If I Only Had a Brain

That song from the Wizard of Oz movie always comes to mind when one thinks of the Bush administration – read the lyrics and listen to the tune here – the one the scarecrow sings about how nice it would be to have a brain.  It oddly contains this –

 

With the thoughts you’d be thinkin’
You could be another Lincoln,
If you only had a brain.

 

As much as this president likes to compare himself to past presidents who were thought failures but in retrospect are now seen as having been effective, he seldom compares himself to Lincoln, that Republican now out of favor with the current Republican Party (the southern base having a problem with the president on the wrong side on matters of race and “states rights” in “the late unpleasantness between the states”).  Lincoln won’t do.  The current president is fond of likening himself to Truman of course.  Truman may have been a Democrat, but in his last years in office he was reviled, and mocked as a shallow fool.  But now we all see he did quite well, given what he faced.  That seems to be a comfort to the “current occupant” – history can vindicate anything that seems absolutely bone-headed at the time, and perhaps it will, eventually, for this president.  Or perhaps it won’t – but you don’t want to think that way.

 

The president is probably not humming the Harburg lyrics to that particular Harold Arlen tune, but he might well be.  Getting to where he hopes to be in the annuals of history – vindicated as being both resolute and visionary, and right about everything – got harder on Monday, August 13, as he lost his brain – “Karl Rove, the political mastermind behind President Bush’s races for the White House and an adviser with unparalleled influence over the past 6 1/2 turbulent years, announced his resignation Monday, ending a partnership stretching back more than three decades.”

 

Yes, the man was known as Bush’s Brain – there was the book and the movie explaining it all, as in “Rove, the driven intellectual with an abrasive edge and an iron will to win, and Bush, the callow anti-intellectual with a charming air and a need for discipline and a game plan.”  Some say that in a sort of Svengali way Rove created the president as we know him now.  And now he’s gone.  That’s very odd.

 

CNN tracks down the fellow who wrote the first book on Rove, and then another, saying just what you would expect –

 

“This is the end of the Bush presidency, absolutely,” said Wayne Slater co-author of a book on Rove titled “The Architect.”

 

“All lame ducks are lame ducks; this one, with Karl Rove now turning out the lights, is the most lame duck we’ve seen in a long time.”

 

Yes, a brain is a terrible thing to waste, or lose, or whatever.

 

CNN added this – “With Rove facing a subpoena from a Senate committee investigating why U.S. attorneys were fired earlier this year, some people in the White House thought that Rove had become a distraction, reported CNN White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux.”

 

Rove broke the news of his resignation in an odd place.  He told Paul Gigot, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor, that he would leave the White House August 31, after fourteen years of, essentially, telling George Bush what to do and what say.  It was a stunner, but the Wall Street Journal’s whacky editorial page was the right place to do this.  They love the guy.  As Rupert Murdoch, the paper’s new owner, transforms the highly-respected news operation into something that reflects his views and supports his empire, and matches the editorial views, the news side of the house will no doubt love Rove too.

 

Sonia Smith at Slate rounds up the immediate reaction on the web, starting with the odd Joe Klein at Time magazine’s site being stunned – “I thought Karl would be there to turn out the lights and write naughty graffiti on the walls to greet the new administration in 2009.”  Well, he could arrange a visit to do that.

 

Smith points to previous items about Rove being called “Bush’s Brain” and “the architect” of the Bush presidency, and, by Bush himself, “Turd Blossom” and segues to, at National Review’s Corner, pro-Bush Kathryn Jean Lopez considering the brain metaphor –  “By leaving, Rove could be doing his last bit of service to the president: If it’s a successful last year, the myth of ‘Bush’s brain’ may be laid to rest.”  Yeah, unless he phones it in.

 

In the middle, Joe Gandelman wonders how Bush will function at all – “The Bush administration is staving off a host of Congressional and other investigations into its policy and political dealings. If Rove is ‘Bush’s brain’ does his departure amid these investigations mean the administration is being politically lobotomized?”  That’s cute.

 

Dick Polman, the Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, has an interesting take, that Rove could never save Bush from himself – “I know we’re all supposed to pay obeisance these days to the Cult of the Consultant, but perhaps we should remember that, in the end, a consultant is probably only as good as his client. In the end, Bush’s Brain could not supply him with a silver tongue.”  That’s also cute.  Rove gave up?  You can make a silk purse from a sow’s ear and all that.

