He won’t be frog-marched out of the White House, but the man the president affectionately refers to as “Turd Blossom” is stepping down.
Karl Rove, U.S. President George W. Bush’s senior political adviser, will voluntarily step down from his White House post at the end of the month, senior administration officials said Monday.
Rove, who has held a top position in the White House since Bush took office in January 2001, is to stand down on August 31.
“I just think it’s time,” Rove told the Wall Street Journal. “There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family.”
Rove, who reportedly raised the possibility of resigning a year ago, will apparently return to Texas, and is unlikely to ever run another presidential campaign.
Rove gave the big scoop to Paul Gigot, the far-right editorial page editor of the WSJ, who wrote a detailed editorial on Rove’s role in Bush’s presidency today. In the piece, which I believe is unavailable to non-subscribers, Rove makes a variety of predictions, including a Bush poll resurgence, improved conditions in Iraq, a “fissure” among Dems, and Hillary Clinton losing the 2008 presidential election.
He concedes that the timing of his resignation may look odd, given that he’s departing after having been subpoenaed. “I know they’ll say that,” Rove says, “But I’m not going to stay or leave based on whether it pleases the mob.”
There will be plenty to say in the coming days about Rove’s work in the White House and role as the president’s “architect,” but I’d argue that most of the intrigue surrounding Rove is a myth. The man has developed a reputation as something of a gifted political savant, whose keen insights are unparalleled in the modern political era.
I think that’s nonsense.
Rove’s genius has always been exaggerated to the point of comedy. In 2000, he pulled out all the stops to help Bush win the New Hampshire GOP primary, where McCain won by double digits. On Election Day 2000, it was Rove’s idea to keep his candidate in California in the waning days, instead of campaigning in key battleground states. Bush lost California by a wide margin, and Rove’s strategy practically cost his candidate the election. More recently, Rove’s single recent responsibility was overseeing the Republican Party’s 2006 election strategy — and Dems won back both chambers of Congress in a historic victory.
No, Rove’s legacy has nothing to do with his so-called strategic brilliance. His significance has everything to do with his cutthroat, win-at-all-cost style. Rove believes the political rule that there are no rules. Laws are meant to be broken. Scandals are meant to be covered up. Enemies are meant to be destroyed. The key to electoral success is to tear the country in half and see who comes out with the bigger chunk.
Moreover, Rove helped usher in an unprecedented approach to executive-branch governing — one in which the line between policy and politics no longer exists. Every agency, every official, every decision was a political opportunity to be exploited, laws and ethics be damned.
When history looks back at the disgrace of the Bush presidency, the one celebrated quote that will help capture much of what went wrong will be John DiIulio’s. It was DiIulio, the first director of the president’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who told Ron Suskind, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
This was Rove’s idea, and it was Rove’s job to execute the strategy. He’ll be leaving the White House in a few weeks, but his place in history is secure. That’s not a compliment.