Republican audiences with the same partisan fervor he’d brought to the presidential campaign trail—all of which must have scared the living daylights out of the very Republicans in Congress Rove foolishly counted upon to do his bidding. The problems buried for years under the war and then the presidential race came roaring back, and Bush got no meaningful support from the Hill. He was left with a flawed, unpopular concept whose motive—political gain—was all too apparent.

Within months it was clear that the Social Security offensive was in deep trouble and, worse, was dragging down Bush’s popularity at a time when he needed all the support he could muster for Iraq. Every week, the political brain trust in the Bush White House gathers under Rove for what is known as the “Strategery Meeting” (an ironic nod to Bush’s frequent malapropisms) to plot the course ahead. What transpires is usually a closely held secret. But two former Bush officials provided an account of one meeting in the late spring of 2005, in the middle of the Social Security push, that affords a remarkable glimpse of Rove’s singularity of purpose.

He opened the meeting by acknowledging that the Social Security initiative was struggling and hurting the president’s approval ratings, and then announced that, despite this, they would stay the course through the summer. He admitted that the numbers would probably continue to fall. But come September, the president would hit Democrats hard on the issue of national security and pull his numbers back up again. Winning on Social Security was so important to Rove that he was evidently willing to gamble the effectiveness of Bush’s second term on what most people in the White House and Congress thought were very long odds to begin with. The gamble didn’t pay off. Even before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on the morning of August 29, what slim hope might have remained for Social Security was gone.

Hurricane Katrina clearly changed the public perception of Bush’s presidency. Less examined is the role Rove played in the defining moment of the administration’s response: when Air Force One flew over Louisiana and Bush gazed down from on high at the wreckage without ordering his plane down. Bush advisers Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett wanted the president on the ground immediately, one Bush official told me, but were overruled by Rove for reasons that are still unclear: “Karl did not want the plane to land in Louisiana.” Rove’s political acumen seemed to be deserting him altogether.

It strains belief to think that someone as highly attuned as Rove to all that goes on in politics could have missed the reason for Bush’s reelection: He persuaded just enough people that he was the better man to manage the war. But it’s also hard to fathom how the master strategist could leave his president and his party as vulnerable as they proved to be six months into the second term. The Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio says, “People who were concerned about the war, we lost. People who were concerned about the economy, we lost. People who were concerned about health care, we lost. It goes on and on. Any of those things would have helped refocus the debate or at least put something else out there besides the war. We came out of the election and what was our agenda for the next term? Social Security. There was nothing else that we were doing. We allowed ourselves as a party to be defined by—in effect, to live and die by—the war in Iraq.”

That Rove ignored a political reality so clear to everyone else can be explained only by the immutable nature of his ambition: Social Security was vital for a realignment, however unlikely its success now appeared. At the peak of his influence, the only person who could have stopped him was the one person he answered to—but the president was just as fixated on his place in history as Rove was on his own.


***

Rove has no antecedent in modern American politics, because no president before Bush thought it wise to give a political adviser so much influence. Rove wouldn’t be Rove, in other words, were Bush not Bush. That Vice President Cheney also hit a historic high-water mark for influence says a lot about how the actual president sees fit to govern. All rhetoric about “leadership” aside, Bush will be viewed as a weak executive who ceded far too much authority. Rove’s failures are ultimately his.

Bush will leave behind a legacy long on ambition and short on positive results. History will draw many lessons from his presidency—about the danger of concentrating too much power in the hands of too few, about the risk of commingling politics and policy beyond a certain point, about the cost of constricting the channels of information to the Oval Office. More broadly, as the next group of presidential candidates and their gurus eases the current crew from the stage, Rove’s example should serve as a caution to politicians and journalists.

The Bush administration made a virtual religion of the belief that if you act boldly, others will follow in your wake. That certainly proved to be the case with Karl Rove, for a time. But for all the fascination with what Rove was doing and thinking, little attention was given to whether or not it was working and why. This neglect encompasses many people, though one person with far greater consequences than all the others. In the end, the verdict on George W. Bush may be as simple as this: He never questioned the big, booming voice of Oz, so he never saw the little man behind the curtain.

*********

As it would happen, the author of this article, Joshua Green, was already scheduled to discuss Karl Rove on Hardball (5 p.m. EDT), CBS Evening News (6 p.m. EDT), and Anderson Cooper 360 (10 p.m. EDT).

Should be interesting given today's news.

[ChuckF]

:tldr:

It's weird how the media is framing this as the end of Bush's influence in domestic policymaking. As if Bush needed some of Rove's magic to get the democrats to roll over on demand. In fact, the democrats are falling over themselves to do so. Not much has changed really.

[Clutch Munny]

KA, is there a copyright issue in reproducing that much of the article?

[Dingfod]

What will Bush do without his brain?

[livius drusus]

KA, is there a copyright issue in reproducing that much of the article?

:yeahthat: It's not available on the site, Kyuss, so you'll have to trim it back to a quote or three.

(I'm glad I got a chance to read it before you do, though. ;))

[Kyuss Apollo]

OK...trimmed back. I just figured in the spirit of FREEthought and all. :ffnod:

[Dingfod]

(I'm glad I got a chance to read it before you do, though. ;)):yeahthat:

[But]

What will Bush do without his brain?

Sometimes I've wondered if they tried to create a Manchurian Candidate and in the process fucked up his brain.

"Good morning. This is David Lesar of Halliburton. Is this President Bush? George Bush? George Walker Bush?"

[D. Scarlatti]

I made a funny (http://illusorytenant.blogspot.com/2007/08/rove-to-massacre-peace-love.html).

[Adam]

:foocl:

...even though I know you're just stroking your insatiable nerd ego.

[Watser?]

Is that what they call it nowadays? :chin:

[InTheServiceOfZeke]

:foocl:

...even though I know you're just stroking your insatiable nerd ego.

i am the most quoted guy here. :)

[Adam]

Well, you say the craziest quotable shit.

[Uthgar the Brazen]

I made a funny (http://illusorytenant.blogspot.com/2007/08/rove-to-massacre-peace-love.html).

Hmmmm, funniest part is that due to the angle of the shot and the obstructing plastic whatevertheheckitis, the Pope appears to be wearing an upside-down crucifix.

But I notice weird shit like that. ;)

[D. Scarlatti]

Skeet shooting humor isn't for everyone I guess.

[Uthgar the Brazen]

No, it was funny. I just found the upside-down crucifix very entertaining.

[D. Scarlatti]

Thanks for pointing that out, btw. I didn't notice. J2P2 roxxored.

[erimir]

Poor Bush.

History will judge... him to be a fuckwit. I predict, that even if history bears out that invading Iraq was a good idea, Bush will get very little credit for it working out. He'll be seen as lucky, because he sure as shit didn't go in with a great plan nor is he a master of strategery. I really don't see how history can ever vindicate him except as a man who boldly did idiotic things - and if any of them do end up working out, it won't save him from being viewed as incompetent.

Rove - same thing. Except that he was good at a few elections, but a failure otherwise.

And that gives me great pleasure, considering how concerned those two are about their legacy.

[viscousmemories]

Heartbroken Bush Runs After Departing Rove's Car | The Onion - America's Finest News Source (http://www.theonion.com/content/news/heartbroken_bush_runs_after_0)

http://www.theonion.com/content/files/images/Bush-Heartbroken-Jump.article.jpg