 

Peter Wehner, former deputy assistant to the president, on the other hand, loved Rove –  “He was the most relentlessly upbeat person in the White House, giving counsel and encouragement to all, and showing great kindness to many of us and our families.”  He sound insufferable, but this is hero-worship –  “And of course what we all learned as well as what a tremendously strong person this policy wonk and former nerd from Utah is. He withstood pressure, unfair pressure, that would have broken lesser men.”

 

Yeah, yeah, but Michelle Malkin, who often covers for Bill O-Reilly on Fox News these summer days, tears into Paul Gigot for not seeing Rove was a fool –

 

Not a word here about the Harriet Miers debacle, the botching of the Dubai ports battle, or the undeniable stumbles in post-Iraq invasion policies. And not a word about the spectacular disaster of the illegal alien shamnesty, which will be the everlasting stain Rove leaves behind.  Imagine how much better off the White House and the Republican Party might be now if he had, in fact, left a year ago.

 

Fellow conservative Ed Morrissey fires back –

 

I’d argue that in this instance, Michelle’s making the same mistake as many on the Left do about Rove. Karl Rove did not make policy - he just structured the President’s message to win as much support for Bush policy decisions as possible. I highly doubt Rove selected Harriet Miers or his immigration policy.

 

… Bush makes the policy and the appointments, and men like Rove sell them. You can’t blame the salesman for the product.

 

As for the future, Republican Jason Bonham wonders about any current Republican hopeful hiring Rove.  Would having Rove as a consultant would help or harm a GOP candidate?  That goes like this –

 

Let’s just hypothesize for a moment and say my favorite candidate hired him. Would I be excited? I don’t think I would. Romney is running on a “Reform Washington” ticket. Mitt’s the outsider who knows that Americans have had enough of the Washington game, and the one candidate who knows how to reform a troubled ship. It would seem like rehiring the captain of the sinking ship, no matter how much of an expert, would be a PR disaster.

 

So that is what popped up on the web, initially, and John Dickerson offers a full column on the matter –

 

Karl Rove has always loved his role as White House historian. Almost as soon as he moved into his West Wing office, he was giving friends late-night tours of the building, offering tidbits about the paintings, rooms, and furniture. His office walls are clotted with yellowed documents and pictures related to Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. More than once, he has challenged academic historians who wrote unfavorably about the Bush presidency. Now that Rove is leaving the White House, shaping the judgment of history will no doubt become his full-time job.

 

Rove could slip into oblivion, teach at the University of Texas at Austin, and write books about obscure 19th-century political figures, but I doubt it. He was involved in every detail of the Bush administration from the placement of the presidential seal on the lectern to the wording of the State of the Union. His drive, his willingness to use base-driven politics, made Bush president and got him re-elected. It also helped make Bush ineffective and the least popular president in modern times. That’s the judgment Rove now faces. A man so obsessed by history isn’t likely to stand by while it judges him badly.

 

So one assumes Rove left to fix all that?  He did tell Gigot at the Wall Street Journal that Bush’s approval rating will improve, and the situation in Iraq will turn around and another Republican will make it into the White House in 2008. Dickerson adds this “Rove will also apparently regrow his hair and play for the Cowboys.”

 

Here’s the assessment –

 

This may be delusional - Rove’s sunny predictions in the past, particularly about the 2006 election, were spectacularly wrong. But his parting comments indicate that while he’s leaving, he’s not letting up on the spin. Rove has a lot to explain: why his dream of a GOP realignment never happened (or hasn’t happened yet), why he isn’t responsible for making the already cynical game of politics more cynical, why the top priorities of Social Security and immigration reform failed so spectacularly, and why he did nothing wrong in outing an undercover CIA agent to journalists.

 

As George Bush headed to Washington in 2001, Rove promised a politics that would grow the GOP into a long-term majority party. Bush would be a new kind of Republican who would challenge the Democrats on their turf, by offering Compassionate Conservative™ solutions on issues such as education where voters didn’t traditionally trust the GOP. By championing a pro-immigration policy, Bush would lock Hispanic voters into the Republican column for a generation. Little by little the president would “hive off” components from the Democratic coalition.

