I strongly feel Karl Rove is responsible for more than just getting Bush elected and re-elected. I am going to try to prove that Karl's influence on Georgie and other's in the administration is the root of so much of the Dark Side of the current political atmosphere.
This diary series started with my diary from yesterday I Want Karl Rove's Head on a Platter
Brief Background.
Karl Rove was born on December 25, 1950 (Definitely the anti-christ. Sorry couldn't resist.)
Childhood Summary
Rove's family life as a child sounds fairly dismal. His father, a mineral geologist, was gone from home for long stretches, and finally walked out for good on Christmas Eve, 1969, which was also the eve of Karl's 19th birthday. A few years earlier, the family had uprooted from Nevada and moved to Salt Lake City just as Karl was entering high school.
Rove prepared for the harder edges of US politics by surviving his youth. Soon afterwards, he found out that he was not his father after all, the news dropped into a dinner-table conversation by his aunt and uncle. Twelve years later, alone in Reno, his mother committed suicide.
At high school in Utah, Rove was known as a nerd and a motor-mouth, unpopular but irrepressibly opinionated. While his peers were fixated on girls he became obsessed with school politics, campaigning for student positions in a precocious jacket and tie. Although his parents were apolitical, he was a vocal Nixon supporter from the age of nine.
Rove was teaching dirty tricks seminars to young RepublicansRove attended the University of Utah, the University of Texas at Austin and George Mason University. He has taught at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and in the Journalism Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
But Rove never graduated from college. Like Dick Cheney, he avoided the Vietnam draft with a college deferment, but gave up his education to work on Republican campaigns, and never got a degree.Rove, along with his friend and College Republicans ally Lee Atwater, became favored Bush protégés. Rove moved to Texas in 1977 to toil as a fundraiser on George Sr.'s failed presidential-exploration PAC, the Fund for Limited Government. A year later he worked on an unsuccessful primary run for the Texas legislature by George W.
Karl Rove Meets George Bush
QUOTE -- George W. Bush "was the kind of candidate and officeholder political hacks like me wait a lifetime to be associated with."
It was in Washington that Rove met the younger Bush. He 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 know alcoholics- and I would guess there is a little blackmail involved in Bush and Rove's relationship.
At this time, he married Valerie Wainright, a wealthy Houston woman from the Bush social circle, but the marriage could not withstand his consuming preoccupation with politics.(He married his second wife, Darby, in 1986.)
An odd background to say the least. The next diary will concentrate on Karl's road to power. I'll leave you with this fascinating snippet.
"Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political adviser post near the Oval Office," John DiIulio, a former presidential adviser, wrote in a notoriously frank email to a journalist from Esquire magazine, after resigning in 2001. "Little happens on any issue without Karl's OK, and often he supplies such policy substance as the administration puts out."
I think Karl has more power than just a political campaign strategist.
