Judging Rove: Genius or fraud?

October 20, 2006

Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings

Hello, everyone. It’s great to be back at The Carpetbagger Report for another guest stint, and I’d like to thank the Carpetbagger himself for the opportunity. I’ll be posting regularly from now through Sunday, and I look forward to reading your comments (and joining in) on what I expect will be a broad range of topics.

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This one’s from a couple of days ago, but I just got around to reading Jacob Weisberg’s latest piece at Slate. In the interest of starting a discussion (yes, a Friday afternoon discussion!), I’ll quote his opening paragraph:

Is Karl Rove the great mastermind of American politics? Everyone seems to think so. George W. Bush’s nicknames for him include “The Architect” and “Boy Genius.” Other Republicans see Rove as a shaman who can conjure victory out of the air—and Democrats agree. (They would rather think they’ve been losing to a nefarious wizard than to a lazy moron.) The political press, always more comfortable with personality than ideology, cottons readily to the myth that the country is run by an elusive puppeteer.

Weisberg calls himself “possibly the last Rove skeptic,” and he makes the case here that “the largest part of [Rove’s] success is arguably due to luck and circumstances beyond his control”. Just go back to 2000. Bush should have lost. Or, rather, he did lose. Rove was only vindicated by a crappy Florida ballot, with Jewish seniors voting for Pat Buchanan, and self-contradictory kingmakers on the Supreme Court. And then there was 9/11, which provided President Bush with one of the mot luxurious honeymoons in presidential history.

Of course, it is conventional wisdom that Rove’s “base strategy” won Bush a second term, but, even there, it could be argued that Rove was simply in the right place at the right time with the right issues: terrorism and same-sex marriage. And on the policy side, such as social security privatization, Rove has been a failure, not unlike pretty much everyone else in the White House.

So here’s my question: Is it true, as the implication has gone, that Democrats have nothing to fear but Karl Rove himself? Do you fear Rove? Even now, with all those promising poll numbers suggesting impending Democratic victory, is there not a nagging doubt? Is there not that little voice saying, “Just wait, Rove’s up to something, he’ll pull something out of his hat at the last minute, let’s not get too excited, he’s a genius and he’ll find a way to take us down”?

It may be too late for Republicans regardless. What with Iraq and a sagging economy and Foleygate and… well, you know the list. But what if North Korea conducts a larger nuclear test? What if those warnings of a dirty bomb at an NFL game continue? What if the GOP’s culture of fear magnetizes voters again? What if… ?

I’m with Weisberg in my assessment of Rove’s talent: He’s really good at what he does, but not the mastermind some make him out to be. And yet there’s that little voice whispering irrational nothings in my ear: Be afraid. Be very afraid. Karl Rove, “Boy Genius,” is still in control.

Has it reached a point where we just expect to lose?

Is Karl Rove a genius?

Ask me after the elections. If you see me in line to get a plane ticket to France then the answer is yes. 🙂

Welcome back Michael. (I’ll spare you the Stickings-It-to-the-Man nickname this time. 🙂

Personally I think Rove is a Man of his time: ruthless, dumb and lucky.

  • I think Rove cheats.

    I think Rove cheats because he thinks the Democrats cheat (how else could Clinton win two elections?) and because Rove thinks if the stakes are important enough, you cheat (Texas football or cheerleading).

    Thus, I imagine Rove puts his faith in Blackwell and Diebold. And may he prove himself wrong.

  • Rove is good, and he may have a surprise in store, but he’s not our problem. It’s our wimpy leadership, and the media which seems to be determined to keep people stuipid.

    I would expect to win more if we had leadership with spines. Pelosi and Reid don’t have eight vertibrae between the two of them, and they seem to have gotten into their positions by waiting in line, not by winning battles with Republicrooks. Maybe Dr Dean could do something for their back conditions if they would just listen. If not we’re f—-ed even if Rove goes bye bye.

    As it is, if we win it’ll be a gift from the Gods, who at this moment are gleefully spilling out the Republican scandals faster than anyone can take notes. My latest favorite: the five-term Republicrook helping a drunk find her truck so she can drive home. His own admission. The media isn’t interested though, not enough sex involved.

    But back to Rove… Rove is a master at playing stupid people for chumps, but maybe he’s finally run out of rope. Even people fed BS can figure out something once in a while. (am I being naive? probably)

    This race won’t be over til Diebold tells us its over. Hopefully the exit polls will be viewed with a little less skepticism this time.

