Tom Edsall, one of my favorite, old-school political reporters in the country, has a great item in The New Republic about what he describes as “Karl Rove’s juggernaut.” Thanks to a link on Ezra’s site, the TNR piece is actually available to non-subscribers.
There’s a lot to consider in the piece, but like Ezra, I was struck by the description of what changed Bush’s m.o. in the 2000 campaign.
In late 2000, even as the result of the presidential election was still being contested in court, George W. Bush’s chief pollster Matt Dowd was writing a memo for Rove that would reach a surprising conclusion. Based on a detailed examination of poll data from the previous two decades, Dowd’s memo argued that the percentage of swing voters had shrunk to a tiny fraction of the electorate.
Most self-described “independent” voters “are independent in name only,” Dowd told me in an interview describing his memo. “Seventy-five percent of independents vote straight ticket” for one party or the other. Once such independents are reclassified as Democrats or Republicans, a key trend emerges: Between 1980 and 2000, the percentage of true swing voters fell from a very substantial 24 percent of the electorate to just 6 percent. In other words, the center was literally disappearing. Which meant that, instead of having every incentive to govern as “a uniter, not a divider,” Bush now had every reason to govern via polarization.
This ran counter to Rove’s previous thinking. In 2000, he had dismissed the tactic of running on divisive issues like patriotism, crime, and welfare as “an old paradigm.” And Bush had followed his advice by explicitly reaching out to the center-left. For instance, during the campaign, he held a press conference with a dozen gay Republicans and sharply criticized the GOP Congress for a plan to save money by slowing distribution of tax credits for the working poor. But Dowd’s memo changed all that. For Rove and the president he served, soon it would be out with the new GOP and in with the old.
It’s easy to forget given time and lessons learned, but Bush’s original plan for national politics had nothing to do with the hard-right. He met with gay GOP groups; he talked to the NAACP; he’d occasionally remind people about some fights he picked with the religious right in Texas, and he triangulated against Tom DeLay and the House GOP. Bush utilized vacuous, bumper-sticker-style sloganeering — “uniter, not a divider,” “compassionate conservative” — but it almost seemed like he meant it.
That is, right up until the polls told his campaign team that, strategically, he needn’t bother.
Bush could win by being what he once described as “a different kind of Republican,” but it’d be even easier if he just stuck to the GOP script, forget about non-existent independents, and make the far-right happy.
Bush hasn’t looked back since.
Also, speaking of looking back, Edsall’s piece included a fascinating anecdote about Karl Rove’s personal history.
Karl Rove was not yet a celebrity in 1997 when he told me the following story. In December 1969, during his freshman year in college, his father left his mother; and, shortly thereafter, his mother largely withdrew from his life. She “packed up the car, had the house on the market, and moved to Reno and said good luck,” Rove recalled. After that, he was on his own. Rove put himself through two years at the University of Utah, working part time, earning a partial scholarship, and living in a makeshift bedroom under the attic eaves of his fraternity house.
His father sent support checks, but his mother kept them, never telling her son. “My mother was one of these people who really thought often of what it was that she wanted in life, and not necessarily what was good or right for her family,” Rove said. “And that was just her way. She never grew up. She could never think long term. She was always in the moment.” When he was 21, Rove discovered that his father was not, in fact, his biological father and that he was the offspring of an earlier relationship. His real father had disappeared, and the man he knew as his father had adopted him. (Years later, he would track down his biological father, who refused to acknowledge that Karl was his son.) When Rove was in his mid-20s, his mother would call to borrow money. Occasionally, she sent him packages with magazines from his childhood or old, broken toys. “It was like she was trying desperately to sort of keep this connection,” he recalled. Finally, in 1981, his mother “drove out to the desert north of Reno and filled the car with carbon monoxide, and then left all of her children a letter saying, don’t blame yourselves for this.” It was, Rove said, “the classic f*ck-you gesture.”
I have no interest in analyzing someone I’ve never met, but these kinds of insights into a person’s background can offer hints into their personality, can’t they?