Razzle Dazzle: Bush Stand-In Exits Picture

Razzle Dazzle
Bush Stand-In Exits Picture

By RICHARD STEIER

When Karl Rove announced last week that he would step down as President Bush's chief political adviser at the end of the month, he told a Washington Post reporter that he doubted his departure would end Democratic attempts to get him.

"I realize that some of the Democrats are Captain Ahab and I'm the Great White Whale," he said.

But if his analogy really fit, Mr. Rove would merely be Moby-Dick's stand-in. One biography of him was called "Bush's Brain," and the President himself called him "The Architect" of his two national election victories, but Mr. Rove is really more like the stunt man who does the dirty work and gets banged up so the star can keep looking good.

Master of Politics' Dark Arts

He may have been the strategist who could sell almost half the country on Mr. Bush as a "compassionate conservative" in 2000 and then go in the other direction to mobilize his committed right-wing base four years later. Mr. Rove was widely suspected as the mastermind of the attacks on John McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primary that raised doubts about his mental stability and hinted that he had fathered an illegitimate black daughter, and of orchestrating the distortion of John Kerry's military service record in 2004 by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

BUSH'S ID: Karl Rove (left) has been called 'Bush's Brain' by critics and 'Boy Genius' and 'The Architect' by the President himself, but he was not so much a puppeteer as he was the unbuttoned dark side of Mr. Bush's personality. But notwithstanding Mr. Rove's glib intelligence - and Mr. Bush's awkward acquaintance with the English language - it would be a mistake to view him as Iago to the President's Othello, using his cunning to manipulate his boss into dark deeds based on twisted facts. The two men found a kindred spirit in the late Lee Atwater, the spinmeister for Mr. Bush's father who hung Willie Horton around Michael Dukakis's neck during the 1988 race for President. There is no reason to believe that Mr. Rove has ever taken Mr. Bush someplace he didn't want to go in pursuing and preserving power.

A lasting insight into Mr. Bush's character was provided during the 2000 campaign during an appearance in Illinois when his remarks to running mate Dick Cheney were picked up by a live microphone.

"There's Adam Clymer, major-league asshole from the New York Times," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Cheney replied, "Oh yeah, he is, big time."

Mr. Clymer was not a columnist who had mocked the Texas Governor or championed his opponent, Al Gore. His sin in Mr. Bush's eyes was that he had taken a hard look at how his "No Child Left Behind" education program had worked in Texas, and written about the problems it had encountered. Since claims of education success were a foundation of Mr. Bush's appeal to voters, particularly moderates, Mr. Clymer's look behind the hype was a most-unwelcome intrusion that earned him the Republican nominee's scorn.

Mr. Bush didn't apologize for his remarks when they were reported, saying instead that he regretted that they became public, as if he were a victim of a prying media rather than someone who got caught sounding like a jerk. If Mr. Rove deserved credit, it was for keeping such eruptions to a minimum while Vice President Gore was portrayed in the media as both pompous and sufficiently insecure as to be taking advice from a female consultant about how to be more of a guy's guy.

Impersonating a Mandate

Mr. Bush's ability to come off as just folks wouldn't have been enough to get him elected if there had been an honest vote count in Florida in 2000. But from the outset of his presidency, he acted like he had a mandate, both in his dealings with Congress and his decision to take a vacation for much of his first summer in office, the same period in which the White House was getting increasingly alarmed warnings about Osama bin Laden's intentions of launching a terrorist attack in the United States.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Mr. Bush's popularity grew exponentially, almost in defiance of his shaky performance in the hours after the terrorists struck, when he did not initially respond upon being told of what had occurred while reading a book to schoolchildren in Florida, then did not surface to reassure the nation, ceding that task to then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

It's been said that Mr. Rove had hoped to build a lasting Republican domination of the national political scene, just as Franklin Roosevelt had ushered in 36 years of Democratic dominance of both the White House and Congress that was interrupted only to elect a Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, whose service as commanding general of the Allied forces during World War II placed him above party labels. If he was powerful or smart enough to achieve such a transformation, however, it's hard to explain what happened next.

Rather than using Mr. Bush's soaring approval ratings to transcend political differences while tracking down the Al Qaeda terror network, his administration bungled the attempt to capture or kill bin Laden, began beating the drums for a war with Iraq that had no direct tie to 9/11, and targeted Democrats during the 2002 elections as weak on patriotism and national security.

Mugged Triple-Amputee

Mr. Rove is believed to be the man who decided that the best way for Republicans to regain control of the U.S. Senate that year was to question the patriotism of Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a triple-amputee as a result of injuries suffered while serving in Vietnam. Republican Saxby Chambliss defeated Mr. Cleland as a result of this deplorable tactic, but that was hardly the sole benefit to Republicans.

