The Ace of PricksIn an exclusive interview appearing in today's Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, the top political adviser to President Bush, announced that he would be resigning from the White House. Doubtlessly, this news has been met in many quarters, including this one, with no small measure of satisfaction. Rove, after all, was the long time bogey-man of American liberals (and many self-described centrists); the chief electoral enabler of what has become concurrent six year long experiments in undermining the historical legacy of the New Deal while squandering our once-insuperable post-Cold War military, diplomatic, and economic advantages abroad. The 2002 and 2004 elections, of which Rove was dubbed "The Architect," were the deepest humiliations inflicted on the Democratic Party since Nixon's 1972 re-election.
Yet, as it turned out, the White House that Rove Built was erected on a faulty foundation. Bush's 2004 re-election prompted a lot of loose talk on the Right about The Final Victory: Republicans installed as a "permanent majority" with the Democrats decisively defeated if not utterly destroyed as a viable force in national politics. Mr. Rove himself used heady phrases like "rolling realignment" to describe what he saw as not just a logical dividend from being the party in power on 9/11, but as a continuation of a trend that was three decades in the making. Only two years and one federal election cycle later, and the dream, if you can call it that, was dead. The Democrats, after only four years in complete exile (they controlled the Senate in 2001 and 2002 following the defection of Republican Senator Jim Jeffords) had captured not only the House of Representatives, as was widely anticipated, but retook the Senate as well.
We always knew that Rove was not in any sense a mercenary; he typified the obsequious loyalty demanded by the Bush family as the price of admission to their clique. The fault of the Republican Party writ large was that its adherents imagined that the goals of the Bush White House, and by extension, Rove, were compatible, if not synonymous with their larger electoral imperative. They believed that the Bush Administration would always sublimate the business of governing to the business of winning elections; what they failed to understand was that though the two ideas remained intricately intertwined in Rove's head, he thought that Bush and the G.O.P. were leading the parade when instead they had just walked right out in front of it. People had signed for Bush's bill of goods because they were afraid of terrorism and divided over gay marriage - that this would not translate into an inexhaustible reservoir of support for Social Security privatization, a muddled course on illegal immigration, and a never-ending war in Iraq seems to never have occurred to Rove, or, more likely, wasn't a consideration in the first place. Good politics typically make for bad government, and vice-versa; the Bush Administration, in its second go-round, has managed the bizarre, although not unprecedented feat of specializing in both bad politics and bad government.
If the 2006 election was Rove's Waterloo, then surely Hurricane Katrina was his Leipzig. Up until that point the alleged incompetence, cronyism and corruption of the Bush Administration was abstract for most Americans; Republicans could always argue that unflattering portraits of the War in Iraq or other Administration activities were being painted by subjective artists with ideological agendas of their own. Katrina was important because it was concrete and incontrovertible. For almost a week during September 2005, the American government effectively abdicated control over one of the country's largest cities, abandoning its residents to the predations of the both the elements and general lawlessness. Instantly New Orleans became a symbol, the flip-side of "compassionate conservatism." Michael Brown, an incompetent Bush fundraiser, had been made head of FEMA; the Iraq war had stretched resources too thin to adequately respond to the crisis; the levees broke because the money needed to maintain them had been parceled out as tax cuts for the wealthy; "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
In a 2006 essay for The Threepenny Review, playwright David Mamet expands upon the idea that the Republicans are the party of management, indifferent or outright hostile to the needs of labor where they diverge from management's overriding interests; thus it follows that Katrina and its aftermath (and last week's I-35 bridge catastrophe in Minneapolis) should be viewed as being of a piece with the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire or the Sago Mine disaster. It is an analogy that Karl Rove, in a darker private moment, might embrace. After all, he authored the concept of the "Ownership Society," a society wherein the veneration of labor is replaced in political importance by what one owns. The aggregation of power proportionate to capital is an economic fact of life; the argument can be made that the American government in the wake of Theodore Roosevelt's progressive movement and later, the New Deal, has sought to interject itself, with a highly debatable degree of success, as a counterweight. Rove's master project for the past six-odd years has been to not only ensure that the boot heel is securely planted on your neck, but to convince you that this is a desirable condition, good for you and necessary for greater prosperity. Hence it is that environmental and safety regulations are tossed aside, government bureaucracies are seeded with political loyalists instead of professionals, taxes on passively earned wealth are slashed with abandon, and access to the civil courts for persons wrongfully injured is either strictly limited or denied outright.
Since the 2006 election, Mr. Rove has gradually faded into the background, stripped of the aura of invincibility conferred by his previous successes, as well as his influence beyond the walls of the White House. Vice President Cheney has since long eclipsed him, in image as well as fact, as the prime intellectual mover of the Bush Administration and as the favorite hate-object among Democrats. Indeed, had Rove's resignation come down a year ago, it would have been an earth-shattering political event; now it is simply the natural consequence of his enforced obsolescence.
