The Downfall Of Karl Rove

The New Republic: After Years Of Success, Hubris Lead To Rove's Failure In '06

(The New Republic) 
Rove can certainly take credit for these election victories, but it wasn't really his micro-targeting and his focus on expanding the Republican base that accounted for the Republicans' success. It was the effects that the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, had on American politics. As political psychologists have now discovered, these effects, by evoking a widespread fear of death, went beyond the usual calculus of issues and interests — they made Americans more susceptible to charismatic appeals and crusades and to what psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski have called "worldview defense." This includes a hostility to what is foreign and preferences for tradition over social experimentation and religious over secular norms. As these effects have abated, the Republicans have once again found themselves without a platform on which to build a majority.

Rove's most brilliant election success — if you leave aside Bush's first win as governor in 1994 — was probably 2000 rather than 2002 or 2004. In that election, Gore and the Democrats had an enormous advantage. Bill Clinton was a popular president; the economy was still buoyant; Gore certainly had credibility (compared to the callow Texan) as a national leader; and the electorate was moving away from the conservatism of the Reagan and Gingrich years toward a more centrist politics. To fit this new post-Reaganite electorate, Rove packaged Bush as a centrist Republican who could also retain the loyalty of the party's conservative base. He was a "compassionate conservative" who championed money for education and condemned the Republican House for trying to eviscerate the earned income tax credit. It's now forgotten, but Bush refused to say he would make opposition to abortion a litmus test either for his vice president or for Supreme Court nominees. In the 2000 election, Bush won the typically centrist vote of Independents, which his father had lost in 1992 and Bob Dole had lost in 1996.

Legend has it that Rove, chastened by Bush's popular vote loss, changed his strategy immediately after the election, but it's not clear from what Bush did in those first months that he abandoned centrism. He worked with Sen. Ted Kennedy on education reform; he got Congress to pass a tax bill by co-opting Democratic senators and a Democratic proposal for an immediate tax rebate. After the September 11 attacks, Bush's popularity soared, but he stayed above the fray in the November 2001 gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia, which the Democrats won.

It was only after those elections that Rove and Bush changed course: they decided to focus the 2002 elections on the "war on terror." Rove made that clear in a January 2002 address to a Republican luncheon in Austin:

We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America. Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe.

That was the single most important tactical decision that Rove made, and it would account for Republican victories in 2002 and 2004. As the 2002 race began in August, voters preferred Democratic House candidates in a generic Gallup Poll by 50 to 42 percent. With the Enron scandal in the background, and the economy still in recession, it looked as though the Democrats could increase their margin in the Senate and take back the House. But in September, the Bush administration began a two-month campaign of focusing on the war on terror — conjoined in the public mind at that point with the threat from Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction." In the last weeks, Republican candidates charged the Democrats with undermining legislation for the Department of Homeland Security; and Bush began a whistle-stop tour — seventeen stops in fifteen states in the last week — warning that "we must assume the enemy is coming and that we've got to do everything to protect the homeland." This appeal resonated — and not just in exurbs and rural areas. In Missouri and Minnesota, for instance, Republican Senate victories were made possible by a shift in votes from Democratic to Republican in upscale suburbs.

In 2004, Rove did apply the strategy of expanding the base and micro-targeting with which he has since been associated, but he ran the election, like that of 2002, around the threat of a terrorist attack — identifying the war in Iraq with the war in terror. Though the Iraq war diminished Bush's support among college-educated women, Rove's strategy worked in rural areas and exurbs and among white working-class voters who had not finished college. In 2000, Bush had won white working class women by seven percent. In 2004, he won them by 18 percent. In 2004, a plurality of these voters identified terrorism and security over the economy and jobs or the war in Iraq as their most important issue.

Eliminate the appeal of September 11 as packaged by Rove, and the Republicans would have been back to where they were on September 10, 2001 — facing a resurgent Democratic party and an electorate that was moving to the center. And that's exactly what happened in the 2006 elections.

After Bush won the 2004 election, Rove came to believe his own bulls----. He decided that Republicans could really win simply by expanding their own base. He convinced Bush to wager his own domestic program on privatizing Social Security. He cooperated with the House Republicans in polarizing Congress and the electorate. And when Bush's popularity sagged, he tried to use the war in terror to revive it. What Rove failed to realize was that the strategy he employed in 2004 was already obsolete — and that the tactics of micro-targeting and get-out-the-vote wouldn't be sufficient any more to pull out victories. Rove and Bush should have gone back to the lessons of 2000 campaign. After his narrow 2004 victory, Bush needed to move back to the political center on domestic and foreign policy. Instead, they tacked further right. That wasn't entirely Rove's fault — he probably had little say over the war in Iraq — but he certainly must get some of the blame.

Rove's brilliance had lay earlier in his ability to adapt his strategy to new circumstances. But after his success in the 2004 election, he became as inflexible in his political strategy as he knocked his former client Phil Gramm for being in his public policies — and he and the Bush administration suffered the consequences.

[pepperp1]

Chicken Hawk Rove on Rush attacking our Girl LOL who cares...your day is past your tactics exposed as amoral lies loser...Buh bye.

Rush and Rove eek.

[r_lamprey]

It doesn't take a genius to politicize 9/11 terrorist fear or use disinformation campaigns to smear opponents. It takes someone like Karl Rove, who considers ethics and laws as mere hinderances. Rove was helped by the new conservative media that eagerly repeated his whisper smears, and never held him to account. I agree with the earlier post that Karl Rove is a traitor for willfully exposing a CIA agent, and undermining the nation's security, for petty political advantage. Disgusting.

[chasemonster]

Rove is a draft-dodging coward who has lied and cheated and committed treason for a living. And, he is one of the Republican Party's greatest heroes -along with Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.

What does that tell you about the state of mind of today's Republicans?

[taddles-2009]

Rove's been a crook from the first day he was involved with politics. He got caught teaching illegal "dirty tricks" learned from some of Nixon's cronies to fellow members of the Texas Young Republicans while he was running for president of that "August Body". He was indited and then investigated by...wait for it...G.H.W. Bush. Needless to say, he was exonerated. One week later Rove was hired by Bush Sr. and has been a member of the Bush crime family ever since. Once a crook always a crook, this vile little scum-sucking ba$**** learned from the Nixon crooks and has carried on the Nixon legacy of "anything for the win".

[klifton2-2009]

The American media has this tendency to glorify rogues, crooks, rascals, and criminals and turn each into a hero or heroine, as the case might be, into celebrity. Such is the case again with Karl Rove. By all decent standards of measurement, the man stands for all this bad in American politics and public services. It is conceivable that he is even guilty of treason by being an active participant in the outing of a covert operative.