 

None of that worked out –

 

The result, along with an unpopular war, is that the Republican Party is now in as deep a funk as it has been since Watergate. Rove wanted to reshape the national political landscape and he did: It now looks like something from a Mad Max film. “Many of us thought we would have helped solve the problem of polarization,” Matthew Dowd, who worked closely with Rove for both presidential campaigns, wrote in Texas Monthly, but “we’re in an even more polarized place.” Bush loyalists looking to pinpoint Rove’s role in the difference between the Texas and Washington years note that in Texas, Rove was merely a consultant to Gov. Bush. In Washington, he was physically in the White House, with his hands directly on the levers of policy-making.

 

The world is not Texas, after all.  Everyone but Rove and the president seems to know that.  That “we’ll get him, dead or alive” business – and the “bring it on” comment – may play well in Abilene.  Everyone else rolls their eyes.

 

And anyway, the departure of Bush’s Brian may, as Kevin Drum notes, may not mean much now –

 

It doesn’t really matter. History will judge Rove a colossal failure, a man who never understood how to govern and, for all his immense knowledge of polls and politics, never really understood the times he lived in. It was 9/11 that both made and broke the Bush presidency, not some kind of mystical McKinley-esque realignment. Rove was blind to that, and blind to the way Bush should have governed after 9/11. His one-track mind, in which every problem is solved by wielding the biggest, nastiest partisan club you can lift, just couldn’t adapt. It’s fitting that he insisted on making even his final act as calculatedly partisan as he could, announcing his resignation not through the White House press office, but in an interview with the editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Sic transit, Karl.

 

And then, almost at the same time Josh Green’s Karl Rove profile in this month’s Atlantic.  Drum notes this telling anecdote –

 

Hurricane Katrina clearly changed the public perception of Bush’s presidency. Less examined is the role Rove played in the defining moment of the administration’s response: when Air Force One flew over Louisiana and Bush gazed down from on high at the wreckage without ordering his plane down. Bush advisers Matthew Dowd and Dan Bartlett wanted the president on the ground immediately, one Bush official told me, but were overruled by Rove for reasons that are still unclear: “Karl did not want the plane to land in Louisiana.” Rove’s political acumen seemed to be deserting him altogether.

 

Drum adds this – “I suspect the answer here is that Rove never truly had a lot of political acumen. He had campaign acumen. He was good at winning elections, but not at much else.”

 

But it takes a life-long conservative of the old school, not one of the new anti-science bible-banging keep-women-in-their-place new sort, to really nail it, as Andrew Sullivan does here –

 

The man’s legacy is a conservative movement largely discredited and disunited, a president with lower consistent approval ratings than any in modern history, a generational shift to the Democrats, a resurgent al Qaeda, an endless catastrophe in Iraq, a long hard struggle in Afghanistan, a fiscal legacy that means bankrupting America within a decade, and the poisoning of American religion with politics and vice-versa. For this, he got two terms of power - which the GOP used mainly to enrich themselves, their clients and to expand government’s reach and drain on the productive sector. In the re-election, the president with a relatively strong economy, and a war in progress, managed to eke out 51 percent. Why? Because Rove preferred to divide the country and get his 51 percent, than unite it and get America’s 60. In a time of grave danger and war, Rove picked party over country. Such a choice was and remains despicable.

 

Rove is one of the worst political strategists in recent times. He took a chance to realign the country and to unite it in a war - and threw it away in a binge of hate-filled niche campaigning, polarization and short-term expediency. His divisive politics and elevation of corrupt mediocrities to every branch of government has turned an entire generation off the conservative label. And rightly so. It will take another generation to recover from the toxins he has injected, with the president’s eager approval, into the political culture and into the conservative soul.

 

One of Sullivan’s readers agrees –

 

He is a brilliant tactician, but a horrid strategist.  He knows the minutiae of politics and the tactics it takes to put together a campaign, but he never had the “vision” to see beyond the next campaign, to see the logical destination of the policies he advocated.

