Karl Rove’s departure from the White House to spend more time with his family and to write his memoirs marks the end of the dominant political partnership of the past decade in United States politics.
Rove took George W Bush under his wing when he was no more than the figurehead of a Texan baseball team, the wayward son of a political dynasty who was not expected to amount to anything.
Through constant drilling and intense discipline the Austin-based political consultant turned his protégé into a fearsomely effective campaigner, Texas governor and a two-term president. After his 2004 re-election, Bush hailed Rove as “The Architect”. The critics called him “Bush’s Brain”.
Along the way, Rove constantly compared himself to the patron saint of US political consultants, Mark Hanna, who guided William McKinley to the Oval Office at the end of the 19th century. Like his idol, Rove saw himself as engineering not just an electoral victory, but also a realignment of American politics that would leave Republicans in power for a generation.
By those standards, Rove’s career has been a failure. Far from securing an enduring “natural” majority, the Republicans were defeated in last year’s congressional elections and dragged down by a presidency that has become one of the most unpopular of modern times. The current crop of Republican presidential contenders are competing with each other to distance themselves from Bush and the Iraq war.
Nevertheless, Rove has left a mark on American political history. His departure marks the true end of an era and his name will live on in the adjective Rovian, albeit with negative connotations. It carries with it the whiff of dirty tricks, which were blamed on Rove, although mostly without conclusive proof.
Bad things tended to happen to rival campaigns when Rove was in charge, but the dirty work tended to be done by surrogates and supporters with no demonstrable link to his office. (John McCain’s challenge in the 2000 primaries was derailed by a rumour campaign in South Carolina, accusing the Vietnam veteran of a lack of patriotism. In 2004, John Kerry was undone by the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who questioned his Vietnam record.)
In his valedictory interview with the Wall Street Journal, Rove made light of his reputation. But by the end, the mud was beginning to stick. He escaped indictment last year for the outing of Valerie Plame, a CIA undercover official married to an administration critic, but it was clear he touted her name around the Washington press corps. He was also forced to invoke executive privilege to avoid telling Congress what his role had been in a cull of federal prosecutors.
Rove ultimately became a victim of the administration’s hubris. Bush took him from the campaign bus to the White House, making him head of policy as well as head of politics, but the policy became a disaster. His ambitious plans to reform federal pensions and the immigration regime alienated both the elderly and conservative wings of the party. Rove’s grand plan of engineering a permanent Republican majority with corporate money, white evangelical fervour and a “moral values” alliance with Hispanics, seemed over-ambitious long before he stepped down.
Rove’s actual legacy is likely to be more mundane. The targeted canvassing methods that he helped pioneer have become part of modern American electioneering. The maestro’s acolytes are active in just about every primary campaign in this year’s primaries, even if the old master himself is no longer welcome. — Â