A majority of the other Democratic Senators, including Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, John Kerry and John Edwards, all voted, a month prior to the election, to authorize Mr. Bush to go to war with Iraq. They all insisted later that they did so based on misleading information provided by the White House, but a major factor - certainly for Ms. Clinton, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards - was concern that a vote against authorization would have been used against them by Republicans to undercut their later campaigns for President.

They have to live with the shame of being stampeded into giving Mr. Bush carte blanche to wage a needless and reckless war that if anything has increased the threat of future terrorist attacks here. But the President, in the name of short-term political gains, squandered any chance of building that long-term Republican majority that Mr. Rove dreamed of.

Can't Cut the Mustard

One reason he did so, to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, is that Mr. Bush is no Franklin Roosevelt. A quarter-century ago, the columnist Russell Baker decried the decline of the system under which party bosses in smoke-filled rooms selected the nominees for President. They may have been grubby, sometimes corrupt figures, he said, but they generally picked candidates who could "cut the mustard" and actually do a capable job of running the country. Giving the nomination over to a series of primaries was a more democratic method, Mr. Baker wrote, but it increased the chance that qualities other than competence would produce the nominees.

Mr. Bush personifies that fear today, to an even greater degree than Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did back then. Those assessing Mr. Rove's influence wind up stuck on the fact that while he was a central figure in electing Mr. Bush twice and swinging control of Congress to the GOP, his tactics were of little use in actually running the country or preserving the Republican majority in last year's elections. Nor, for that matter, in tracking down bin Laden, effectively protecting American troops in Iraq or caring for them adequately in Federal hospitals. You can win elections on spin, but if you can't govern competently, what have you really gained?

Mr. Bush's continued low approval ratings, even as major disgraces like the treatment of wounded veterans and the lack of Federal help in rebuilding New Orleans have faded from public consciousness, result from a gradual but now unshakeable public consensus that he has been a consumer fraud. For some people, this was obvious a long time ago; for many others, it should have been.

Combat-Dodging Warrior

There was something truly perverse about an administration led by a man who evaded Vietnam service and used his political connections to cut short his National Guard duty consolidating its power by attacking the patriotism of Mr. Cleland, then gaining a second term by questioning Mr. Kerry's war record and patriotism. If Mr. Bush was truly the caring individual he tries to portray, he would have rejected such tactics the moment Mr. Rove suggested them, and argued that if his service record paled in comparison with Mr. Kerry's, that was something he would have to try to overcome the right way. A man of real character would have concluded that if he couldn't surmount that hurdle, maybe he didn't deserve to.

But for all his professions of deep religious conviction, winning has always animated Mr. Bush above all other considerations, just as it does Mr. Rove. It is as if he believed that if he could just grab and retain power, he could find a way past his shortcomings.

That belief accounts for the work of Mr. Rove and others four years ago in trying to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, even if it meant blowing the cover of his wife, then-CIA Agent Valerie Plame Wilson. It also is at the heart of the still-smoldering wreckage Mr. Rove leaves behind: the corruption of the justice system that led to the selection and removal of U.S. Attorneys not on their qualifications but rather their loyalty to the Bush Administration.

Beyond LBJ and Nixon

Such shenanigans are not an accepted part of American political hardball, or they would have been used by bare-knuckled Presidents like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, deeply flawed men who nonetheless lived up to Mr. Baker's standard of being able to cut the mustard. Whatever Mr. Rove's involvement in both of these schemes, they wouldn't have advanced very far without the assent of Mr. Bush and his equally feckless Vice President, Mr. Cheney.

And so there is even less of a point to meditating on Mr. Rove's responsibility for tarnishing the government than there is to wondering how Mr. Bush will govern in his absence. It is an administration that from its outset was strong on stagecraft and weak on statecraft, and the problems it has had running the country have made people increasingly less susceptible to the spin it purveys.

Bush Wasn't Oblivious

But Mr. Rove was not deceiving Mr. Bush or overruling his better angels for the past 7-1/2 years. The President knew what he was doing when he chose not to attend military funerals and prohibited the filming of coffins being transported from Andrews Air Force Base. The forced deployment of military personnel in Iraq after their scheduled tours were up was a consequence of Mr. Bush's decision to fight a war without reinstituting a draft; anything was preferable to demanding shared sacrifice from the general public and giving it reason to think about why we had invaded and what we were doing there.

Mr. Bush, as he has told us, is The Decider. A man who aspires to be President should have more substance than a piece of rough clay to be molded by advisers, and should not be a captive of their visions once in office, unless he is hideously weak.

Mr. Rove was merely the face of the administration that Mr. Bush could not afford to personally display.

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