Karl Rove and the Damage Done / Regressive Antidote

[Demeter]

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Karl_Rove_and_the_Damage_Done.html

...The only thing at stake for the consultant is his reputation, but even that hardly seems vulnerable. Bob Shrum managed to amass an amazing 0-7 won-loss record in the presidential sweepstakes and still got invited by John Kerry to make it 0-8 in 2004... Rove was handed the keys to both the policy and politics hot-rods when they got there. That means that when we say that somebody else provided the stakes with which Rove got to play, we’re no longer just talking about campaign contributors with dollars on the line, or candidates with reputations to be made or lost. Now we’re talking about American soldiers and Iraqi civilians who’ve paid the highest price possible for Rove’s policy decisions. Now we are talking about American citizens who will be working long hours to finance the debt that Rove ran up. Now we’re talking about an entire planet suffering the consequences of global warming negligence for generations to come. And that’s just the start.
Rove The Gambler came to the White House with the best deal imaginable from his perspective. He could, in governing, gamble for the highest stakes, and if he won he would be feared and revered as the greatest political genius of his generation, perhaps of the century. But if he lost, other people would pay the price. To those of us whose morality chip wasn’t somehow misplaced on the assembly line, such a game might seem momentarily tempting but ultimately too reprehensible to play. Not so for Karl, who not only played, but played with a vengeance, literally and figuratively.

Rove had a dream, and he brought it with him to the White House... It was not Karl Rove’s great aspiration in life to cure cancer, or eradicate poverty, or bring peace to the Middle East, or double the number of college students in America. No, handed the keys to the government of the world’s sole superpower, Rove had something else in mind – something infinitely more meager. His great dream in life was to emulate his hero, Mark Hanna, and reestablish a generational-long hegemony for the Republican Party in America. If that seems like a small-minded aspiration for a man who fancies himself as a student of history and the big picture, it is. But all the more so because Rove was prepared to do anything in order to achieve his little goal. It is not unfair to say, then, that Iraq has been smashed, a million people murdered, the American military broken, the American treasury depleted, the environment dangerously threatened, the Constitution tattered, and the country’s reputation eviscerated – all on a gamble that things would break the other way and... what? Leave the GOP in power for the next quarter-century. Oops. As Maxwell Smart might’ve said, “Missed it by that much!” What an incredible amount wagered for so little potential return, even if it had gone all right...Of course, the greatest irony of all is that, not only did the Karl Rove wrecking machine destroy all of those things that most people care about, but it also wound up profoundly demolishing the very goals that Rove himself most sought. The Bush presidency is utterly in the toilet, and it would seem clear even with 17 months remaining that it will be regarded as the very worst presidency across all of American history. As for the Republican Party, its woes were only beginning to become evident with the election blow-out of 2006. Not many people can say that they managed to lose control of both houses of Congress in one election. That rarely happens. But Karl Rove did it.

And 2008 will be even more devastating. Rove might even be correct in arguing that the Democrats will nominate Hillary Clinton and that she is enough of a liability to cost her party the White House, even in a can’t miss year. I doubt it, because if there’s one thing Clinton is, it’s smart, and if there’s another, it’s ruthless, and she will therefore turn the Republican candidate – with his help, no doubt, as we’re already seeing today – into a clone of George W. Bush. Faced with the choice of the obnoxious but harmless Hillary, on the one hand, and four or eight more years of Bushism, on the other, enough voters will hold their nose and choose aggravation over devastation, handing Clinton the White House. But regardless of what happens in the presidential race, congressional elections will be absolutely devastating for the GOP, not only widening Democratic majorities in both houses, and not only ending both the Republicans’ capacity and will to act as a block on legislative progress, but actually threatening the very existence of the party itself. This happy problem, which couldn’t possibly be visited upon a nicer group of fasc..., er, people, will only then be amplified in coming years and elections, as today’s young voters – who have already rejected the Republican Party – matriculate through the electoral system, replacing dinosaur GOP devotees who cut their teeth on Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan...Ironically enough, then, Rove destroyed the very thing that he had mortgaged everything for in seeking its empowerment. And even more ironic yet, he may well have created the very antithesis of what he most coveted: There may well be generational dominance of a single party in our future, yes – just not the one that Rove happened to have in mind. While many of us can’t be bothered to shed even crocodile tears for the demise of the Republicans, the collateral damage from Rove’s all-in bet has been devastating to everything else that we care about. But, again, no worries for him. He bet with other people’s stakes, and he can probably still get lots of work from those candidates willing to do anything to win office (read virtually every Republican).

I don’t know what happens in a childhood to produce a figure like Karl Rove, but it can’t have been good. Like a serial killer with ice-water running through his veins, for whom the idea of compassion or remorse is a foreign concept, Rove is the quintessential amoral man – the very definition of a sociopath. Don’t take the way he treats you personally – it’s not that he doesn’t like you. He just utterly couldn’t give a shit one way or the other, dude. But woe unto you if you possess something that he wants, like money, a vote, cannon fodder capability, or shock troop potential. He will simply say or do whatever is necessary to liberate you from your dollars, your common sense or your life in order to achieve his goals. There are myriad examples, but one which is highly illustrative is Rove’s response to Hurricane Katrina. While you and I looked at our television screens and saw there a disaster in which compassion and immediate action were the watchwords of the day, Rove – the guy Bush put in charge of the crisis – was at that exact same moment spinning the gears in his head, literally thinking instead about the partisan political implications of relocating a quarter-million black (and therefore likely Democratic) voters out of the state, thus perhaps putting Louisiana back in the Republican column in future elections.


This is an astonishing, jaw-dropping record of disaster. In saner days, a president would have been run out of town on a rail for nearly any single one of these, let alone the whole lot of them. But we live in strange times, and nobody is more responsible for creating that strangeness than Karl Rove, because nobody has benefitted more from the fear, disorientation and detachment from common sense he produced than he has. That makes it hard, despite this glaring record of sheer failure, for many Americans to comprehend the magnitude of what has been wrought. Indeed, since Democrats utterly lack an instinct for the jugular (or most any other body part), what would be truly amusing would be to see Rove doing a Rovian hit job on his own legacy. Can you imagine the TV ads? The scurrilous rumors leaked to friendlies in the press? The character assassination by innuendo? The fear mongering? Too bad it will never happen – it is perhaps the only way we could truly measure the full extent of this disaster.


Earlier this week, I saw an ad in the New York Times for a new book. Two things about this ad were notable. One was that the book’s subject is the Marshall Plan, a story of international diplomacy from half a century ago – in short, nothing whatsoever to do with Bush, Rove or contemporary American politics. And yet the other remarkable thing about the ad was the bold-letter text at the top, above a graphic of the book, employed today to market a book about a wholly different topic from a wholly different era. It read: “There was a time when the world believed in America and what it stood for”.