So maybe you aren't having a party tonight. Maybe you're thinking, as am I, that this changes absolutely nothing, that the Bushies and their ideological heirs will still be around tomorrow and the day after and the day after that espousing their nauseating blend of counterfactual fear-mongering and economic abnegation. It's true, the War of Ideas continues without a moment's abeyance. Yet, hopefully, somewhere deep in the recesses of your refrigerator, there's a can or a bottle of beer, something aptly proletarian. Tonight, when you go home, reach back there for it, crack it open, and raise a toast to Karl Rove, Government Retiree.
Yet, as it turned out, the White House that Rove Built was erected on a faulty foundation. Bush's 2004 re-election prompted a lot of loose talk on the Right about The Final Victory: Republicans installed as a "permanent majority" with the Democrats decisively defeated if not utterly destroyed as a viable force in national politics. Mr. Rove himself used heady phrases like "rolling realignment" to describe what he saw as not just a logical dividend from being the party in power on 9/11, but as a continuation of a trend that was three decades in the making. Only two years and one federal election cycle later, and the dream, if you can call it that, was dead. The Democrats, after only four years in complete exile (they controlled the Senate in 2001 and 2002 following the defection of Republican Senator Jim Jeffords) had captured not only the House of Representatives, as was widely anticipated, but retook the Senate as well.
We always knew that Rove was not in any sense a mercenary; he typified the obsequious loyalty demanded by the Bush family as the price of admission to their clique. The fault of the Republican Party writ large was that its adherents imagined that the goals of the Bush White House, and by extension, Rove, were compatible, if not synonymous with their larger electoral imperative. They believed that the Bush Administration would always sublimate the business of governing to the business of winning elections; what they failed to understand was that though the two ideas remained intricately intertwined in Rove's head, he thought that Bush and the G.O.P. were leading the parade when instead they had just walked right out in front of it. People had signed for Bush's bill of goods because they were afraid of terrorism and divided over gay marriage - that this would not translate into an inexhaustible reservoir of support for Social Security privatization, a muddled course on illegal immigration, and a never-ending war in Iraq seems to never have occurred to Rove, or, more likely, wasn't a consideration in the first place. Good politics typically make for bad government, and vice-versa; the Bush Administration, in its second go-round, has managed the bizarre, although not unprecedented feat of specializing in both bad politics and bad government.
If the 2006 election was Rove's Waterloo, then surely Hurricane Katrina was his Leipzig. Up until that point the alleged incompetence, cronyism and corruption of the Bush Administration was abstract for most Americans; Republicans could always argue that unflattering portraits of the War in Iraq or other Administration activities were being painted by subjective artists with ideological agendas of their own. Katrina was important because it was concrete and incontrovertible. For almost a week during September 2005, the American government effectively abdicated control over one of the country's largest cities, abandoning its residents to the predations of the both the elements and general lawlessness. Instantly New Orleans became a symbol, the flip-side of "compassionate conservatism." Michael Brown, an incompetent Bush fundraiser, had been made head of FEMA; the Iraq war had stretched resources too thin to adequately respond to the crisis; the levees broke because the money needed to maintain them had been parceled out as tax cuts for the wealthy; "George Bush doesn't care about black people."
In a 2006 essay for The Threepenny Review, playwright David Mamet expands upon the idea that the Republicans are the party of management, indifferent or outright hostile to the needs of labor where they diverge from management's overriding interests; thus it follows that Katrina and its aftermath (and last week's I-35 bridge catastrophe in Minneapolis) should be viewed as being of a piece with the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire or the Sago Mine disaster. It is an analogy that Karl Rove, in a darker private moment, might embrace. After all, he authored the concept of the "Ownership Society," a society wherein the veneration of labor is replaced in political importance by what one owns. The aggregation of power proportionate to capital is an economic fact of life; the argument can be made that the American government in the wake of Theodore Roosevelt's progressive movement and later, the New Deal, has sought to interject itself, with a highly debatable degree of success, as a counterweight. Rove's master project for the past six-odd years has been to not only ensure that the boot heel is securely planted on your neck, but to convince you that this is a desirable condition, good for you and necessary for greater prosperity. Hence it is that environmental and safety regulations are tossed aside, government bureaucracies are seeded with political loyalists instead of professionals, taxes on passively earned wealth are slashed with abandon, and access to the civil courts for persons wrongfully injured is either strictly limited or denied outright.
Since the 2006 election, Mr. Rove has gradually faded into the background, stripped of the aura of invincibility conferred by his previous successes, as well as his influence beyond the walls of the White House. Vice President Cheney has since long eclipsed him, in image as well as fact, as the prime intellectual mover of the Bush Administration and as the favorite hate-object among Democrats. Indeed, had Rove's resignation come down a year ago, it would have been an earth-shattering political event; now it is simply the natural consequence of his enforced obsolescence.
So maybe you aren't having a party tonight. Maybe you're thinking, as am I, that this changes absolutely nothing, that the Bushies and their ideological heirs will still be around tomorrow and the day after and the day after that espousing their nauseating blend of counterfactual fear-mongering and economic abnegation. It's true, the War of Ideas continues without a moment's abeyance. Yet, hopefully, somewhere deep in the recesses of your refrigerator, there's a can or a bottle of beer, something aptly proletarian. Tonight, when you go home, reach back there for it, crack it open, and raise a toast to Karl Rove, Government Retiree.