  • Thank you, Dale. It’s great to be here. And the nickname is fine with me. Obviously, I have a rather uncommon name.

    I don’t think Rove is dumb, but he’s certainly ruthless and dumb. His career took off down in Alabama, where he worked for judgeship candidates, and he did well in part because he came along right when the South was going completely Republican. This isn’t to say that he hasn’t been somewhat visionary in his use of targeted campaigning, but his national success over the past few elections owes a great deal to luck, or at least to external factors (the 2000 election, 9/11, etc.). Indeed, shouldn’t Bush have done better in 2004 given 9/11 and the (at the time) apparently successful campaign in Afghanistan. Of course, Bush’s policies have been failures, but it seems to me that the closeness of that election, especially in Ohio, suggests that Rove hasn’t been terribly successful.

  • Rove is very very smart, but his biggest talent is getting other people to award him kudos for chance events.

  • I do fear Karl Rove and I fear him becuase he has proven that he has no morals or standards. Karl Rove has the ability to win elections. As a person who wants the party Rove represents to lose, I fear what might happen when a dirty fighter gets backed into a dark alley.

    I have a hard time saying he is a genuis. He wins, yes but when you destroy the very fabric of politics to win is that smart or dumb? In the future, when all the hijinx of the Bush administration are brought into the light of day, I feel we will see that Karl Rove is a very good magician.

    A genius would not destroy the game to win it.

  • Rove is not a super-genius, and not at all infallible, but he did have two key insights which have revolutionized US politics (for the worse):

    1. Politics has nothing to do with policy, everything to do with image and spin. You could argue that this started a while ago, certainly with Reagan if not before. But even Reagan had a few ounces of integrity: he really did believe he could make peace with the USSR, under the right conditions, and he really did start pursuing it after 86 despite the apoplexy being experienced among conservatives. Rove realized that policies just don’t matter – all you need is the appearance of doing that which will win you elections. Actually doing it is irrelevant at best, costly (bec you have to livewith the consequences) at worst.

    2. You can win elections by mobilizing the base. Before Rove it was conventional wisdom that you won by staking out the broad middle ground better than your opponent. Rove realized that, in an era of 50% turnout for Pres and 35% turnout for Congress, you can win power by getting more of your people out to vote than your opponents. How do you mobilize the base? See #1.

  • I have often wondered if Rove is gay like his dad was…and that’s why he’s so evil…to compensate for him being a fairy.

  • “I have often wondered if Rove is gay like his dad was…and that’s why he’s so evil…to compensate for him being a fairy.” – Char

    Now, that’s just wrong.

    But if you said you wonder if Rove is a surpressed closeted self-hating homosexual and that’s why he’s so evil ….

    If Rove’s dad was gay, how did we end up with Karl?

  • You’re right,Michael, I retract the idea that Rove is dumb. He is at least cunning. I was reading an article the other day about the conflict between the Dem data geeks in the DNCC and the Hillary crew and both side agreed that they were nowhere near the granular level of voter data that Rove has caused to be amassed. And I think he is the architect of their GOTV efforts which were so effective. I’m hoping that won’t be the case in November.

  • You’re right,Michael, I retract the idea that Rove is dumb. He is at least cunning. I was reading an article the other day about the conflict between the Dem data geeks in the DNCC and the Hillary crew and both side agreed that they were nowhere near the granular level of voter data that Rove has caused to be amassed. And I think he is the architect of their GOTV efforts which were so effective. I’m hoping that won’t be the case in November.

  • BC hits it on the head: Rove isn’t a genius, he’s a guy who has mastered the politics of personal destruction (as originally started by Thomas Jefferson).

    What makes Rove so good is that he has no conscience. He lies over and over and over again, creates strawman arguments in order to knock them down, ignores his own party’s hypocrisy, plays the religious rights for the ignorant suckers they are, and then revels in all of it.

    That’s not the sign of a genius — it’s the sign of a sociopath.

    The “fear” from the left comes in not because they’re honestly afraid of Rove, but because Rove will stoop to anything in order to win and they (the left) are never sure what kind of crap Rove will sling next.

    It is honorable that Dem leaders have chosen not to fight fire with fire, but it would be nice if, every once in a while, they’d show a freaking spine and kick Rove in the ideological nuts every now and then.