 

He pushed Bush to adopt the No Child Left Behind, the Prescription Drug Entitlement, and was complicit in runaway spending.  He also did about everything you can to alienate the libertarian-minded wing of the GOP to foster his Christianist oriented base.  While he was “successful” in getting Bush elected in 2000 (more the fault of Gore’s failure to embrace Clinton’s records and due to Ralph Nader’s siphoning votes from Gore in Florida), and in 2004 (more of Kerry being a god-awful candidate), he led to a breakup of the coalition that had been the political majority in this country since 1980.  By allowing the big government, bedroom invading, and deliberately divisive hardcore social conservatives to become ascendant, Rove ultimately succeeded in driving away the libertarian, small government and moderate members of this governing coalition.  In the end, these voters came to be more repulsed with Rove than they were with the prospects of Democrats in office.

 

Other than that, Rove was a genius.

 

Tim Grieve analyzes that –

 

It’s easy to count Karl Rove’s successes: The election of George W. Bush, the reelection of George W. Bush and the tax cuts, deregulating of industry, preemptive war and Supreme Court appointments that came with the above. But while the last couple of years have been marked by one notable Rove victory - he wasn’t prosecuted in the Valerie Plame case - the man the president called “The Architect” has had a rough ride since voters handed Bush a second term in 2004.

 

It wasn’t supposed to be that way.

 

As Bush began his second term, he promoted Rove from “senior advisor” to “deputy chief of staff,” a move that, the Washington Post explained at the time, merely confirmed that Rove “was really behind virtually everything.” In his new but not-so-new role, the Post’s Peter Baker wrote, Rove would reign over “an expansive portfolio cutting across virtually the entire policy spectrum” as the president “retooled his staff to focus on his ambitious second-term agenda of restructuring Social Security, rewriting the tax code and spreading democracy around the world.”

 

A month later, the New York Times’ Richard Stevenson piled it on: “As Mr. Bush pushes doggedly ahead with his battle to add investment accounts to Social Security, he is betting heavily on Mr. Rove’s well-chronicled political skills to build public support, hold Republicans together and overcome intense Democratic opposition … Mr. Rove is assuming a more expansive role, bringing the same intensity to the big issues in Mr. Bush’s second-term agenda that he brought to the president’s re-election campaign.”

 

It all fell apart –

 

Despite Rove’s “well-chronicled political skills,” Bush’s campaign to “reform” Social Security went exactly nowhere. As for the other big-ticket items in Bush’s “ambitious second-term agenda?”  Last time we checked, the tax code hasn’t been rewritten since 2004, and all that talk of spreading democracy around the world has pretty much run aground in Iraq. In between, Bush tried - with a lot of help from Rove - to reform the nation’s immigration laws. That didn’t work either.

 

And then there’s the small matter of 2006. Just days before the midterm congressional elections, Rove scoffed when NPR’s Robert Siegel told him that the polls weren’t looking so good for the Republicans. Rove said he saw more polls than Siegel ever could, and that the polls he was seeing would “add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House.” Rove sneered: “You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to ‘the’ math.”

 

Oops.  And Grieve adds one of his readers points out something no one remembers.  At one time, Rove was said to be in charge of the Hurricane Katrina reconstruction effort.  You could look it up.  No one ever asked about that.  Why bother?

 

Former Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal offers the complete assessment.   It’s long, but worth a read, considering these highlights –

 

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.

 

Oh my!  It’s our invasion and occupation of Iran next.

 

But Rove won’t be missed for this –

 

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…. 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.

 

And there’s his rise –

 

Rove’s saga is a rags-to-riches success story of a political serial killer. His first involvement in a political campaign was to conduct a dirty trick against a candidate running for Illinois state treasurer. After Rove dropped out of the University of Utah, his promise was recognized and he was appointed executive director of the College Republicans. Donald Segretti, ringmaster for the Committee to Reelect the President of a gang of dirty tricksters engaged in what he called “ratfucking,” recruited Rove. Rove conducted one session training young Republicans to sift through the garbage of opponents. In the Watergate scandal, Segretti was sentenced to prison for forging campaign literature. The FBI questioned Rove, but dropped its investigation of the small fry. Yet he would become the greatest rat fucker of them all. The new chairman of the Republican National Committee, George H.W. Bush, named Rove chairman of the College Republicans and, even more fortuitously, appointed him as a handler of his obstreperous older son. It was love at first sight, at least from the nerdy Rove’s point of view. “Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma - you know, wow,” he said later.

