I Cogitate

Utahns see Rove's legacy as one of political genius - and questionable ethics
Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune
8/14/2007

WASHINGTON - Presidential adviser Karl Rove may be the one of most famous students to attend the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics - and also one of its greatest disappointments, one of his political mentors said Monday.

    At the same time, Rove has no shortage of admirers in Utah, and is widely acknowledged for his ability to crunch voter data and turn it into a winning political formula.

    Rove, who graduated from Salt Lake County's Olympus High and launched his political career at the U., is leaving the White House at the end of the month, he said Monday.

    The former Utahn excelled in the realm of politics, rising to President Bush's deputy chief of staff. But he never learned the ethics of the game, says J.D. Williams, a former U. political science professor who taught Rove.

    "He certainly demonstrated a command and love for politics," Williams, a Democrat, said Monday. "He loved politics. [But he] missed out on the other critical aspect of it and that was . . . the ability to play the game fairly and with honor..."

..."Rove's ethics or lack thereof will always be at issue," says Kirk Jowers, the director of the Hinckley
Institute, which helped Rove get internships at the Utah and national Republican parties in the late 1960s.

    While Rove's power and influence in the White House was far-reaching, Jowers believes that it ultimately became a millstone for the administration's policies and explains why Bush now finds himself hovering in the low 30s in job approval polls.

    "Anytime you let a person who is genius in politics control areas where his self-interest is different than the country's, you're asking for problems," Jowers said.

We'll go no more a-Rove-ing
The country takes leave of the political serial killer who tried to forge a one-party state. But don't expect the Mayberry Machiavelli to pay for his civic sins.
Sidney Blumenthal
www.salon.com

Aug. 13, 2007 | With the departure of Karl Rove the Bush administration now enters its last throes. As a legacy for his patron, Rove has designed the public relations offensive for the fall presidential campaign to attempt to corner congressional Democrats through a combination of Gen. David Petraeus' forthcoming report on the "surge" in Iraq and presidential budget vetoes; but once those tactics are played the political string runs out. President Bush will be left with the unalloyed counsel of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose endgame transcends Rove's machinations. "I don't worry about the polls," Cheney said on CNN's "Larry King Live" on July 31. One more hypothetical restraint on Cheney has been removed.

Rove's resignation marks a tacit recognition of the failure of his theory of political realignment, though hardly of its consequences. Trailing him out of the West Wing is the cloud of a subpoena from the Senate Judiciary Committee that seeks his testimony about his primary role in purging U.S. attorneys for partisan purposes. But even when Rove leaves government service at the end of August, Bush will extend the protective cover of executive privilege.

Rove's merger of politics and policy was an effort to forge a total one-party state. While he is acclaimed as a political strategist, his true innovation was in governing. He sought to subordinate the entire federal government to his goal of creating a permanent Republican majority. Every department and agency has been subject to an intense and thorough politicization. Indeed, Rove's ambitious plan was tantamount to a proto-Sovietization. Even science has been suppressed in the name of the party line, recalling the Lysenko episode. Cheney and Rove acted as the pincers of the unitary executive. While Cheney sought to concentrate unaccountable power in the presidency, Rove brought down the anvil of politics on the professional career staff.

Rove's radicalization of government was early described by the first member of the administration to quit in disgust, John DiIulio, a University of Pennsylvania professor and the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He discovered that "compassionate conservatism," Rove's slogan for Bush's 2000 campaign, was little more than a sham. "What you've got is everything -- and I mean everything -- being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis," said DiIulio.

PressThink
Jay Rosen
August 14, 2007

Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press

"Savviness--that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, 'with it,' and unsentimental in all things political--is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain."

Conservatives think the ideology of the Washington press corps is liberal. Liberals think the press is conservative in the sense of protecting its place in the political establishment. Karl Rove once said that the press is “less liberal than it is oppositional.” (A fascinating remark coming from Rove, since it apppears to put him at odds with the conservative base.)

Whereas I believe that the real—and undeclared—ideology of American journalism is savviness, and this is what made the press so vulnerable to the likes of Karl Rove.

Savviness! Deep down, that’s what reporters want to believe in and actually do believe in— their own savviness and the savviness of certain others (including operators like Karl Rove.) In politics, they believe, it’s better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts. It’s better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere or humane.

Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness—that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, “with it,” and unsentimental in all things political—is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it. And it was this cult that Karl Rove understood and exploited for political gain..."

The Atlantic Monthly | November 2004
Karl Rove in a Corner
Joshua Green

"Karl Rove is at his most formidable when running close races, and his skills would be notable even if he used no extreme methods. But he does use them. His campaign history shows his willingness, when challenged, to employ savage tactics

It is the close races that establish the reputations of great political strategists, and few have ever been closer than the 2000 presidential election. From the tumult of the lengthy recount, the absentee-ballot dispute, the charges of voter fraud, and, ultimately, the Supreme Court decision, George W. Bush emerged victorious by a margin of 537 votes in Florida—enough to elevate him to the presidency, and his chief strategist, Karl Rove, to the status of legend.

But the 2000 election was not Rove's closest race. That had come earlier, and serves as a greater testament to his skill. In 1994 a group called the Business Council of Alabama appealed to Rove to help run a slate of Republican candidates for the state supreme court. This would not have seemed a plum assignment to most consultants. No Republican had been elected to that court in more than a century. But the council was hopeful, in large part because Rove had faced precisely this scenario in Texas several years before, and had managed to get elected, in rapid succession, a Republican chief justice and a number of associate justices, and was well on his way to turning an all-Democratic court all Republican. Rove took the job..."

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