  • I was on the record during the ’04 campaign saying Rove’s reputation was a joke. I still stand by that, and here’s some recent commentary on that point:

    As usual there’s Karl Rove, putting the whammy on the opponent. Against all odds, against all decency, against all sense, Karl Rove is predicting fewer losses than anyone else. But how can that be…unless he knows something the Democrats don’t know. The kind of thing he always seems to know, because he always seems to win.

    You can feel the Democrats puckering.

    But whose fault is that? Is it the Republicans’ fault for pressing every advantage and doing everything they can to win? Or is it the Democrats fault for being weak-kneed, soft, easily-intimidated and politically fragile?

    That answer is that it’s the Democrats’ fault. … It’s the Democrats’ fault for buying into the myth of Karl Rove, a man who lost the 2000 election and had to have a win handed to him by the Supreme Court. A man who won the 2004 election by a paltry 50,000 votes in Ohio, despite having a sitting war president, $80 million more in cash, and the bully pulpit. A man who has burned through every asset in his own party in order to keep afloat the most inept, incompetent and disastrous presidential administration of our lifetimes — if not any lifetime.

    http://thepremise.com/archives/10/15/2006/396

    You see it in sports all the time: somebody wins a championship on a fluke shot at the buzzer, and by the time the next season rolls around they’re a genius. Who the hell couldn’t have won in ’04 with 9/11 to prostitute and a sitting war president? And I say that as a John Kerry supporter. The fact that Kerry made it as close as he did shows Rove’s weakness even in victory, not his strength.

    Rove is a failure. He’s destroyed the very party he was supposed to sustain. What a legacy.

  • Evil Boy Genius.

    I’ve never thought of it this way before and I must confess that I’m one of those who thinks ShrubCo would be in a lot more trouble if Rove walked in front of a train. Not that I’m hoping for that to happen of course.

    But I’ve also wondered what he’s been up to this election cycle. Where is that October Surprise that will make even people such as myself vote ReThuglican? There have certainly been a number of surprises from the GOP but I don’t think a scandal involving IMs and young men, North Korea giving the world a glowing finger and more members being convicted of crimes is what they had in mind.

    But let’s assume Rove really is the evil genius pulling every one’s strings: Fine, but fooling people requires the foolee to play a long a little bit. Rove has two tricks: Fear and Smear. We know about the fear but I honestly think the majority of people in America never really believed they were in direct or even remote danger of a terrorist attack. I think Karl tapped into something far more pathetic: People wanted to feel important enough for to be worth a terrorist’s time (with a big glop of xenophobia added to make extra yummy). So Shrub hammered away at the fear and people living in towns with populations in the double digits thought “Yeah, I’m a target, the bad guys are out to get me.” and imagined what they would do if brown guys tried to blow up the local 7-11 (WaWa? Bigfoot?). However, that is now all the GOP machine spews out. People are fickle, especially when they have other things to think about, like how they’ll pay their bills since they’ve been laid off. After a while the fear got kind of boring and of course the terrorists never did try to blow up anything. Meanwhile, there’s this war that isn’t going the way Bush promised…

    As for smearing, that might work if his fellow ReThugs hadn’t spent the past six years rolling in the caca. It has reached the point where I think ReThugs know mentioning one misdeed by a Democrat will spark of barrage of “Oh yeah? Well what about…[long list of greed/sex scandals].” Best not to bring it up.

    I guess this is a long-winded way of saying even evil geniuses have their limits. Either that or he just twisted the arms of everyone at DieVote.

  • Rove is not a super genius.

    He is ruthless and is out to win. He is neither a moron nor a genious but appears to be shortsighted. He is willing to cut corners and be dishonest to win. In the short run such a strategy may be on the surface be successful. In the short run the base has ralley around Bush, but at what cost to the nation and eventually it is catching up with the party he works for.

    As for Weisburgs self congratualatutory claim to be the last Rove skeptic, thats ridiculous.

  • [sorry about the italic attack, I think I left out a / somewhere.]

    tAiO

    Oh I thought the absent slash was a meta-comment on Rove’s slash and burn style of politics.

    I agree. After 6 years an evil genius is just another doofus. Anybody inside 50 miles of our national borders doesn’t even have to think about terrorism. Well, at least not from foreigners.

