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, recalling the Lysenko episode. 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. Sidney Blumenthal in Salon
There’s a lot on the net about how over-rated boy genius Karl Rove was, and I am certainly not going to defend the intelligence and grandiosity of the Rove vision. Sure Rove failed to establish his one-party dominance of the system,
but he laid the infrastructure for it, and don’t think others won’t build on it. Who’s going to stop them? We’ve
seen an evolution of these kinds of GOP tactics since the Nixon years,
and Rove’s tactics are just the most recent upgrade. He will be
superseded by more sophisticated versions in the future.
And snide Democrats are missing the point when they use "intelligence" as some marker of effectiveness. Rove was remarkably effective, and Republican and probably Democratic political operatives have learned from Rove how far you can go, what works, and what doesn’t, and they will find ways to improve and develop these methods further. Rove represents what has become in the last twenty-five years standard political procedure. What we need to fear in the future is a smarter and more knowledgeable group which has learned from the Bush-era mistakes, and also has the will to play the power game the way Rove and Cheney do. Who will stop it?
The Rove-Cheney years have taught us that you can pretty much do what you want behind a smokescreen of fear, and nobody’s going to stop you. It doesn’t matter if 30 or 40 percent of the electorate or the congress sees through these tactics–all you need is 51% ruled by their fears and anxieties. The smart money is on that kind of fearmongering getting its 51%+ every time. 51% is easy to find. Apparently 60% was pretty easy to find on the FISA legislation last week.
So it’s not about intelligence. This administration has demonstrated how much damage can be done by rather ignorant people who think brute power is the only persuasive tactic that matters. It has demonstrated time and again what bullying can accomplish. You don’t have to be intelligent to be a bully; you just need to have the will to make your opposition give in before you do, and the administration won that battle far more often than they lost it, even in recent months when they have no credibility and no support. This bullying tactic didn’t work against the Iraqi insurgents who in standing up to the administration exposed the astonishing lack of substance that lay behind the administration’s bully-swagger. These people are fundamentally empty and without substance. The only way to deal with them is to expose them by standing up to them. Too bad congress caves so much more easily than do the Iraqi insurgents.
Update: This James Carville article assessing Rove’s career is interesting, and I think reinforces what I’ve said here about Rove’s remarkable accomplishments. I think he and other Democrats are deluding themselves, though, if they think that Democrats have anything more than a temporary advantage because of how the Rove-GOP has turned off the under-30 electorate. Another terrorist attack will turn enough of them all into anxious, security-minded Republicans in a twinkling. Carville also doesn’t speak about the effectiveness of the authoritarian infrastructure Rove/Cheney has built that will survive the Bush administration and any attempts of the Russ Feingold types to dismantle it.
Leave a Reply