Some background and perspective on Karl Rove might be helpful, in understanding what's going on with the current US attorney scandal. I'm not going to go into how deeply involved Rove is with the current shenanigans because I don't know how deeply involved he is. Rather, in this diary I want to describe Karl Rove's background and his job in the White House. I think it will help to see a part of the big picture.
On CNN they call him a "political adviser"; as, for example, James Carville was a political adviser to Bill Clinton or Ed Rollins was a political adviser to Ronald Reagan. But Karl Rove isn't a "political adviser" to George W. Bush any more than George W. Bush is a "politician".
Those are out-moded words; they paint the wrong picture, and using them will only get us into a muddle.
Karl Rove is a state-of-the-art operative. He is, you might say, a prototype. There is no word yet to describe exactly what his job is -- one hopes that his job will remain forever unique; that it is a prototype for no future production model and therefore does not need a name -- but we can get at his job description through an examination of his career. In a sense, his background is his job.
Let's start with basics.
The first thing to understand about Rove and therefore to understand, in miniature, America under the Bush White House, is that Rove learned what the word "politics" means as a teenager living during the Nixon administration. He ratfucked for Republicans. Ratfucking is a technical term made popular as a description of Nixon-style campaign tactics; it refers loosely to the pulling of dirty tricks in elections.
In the autumn election season of 1970, a cherubic, bespectacled teenager turned up at the Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer in Illinois. No one paid the newcomer much attention when he arrived, or when he left soon afterwards. Nor did anyone in the office make the connection between the mystery volunteer and 1,000 invitations on campaign stationery that began circulating in Chicago's red-light district and soup kitchens, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" for all-comers at Dixon's headquarters.
It didn't work; Dixon won. The point is that Rove took to ratfucking with the passion with which other teenage boys take to football, to Dungeons and Dragons, or if they're unduly smart, perhaps to physics. Karl Rove was unduly smart but did not take to physics. He made ratfucking his world.
He launched his political career by wresting control of the College Republicans, a radical group in the Nixon era. It was an unpleasant business. In an interesting precursor to the Florida battle 17 years later, Rove took on his opponent, Robert Edgeworth, principally on procedural grounds - challenging the credentials of every single Edgeworth delegate to the 1973 College Republican convention and putting forward a rival delegate.
Rove's travelling seminars to young Republicans on how to ratfuck, and the ensuing scandal, caught the attention of one George H. W. Bush, who then sent Rove to Texas to tutor his son.
[Rove] fell, politically speaking, in love. "Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow," Rove recalled years later. In 1977, Rove was sent to Texas, in theory to run a political action committee, but according to one Texan political consultant who knew him at the time, "It was really to baby-sit Bush back when Bush was drinking".
I have no doubt at all that this is at best only a partial understanding of what Rove was thinking at that time. It seems clear that Rove, in the late 70's, was looking at the smoking ruins of the political party he had taken up with, and was asking Lenin's question: "What is to be done?"
But unlike Lenin, and unlike other young Republicans at the time, Rove did not delude himself with the false consciousness of a soothing ideology. He knew what he wanted. He wanted to ratfuck. Since his talent had so far failed to gain him the world via politics, he decided to turn politics into that at which he was talented. He decided to win the Kobayashi Maru by changing the conditions of the test. He wanted to ratfuck not just campaigns but governance itself. He wanted to ratfuck the world.
In a March 31, 2004 interview with David Talbot in Salon.com, John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, described Karl Rove as the logically inevitable consequence of the Nixon Administration's half-hearted attempts at redefining the meaning of the word political:
[Talbot:] Karl Rove also plays a unique role in the Bush administration. One close observer says in your book that he's "Haldeman and Ehrlichman all in one." Explain.
[Dean:] Rove's unique role is that he is a political guy making policy decisions for political reasons. Decisions in the Bush White House are made not based on what is best for the public interest, rather what will get the president the most mileage with his base, and best political advantage. Not since Nixon's so-called responsiveness program -- which was uncovered during the Watergate investigation -- have we had such overt political decision-making.
The reference to Haldeman and Ehrlichman as explaining Rove was a quip from a friend of mine from the Nixon White House who has had dealings with Rove. Since Rove is a revengeful fellow, my friend will remain nameless. But my friend was telegraphing a lot of information about Rove with this bit of shorthand -- for anyone who has any knowledge of the Nixon White House and Watergate, they know Haldeman and Ehrlichman were the heavies. First, it is a compliment in that both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were very smart, and highly efficient. But what it tells us is that Rove is ruthless, for both Haldeman and Ehrlichman were that too.
Both Haldeman and Ehrlichman saw the world through a political lens, and what was most likely to help Richard Nixon get reelected. So does Rove. Haldeman was involved with procedure (broadly speaking, I mean who was doing what at the White House, arranging the presidential travel and appearances for maximum political benefit, and constantly mindful of the president's image and making him look good), and Ehrlichman was the substance guy (who developed domestic policies, but accounting for the political impact). Rove controls both.
Like many a future revolutionary throughout history, Rove took the essence of what he had learned from his elders and, because of a youthful attachment to purity unsullied by the complications of conventional wisdom (meaning, in this case, the hobbling requirements of an aging sense of propriety), he was able to scour the lessons he had learned of all sentimental connection to past history, and thereby to grasp the hard diamond of truth; the logical implication and import of exactly what it was his teachers had groped dimly towards but had not quite dared to grasp.
What young Rove was brave enough to understand was that ratfucking, if you really mean it, cannot coexist with a commitment to small-"d" democracy.
One or the other has to go. He had the courage to understand this. Give him that.
In some not-literally-false sense of the word "advises", Karl Rove "advises" George W. Bush. But Rove does not "advise", and never has "advised", George W. Bush on anything as quaint as "how to win elections". Not if "win elections" means "earn the most votes by being the best campaigner". That isn't Rove's job and it never was. He isn't a "political adviser" in that sense.
It was because of this mistake -- thinking that Rove is a "political adviser" rather than a revolutionary -- that many people thought he might be in trouble because of something as small potatoes as the 2006 elections:
Karl Rove, the top White House political strategist, is coming off the worst election defeat of his career to face a daunting task: saving the president's agenda with a Congress not only controlled by Democrats, but also filled with Republican members resentful of the way he and the White House conducted the losing campaign.
But that is to miss the point entirely. The 2006 elections were less important to Rove than retooling the United States government into an insturment for what he somewhat misleadingly calls the long term politcal realignment of America. Commentators in the mainstream lacking Rove's and, to a different effect, Bush's, strength of will, fail to grasp the full of import of the word "realignment."
The White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, formed to sell the Iraq war and currently headed by Rove, has as much to do with the "realignment" as any electoral campaign.
The affirmation of the Unitary Executive has as much to do with the "realignment" as any electoral campaign.
The famous secrecy and retribution of the Administration has as much to with the "realignment" as any electoral campaign.
The dismissal of the US attorneys is exactly as much a part of it as any electoral campaign.
It's all of a piece. An attempt to win the whole enchilada; the only thing worth winning.
Karl Rove knows of the will-to-power.
He wants to ratfuck the world.