Down to whom?

The ample-assed “brain” of Dubya, Karl Rove, announced his departure from the White House this week, and the air waves were thick with pundit-wisdom on this supposed genius of the modern political arena. How easily public figures earn such designations. I always think of Henry Kissinger, hailed in his time as a brilliant geostrategist and practitioner of cold war realpolitik, whose ham-fisted policy of stalemate in the middle east contributed very substantially to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (not to mention the continuing disaster in Israel/Palestine) and whose Nobel Prize-winning Paris Peace Accord was sabotaged by the man himself before the ink was dry. Rove’s reputation is similarly inflated, and we often hear about his meticulous district-by-district, precinct-by-precinct analysis, his get out the vote strategies, etc., but honestly – what did the guy really accomplish? He basically lost the 2000 election against Gore, who was about as flat-footed a candidate as could have been imagined at the time, then very nearly lost four years later (with all the advantages of 9/11 at his back) to John Kerry, more than Gore’s equal in the flat-footed category. Where’s the magic?

Seems much of Rove’s vaunted talent is about luck, much about a very entrenched G.O.P. electoral machine (crucial for Ohio in 2004), and three parts right-wing media echo chamber – the talk show yammerers, tabloids, and reactionary bloggers that push the pusillanimous and profit-obsessed mainstream media to the right on just about every issue. Without those natural advantages, Rove/Bush would have gotten nowhere. For Christ’s sake, the Democrats handed their ass to him on a plate and he practically handed it back… twice, pulling off razor-thin victories that made JFK’s 1960 win look like an electoral landslide. How do their two elections compare with LBJ in ’64, Nixon in ’72, Reagan in ’84, or even Dubya’s father in ’88? Pretty poorly, that’s how. And as a political strategist/advisor, what has he managed to accomplish between elections? His boss enjoys abysmal approval ratings, his administration in a shambles. If it weren’t for the total ineptitude and disingenuousness of the Democratic leadership, I doubt there would have been an administration left for Rove to quit by this time. Seems to me a bona fide political genius might have managed to keep his man from scraping his ass all the way to the finish line.

My guess is that the Democrats will miss Rove more than the Republicans. He makes a good target – he is obnoxious and despicable, to be sure – and it fits into the general narrative that everything was swell until the Mayberry Machiavellians came to town. That is the theme of the Hillary campaign… back to the future. Don’t buy it, friends. As much as Bush has been able to destroy the U.S. empire merely by strolling through it, Bill Clinton was culpable for considerable misery, including an eight-year campaign of economic strangulation and bombing against Iraq that cost at least 500,000 lives. There are marginal differences, but nothing to get too giddy about. And while Rove bears substantial responsibility for the carnage that has occurred since, he isn’t the mastermind the Dems make him out to be. In fact, a cursory look at the past fifty years of electoral history shows him to be a third-rate Svengali, less accomplished than Michael Deaver or James Carville.