From President Bush to the supine, sycophantic mainstream media the kudos can’t stop coming about Karl Rove the supposed “political genius” as the person behind the Republican Party’s rise to power. But no amount of wax paper will obliterate the fact that long before his public decision to demit office at the end of August Rove’s shine was badly scuffed and sullied and his political career was in already in decline. But spin is spin and depending on which side of the political fence that you sit on you might agree with President Bush that Mr. Rove is a “boy genius.”
Me? I can’t as yet wrap my arms around these oozing flowery salutations to a man who will be remembered more for his foibles than for his political skills. Indeed, Rove’s raison d’etre – the reason for his existence – winning elections for his party sustained a serious crack in the armor when he failed to halt the Democratic juggernaut last November that resulted in the Republican Party losing both house of Congress. That was hardly the work of a political genius but the dithering blundering of an incompetent.
Then came the Alberto Gonzales saga that thrust Rove in a less than flattering light smack dab in the middle of the sordid melee. The embattled US Attorney General admitted that on at least two occasions he had conversations with Rove about sacking eight federal prosecutors. Democrats claimed that Rove’s meddling amounted to a perception that the attorneys were fired for political reasons. In the ensuing political fracas President Bush intervened and used his executive privilege to prevent Mr. Rove from answering questions before a Congressional committee that had grilled Mr. Gonzales good and proper.
Even today the controversial 2000 presidential elections is still the stuff of debate all across America. But the essential point here is that for all his political genius, something spun and built by a pro-Republican mainstream media and sundry talking heads, that election will go down in United States and world history as a colossal screw-up. Al Gore won the popular vote after running a very bad campaign in which he avoided the immensely popular former president, Bill Clinton, as the plague. After all the votes were counted Gore won by 500,000 votes – the popular vote - and had it not been for the chicanery in Florida he would have been the President of the United States today.
Eventually the election was decided by the United States Supreme Court and there Bush won most of the popular vote – five of them. So in the end it was not the genius of Karl Rove but the decision of a Republican-leaning US Supreme Court that decided who was going to be the President of the United States. In 2004 when Rove’s supposed political genius was on display again when Bush won the elections by 3 million votes against another Democratic candidate who ran the worst campaign in recent history.
So the Republican win that saw Bush in the White House for another term had all to do with the Democratic Party’s weak, wishy-washy political campaign and Kerry’s blunders, missteps and spineless showing on the campaign trail than Karl Rove’s brilliance or genius. Then came Hurricane Katrina and President Bush abysmal handling of the political aspects of this disaster. Rove, who was supposed to be the political maestro, either gave his boss bad advice or was so off his game that he allowed the doo-doo to hit the fan and then going into damage control mode. The fallout of Bush’s Katrina bungling is still being felt all across the country.
And if these political screw-ups were taking a toll on a man who famously says that he’s “Bush’s Brain,” there was nothing publicly to show it. Yes, Rove would have one more shot to prove his genius or his days would be numbered. Last November’s mid-term elections was the make or break event for Rove. The GOP had come to rely on his expertise and the party faithful had high expectations that he was going to pull the rabbit out of the hat again.
Still, the war in Iraq that Rove used to sell the American public on the GOP’s strong foreign policy and security credentials was going horribly wrong. So dusting off the Republican playbook Rove resorted to the usual tried and tested strategy of stoking the fear bogeyman and painting the Democrats as weak on national security issues and equating a democratic win as favoring terrorism. For all his genius Rove never saw what was coming and he doggedly stuck to the old playbook’s rules. The end result? The GOP got creamed. Americans got tired of his crap.
Today, President Bush job approval ratings are in the toilet. The war in Iraq is a complete failure, a gross, ill-advised misadventure built on a foundation on lies, falsehoods and untruths that is taking the lives of America’s youth. Afghanistan is becoming more and volatile, America’s credibility around the world has been badly tarnished and the Republican Party is hobbled by scandal after scandal.
One is left no other conclusion that Karl Rove has given his president suspect and bad advice during his tenure as Deputy White House Chief of Staff. No other explanation is possible. Karl Rove is directly tied to the legacy of President George Bush which is one of failure, deceit and incompetence. If Karl Rove, who became a close friend and political strategist for President Bush from the time he [Bush] was the governor of Texas and if, as we are told, he was the mastermind of both presidential elections, then it stands to reason that he cannot divorce himself from the fact that his actions have caused one of the worst administrations to be visited upon the American people in recent history.
In the end Karl Rove is no political genius but a loyal Bush flunky, an ambitious, though limited man, who got lucky and with the help of the US Supreme Court had his candidate installed as President of the United States. History will not be kind to Karl Rove.