  • The cult of personality that has grown up around Rove is due in no small part to the willingness of all the middlebrows and empty suits in Washington D.C and in the MSM to mouth and sometimes create the conventional pieties applied to him. In my view he couldn’t have saved Bush from repeating his father’s one-term performance as President if it wasn’t for the circumstance of 9/11. Furthermore, Rove quite clearly understands the politics of division. His masterstroke is to combine useless social issues such as gay marriage with religion as a means of pandering to and reinforcing the negative and ignorant viewpoints of “the base”. His daily affirmation could be, “I’m immoral but, so what? The object is to win.” The best way to deal with a mendacious propagandist such as Rove is to confront him in the open, away from the sycophantic chorus that serves as his sounding board. I’d love to see Big Dog beat the stuffing out of that fat-assed windbag. Let’s see Rove defend his untenable beliefs from an overwhelming forensic attack that only Clinton could mount.

    “Be afraid” of Karl Rove??

    *yawn*

  • I don’t think we really know enough about him to characterize him as a genius. I’m reminded of the great quote by Joe Theismann:

    “Nobody in the game of football should be called a genius. A genius is somebody like Norman Einstein.”

    So is Rove merely a political genius? Who knows. Is he truly an ‘ideas guy’ who comes up with grand schemes or does he have a bunch of people around him brainstorming and/or feeding him ideas. Or maybe he’s just got great organizational skills and can get done in a hurry what needs to be done – witness the talking points that get circulated on a moment’s notice by the GOP talking heads.

    I think Mark @13 makes an excellent point about how he may have destroyed his party but it appears to me that there was a concerted effort with the neocons vs. true conservatives to remake the party. Now is he to blame for the horrendous failure to anticipate how bad post-war Iraq would be, or was part of the plan to intentionally allow chaos to descend so that there would be the perpetual “state of war”?

    I guess it depends on how evil you think these people are. (Apologies for being quote-happy but) what’s the one about the devil’s greatest accomplishment was getting people to believe that he existed. I think that applies to Rove. The next thing to worry about though is how to respond. Clinton has it best I think in that we should stop worrying about what a bad guy he is and respond and fire back and point out how wrong/immoral/evil they really are.

  • There are a lot of good points in the above comments. BC’s struck a chord. Rove has turned everything political. Rove has turned all governance into a game, and knowing his party are the current kings of the hill and that it takes tremendous force to overcome that, Rove won’t let anthing happen in government that can’t be used as a weapon to his opponents. He’s mastered the politics of nastiness, simply because no one was ever willing to sink so low.

    But Rove’s game has caused an unbelievable amount of damage to the United States. Fine bit of genius he has. He’s destroying what he’s won and on the long run he may very well rue his victories and strategies. In Viet Nam we destroyed villages to “save” them. Rove’s done the same thing. Eventually more enemies are created than killed. The long knives are massing for Rove and a lot of people will take joy in his downfall. Ruthless people always end up that way.

  • @19 Homer

    what’s the one about the devil’s greatest accomplishment was getting people to believe that he existed.

    It was getting people to believe he didn’t exist. I want to say it is C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters?) because it doesn’t quite sound like G.K. Chesterton.

    But good point. Pointing out how evil Rove et al are should make holy water unecessary.

  • IF the dems take back the house next month, then Rove is automatically not a genius because his vision of the Republican Century would have lasted 4 years only.

    My pet theory is that Ari Fleischer had as much to do with Bush’s sucess as Rove, since he was the one who cowed the press into writing Bush-as-Churchill stories. Bushie’s ratings have come down steadily since April ’03 when Fleischer stepped down.

  • I just don’t think fear can work this time if the Democrats will hit back. Karl Rove has made a career of taking his opponents strengths and turning them into liabilities…and its time someone return the favor. His house of cards is ready to fall.

    See a tongue-in-cheek visual of Karl and the boys singing some of their favorite “Church & State” hymns…here:

    http://www.thoughttheater.com

  • Rove is not a genius. At least, not a political genius. What he is is an exceptionally gifted con artist.

    Rove had two basic skills. 1) He knew how to talk to the Base. 2) He knew how to obscure from the rest of us what he was really saying to the Base. We all know the catchphrases and codewords and oblique biblical references — no need to enumerate them here.

    Rove no longer has the second skill. People are paying attention now. It’d be nice if they had been paying this much attention two years ago, but I’ll take what I can get.

    He is as good with that first skill as he ever was. The problem is he was never talking to more than 23% of the electorate. And it turns out he was lying to them, too.

