Rove Saw Rise, Fall of GOP Dream
By Wayne Slater, The Dallas Morning News
Aug. 14–AUSTIN — And then there were none.
The resignation of Karl Rove means that the last — and most important — member of George W. Bush’s Texas inner circle is gone.
One by one, the team that Mr. Bush took to Washington has left.
Mr. Rove, the guiding force of Mr. Bush’s political career, will be gone by month’s end. And his departure is a signal that there are no more big legislative or political battles for Mr. Rove to fight — and little chance Mr. Bush could win them anyway.
“It was time for us to think about the next chapter,” Mr. Rove told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One bound for Crawford.
Mr. Rove was with George W. Bush at the beginning, planning his first race for governor and sketching the outlines of winning the White House years before Mr. Bush had ever held political office.
Without Mr. Rove, Mr. Bush would not have run for governor, probably never won the White House.
Many thought the man variously dubbed “Bush’s Brain” and “The Architect” would be the last to leave.
But all presidents become lame ducks in the final years. And for Mr. Bush, the loss of his buoyant political strategist underscores the cruel nature of lame duck status — and the demise or Mr. Rove’s hopes of a Republican realignment for a generation.
“What we’ve witnessed is both the rise and fall of his political dream,” said David Gergen, an adviser to other presidents. “Karl will go on, but the dream has gone smash, to create an enduring Republican majority.”
Significant figure
By almost any measure, Mr. Rove has proved one of the most significant political figures ever to occupy an office in the White House.
He was the architect of Mr. Bush’s 1994 challenge of Gov. Ann Richards of Texas, his re-election in 1998 and back-to-back victories for the White House.
In the process, he brought a politics of division, a strategy of winning by cultivating an increasingly polarized electorate and motivating a majority around the kinetic issues of terrorism, gay marriage, tax cuts and conservative values.
That made winning elections easier but governing much more difficult.
“They made a judgment that you can govern the country and get large changes done with bare majorities, with 51 percent and steamrolling the opposition,” Mr. Gergen said.
“The history has been that if you wanted to get the large things done in Washington, you need to do it with supermajorities. They went the other way.”
Political talents
In Texas, long before Mr. Rove became a national celebrity, political operatives in both parties learned that he possessed considerable political gifts.
When Mr. Rove worked as a campaign aide for Republican Gov. Bill Clements in the mid-1980s, Democrats dominated Texas politics. By the time Mr. Rove accompanied Mr. Bush to Washington in 2000, Republicans held every statewide office, both U.S. Senate seats and majorities in both chambers of the Texas Legislature.
Mr. Rove helped make the Republican resurgence happen — and hoped to duplicate the effort on a national scale.
The electoral success of twice winning the White House and of the 2002 midterms (in which the GOP defied history by gaining in Congress) stamped Mr. Rove with the imprimatur of genius.
In much the same way, the Republican defeats in 2006, in which the Democrats took control of Congress, tarnished his political reputation for the first time.
The day after last November’s election debacle, Mr. Rove went into the Oval Office and told Mr. Bush that the election actually was much closer than many believed.
He said that with a shift of just 3,000 votes, Republicans would have held on to the Senate. A shift of 70,000 votes nationwide, he said, and the GOP would have maintained control of the House.
It was Mr. Rove’s way of reassuring the president that the election was only a detour, not a derailment, on the road to an enduring Republican majority.
But for now, Mr. Bush’s low job approval ratings and the resistance of a Democratic Congress will stymie many of the major initiatives he and Mr. Rove long dreamed of.
Choking up
Monday, standing next to Mr. Bush on the South Lawn of the White House at the formal announcement that he was resigning effective Aug. 31, Mr. Rove teared up.
He praised the man he helped elect governor of Texas and president of the United States, and he promised to be “your fierce and committed advocate on the outside.”
Indeed, Mr. Rove has told friends he intends to spend the years ahead writing books. As the president’s most indefatigable political adviser, it seems likely that he will become the most active interpreter of the Bush years.
But which Bush years? Mr. Rove and his wife, Darby, have built a house in Florida’s Panhandle. Many thought former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was the one who would follow his father to the White House, and for all the talk of Bush fatigue, America’s political memory is short.
In 2012, Jeb Bush will be 59 — prime time for a run at the presidency.
If Karl Rove is right, the machinery of Republican re-emergence is still very much in place, awaiting the right circumstances and the right candidate.
For now, with the political winds as unfavorable as they are, Mr. Rove says he’s retiring. But who can rule out the possibility that there, on the bright sands of the Republican Riviera, the Architect might regroup.
Senior political writer Wayne Slater is co-author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential” and “The Architect: Karl Rove and the Dream of Absolute Power.”
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