 

Rove weathered rough storms, including being fired in 1992 from the Bush for President campaign by the candidate himself for leaking damaging information to conservative columnist Robert Novak about the elder Bush’s close friend and top fundraiser Robert Mosbacher.

 

In 1981, Rove established a direct-mail firm, Karl Rove & Co., in Austin, Texas, which became his cockpit for the destruction of the state Democratic Party. Over more than the next decade, he was involved in dozens of campaigns marked by dirty tricks, sexual innuendo and the use of friendly FBI agents and prosecutors to harass Democrats. In Texas and elsewhere, he laid the groundwork for his later efforts. The whispering campaign in 1994 against Gov. Ann Richards claiming that she was a lesbian and the rumor-mongering that an esteemed Alabama state judge was really a secret pedophile were harbingers of the smear campaign against Sen. John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Rove’s exploitation of prosecutors pioneered his later politicization of U.S. attorneys.

 

And so on…  Read it if you dare.

 

So will Rove now work for one of Republican candidates?  It is possible.  He told Paul Gigot that Hillary Clinton was “fatally flawed” as a candidate, but he didn’t say who he favored on his side of things - Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, or Sleepy or Dopey or any of the others.  Ryan Sager in the New York Sun points out what just happened in Iowa with the “straw poll” shows these guys need some help –

 

The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he’s little more than Jesus Christ’s running mate. The pandering from the stage told the story. Mr. Romney promised not a chicken in every pot, but “a button on every computer” for parents to block obscene material. Anti-immigrant ranter Tom Tancredo nearly brought the house down decrying the fact that Americans sometimes have to “Press 1″ for English. Mr. Huckabee earned his second-place finish in part by making the specious claim that farm subsidies safeguard America’s food independence … Senator Brownback of Kansas, the third-place finisher, declared as he often does in his stump speech: “All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus. All for Jesus.”

 

This all may fly in Ames. But it won’t in Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the interior West, all of which will be battlegrounds in this presidential election and for many elections to come. Republicans need to broaden their appeal in this tough environment, and the first step is to turn their sights away from Ames and toward the rest of the nation.

 

They may need Rove.  They are an odd bunch.

 

But Josh Marshall point to one of them with whom Rove would have an affinity –

 

I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know by noting that being mayor on 9/11 doesn’t give Rudy Giuliani any expertise on terrorism, no matter what he might think. But it’s only crystallized in my mind in recent days - from watching him speak and seeing who his advisors are - that Giuliani appears to know virtually nothing about either the Middle East or counter-terrorism policy. And he looks very much like another George W. Bush in the making. Indeed, not the President Bush we now have, who has slowly lost the greater proportion of his more fanatic deputies and has Bob Gates and Condi Rice as his two main policy advisors, but the President Bush of 2001.

 

With Giuliani you have a man who appears to have very little familiarity with the Middle East but does have a personality which prioritizes gut-instinct, point-scoring and aggression. And like Bush he appears to believe he can make up for his lack of knowledge and experience with attitude and ass-kicking. To round things out, his foreign policy advisory team looks quite like the crowd of neocons who were advising President Bush while he was running for president. If anything they look like a group that was too extreme to gain entry into the original ‘vulcans’ group.

 

So “the direction he’d take US policy on the Middle East would likely be a genuine disaster.”  Rove could work with that.  That might be what’s next for the Brain.  Giuliani needs one.

 

As mentioned a year or more ago, there is a cartoon that really applies here.  That would be Pinky and the Brain - a genetically engineered mouse (who sounds a whole lot like Orson Welles) and his quite amusingly insane mouse cohort make nightly attempts to take over the world. This was a co-production of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Warner Brothers that ran from 1995 to 1998. There were sixty-five episodes, and it wasn’t really for kids - the dialog was far too witty and subtle, and there were all those references to classic films like “The Third Man” and “Bride of Frankenstein” and such. It was about power and insanity.

 

Pinky: Gee, Brain. What are we going to do tonight?
The Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the world.

 

Rove hooks up with Giuliani and here we go again.  Hollywood explains everything again.