    I’ve said this on more than one board, but I think it bears repeating: Americans will put up with any number of people or groups getting screwed. But they will not tolerate everybody getting screwed. And since that’s been the aim of the GOP all along, it was just a matter of time before people caught on to them.

  • Bush and his cronies ran $1.4 trillion in operating deficits in 2001-2004 while his buddy in the Fed was holding the discount rate to banks at 1%, the lowest in history, in an effort to flood the economy with money and boost his reelection chances. Rove may have helped craft the talking points that the party reps peddled, and helped orchestrate the gay bashing/fear mongering agenda, but I wouldn’t credit him with the reelection victory. In fact I think that a three percentage point victory on reelection is pretty darn small for a sitting president, and had Bush run a more moderate and less despicable campaign in 2004, he would have won by a much larger margin and his party would be in better shape for the mid term elections this year.

    Bill James in one of his Baseball Abstracts pointed out that when a baseball manager’s team wins, everyone asks “how did his decision making contribute to their winning?” Conversely if they lose, everyone asks “how did his decision making contribute to their losing?” Rove is in the same seat now, being credited for a relatively narrow victory that should not have been so narrow.

  • Re: #4 His career took off down in Alabama, where he worked for judgeship candidates, and he did well in part because he came along right when the South was going completely Republican. This isn’t to say that he hasn’t been somewhat visionary in his use of targeted campaigning, but his national success over the past few elections owes a great deal to luck, or at least to external factors (the 2000 election, 9/11, etc.)

    As someone who worked for the Alabama Supreme Court in 1994 and experienced those “brilliant victories” firsthand (including the Chief Justice post-election fight that served as a dress rehearsal for 2000), I don’t think Rove is even close to a genius. He is a very smart sociopath willing to do anything to win who works long hours doing analysis that other politicians don’t do. Intense study of detailed demographics is what sets him and Mehlman apart, but it isn’t visionary; they are only continuing the micro-targeting that Richard Viguerie started with his direct-mail campaigns decades earlier. And really, how much genius does it take to start a whisper campaign that your opponent is gay (Ann Richards, Mark Kennedy) or mouth mindless nonsense statistics about tort reform?

    That in a nutshell was Rove’s strategy in ’94. You’re right, his successes in Texas and Alabama fortuitously took advantage of pro-Republican shifts that were already in place. He may have sped up the process by a few years with dirtier tactics than anyone else was willing to employ, but his “victories” were inevitable given the changing self-identification of the electorates in question. Even when Texas and Alabama were electing Democrats for a hundred years (in reaction to Republican control of Reconstruction), the politicians they elected were still more conservative than most Republicans elected from the rest of the country.

    As for Bush’s presidency, it has been the most disastrous in history and Rove plays a major part in shaping policy. They have failed most of their constituents in every single area other than campaigning. If he strictly worked on elections, Rove might get a pass for all of the other lousy policy choices, but the White House is very clear in giving him “credit” for everything. This is no genius.

  • TaiO – thank you for the correction. I’ve now spent half an hour trying to figure out who the hell said it. I will try another quote.

    “Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”

    –Willy Wonka

  • Rove has a very narrow genius for packaging and salesmanship. How else to explain the victory of Bush for the presidency, twice, despite his obvious lack of substance?

    But Rove created a Potemkin village that could not possibly survive in the long-run in the absence of a substantive, popular, and effective set of policies. A true political genius is someone who has creative insights and strategies that solve difficult political problems. Someone willing to make hard choices for what prove to be good reasons. In this respect, Rove has been a catastrophic failure for our country. His reputation will only fall with time.

  • Karl Rove isn’t a genious. Just like Bush Jr. he’s a coward and pussy that nobody has ever punched in the nose.

  • There are many people who lie and cheat their way to the top, and appear to have achieved “great” things to the undetecting public. Some CEO’s hide their company’s low profit through tricky accounting, and some students cheat on exams and end up at Yale, or go AWOL from the National Guard and end up as president. This doesn’t make them geniouses, it just makes them unscrupulous cut-throat bastards that haven’t yet been caught. I place Rove in the second category. If either of the past 2 presidential elections had been run fairly and honestly (ie. without voter suppression and with paper trails) not a soul would consider Rove a genious. In short, it’s easy to appear a genious if you cheat and don’t get caught.

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