Rove's Final Retreat

By James Carney

It wasn't so long ago that Karl Rove was being hailed as perhaps the greatest political strategist in American history, "the architect," as President Bush dubbed him after election night in 2004, of three successive national election victories for the Republican Party. Even ideological foes admired Rove's seemingly unparalleled acumen. James Carville, another famous campaign strategist, wrote in this magazine that Rove's ability to win a second term for Bush was "the signature political achievement of my lifetime." In Rove's grand plan, it was just the beginning. What he had really created, Rove believed, was a governing strategy that would produce "a durable Republican majority" that would rival the dominance of the Democratic Party during the middle 50 years of the 20th century.

The historic realignment of American politics hasn't happened. And when Rove surprised all but the President, his family and a handful of close colleagues by announcing his resignation from the White House, sweeping accolades and gauzy visions were in scarce supply. Democrats, who have long viewed him with equal parts fear and loathing, heaped scorn on Rove upon hearing the news. (John Edwards' statement -- "Goodbye, good riddance" -- was the most succinct.) More telling was the reaction, or lack of it, from Republicans, who were mostly silent, content to be on summer recess. The party's presidential candidates largely avoided the subject. And the assessments of Rove's legacy by others have been mixed -- or unforgiving. "In politics, nobody was better," Richard Viguerie, one of the founding fathers of the modern conservative movement, says of Rove. "At policy, he was a disaster."

Viguerie is echoing a critique commonly heard in these gloomy days for the Republicans. With the President deeply unpopular, Republicans back in the minority on Capitol Hill and widespread hand-wringing that 2008 will usher a Democrat into the Oval Office, Rove's reputation has suffered along with his boss's approval ratings. The Iraq war, now well into its fifth year, has been an abysmal policy failure, causing some influential Republicans to defect from the cause and many others to consider doing so. The response to Hurricane Katrina created a damaging image of an incompetent and uncaring Administration. And the big domestic policies Rove was directly responsible for -- the expensive expansion of Medicare, the spectacular collapse of Bush's effort to reform Social Security through partial privatization and the vain pursuit of immigration reform -- have all created an uncomfortable climate for Republicans. Vulnerable incumbents are facing primary challenges, Republicans lag far behind Democrats in fund raising, and for the first time since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, the party is in retreat.

Rove, who was Bush's political guru and his most trusted domestic-policy adviser, is receiving a large portion of blame for the general state of his party's affairs. "Some historians will give him credit for his political shrewdness in getting Bush elected two times," says Robert Dallek, a prominent presidential historian. But because of his role in devising and implementing the Administration's policies, Rove "won't be spared the harsh judgments of the Bush presidency." He has not been responsible for all Bush's policy miseries -- Rove did not propose the invasion of Iraq, for example, or make the decision to send in too few troops to secure the country. But he did willingly exploit the political weapons that the war delivered by building campaigns around the theme that Democrats couldn't be trusted to protect America.

Even in his heyday, Rove was never as faultless a political mastermind as his reputation suggested. I remember sitting at a picnic table in Florida on the first Monday in November 2000 listening to Rove brashly predict that Bush would thump Al Gore with at least 320 electoral votes the next day. He was wrong, but he pulled off an unlikely win anyway. Not so in 2006, when Rove asserted to the end that Republicans would retain control of Congress. It was never clear -- and still isn't -- whether Rove was practicing extreme message discipline or simply deluding himself.

In perhaps the surest sign that Rove's power has ebbed, erstwhile allies are now calling into question his vaunted skills as a campaign strategist. Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader who resigned under an ethics cloud two years ago, faulted Rove for turning the 2006 elections into a referendum on Bush and the war -- to calamitous effect. And David Frum, a first-term Bush speechwriter, decried as shortsighted Rove's strategy of demonizing the opposition and playing to his party's conservative base to win elections. "Polarization," Frum opined disapprovingly in the New York Times, "is Karl Rove's specialty."

That polarization has left scattered land mines for the candidates who seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. As a top aide to one contender told me, "You have to solidify your base -- that's Republican Politics 101. But one thing we learned from 2006 is that we need moderates to create a majority. You can't alienate them." From Mitt Romney to Rudy Giuliani to John McCain, the Republican field is not lacking in candidates who have crossover appeal. But in order to capture their party's nomination, they will first need to survive a primary electorate that has become, through Rove's express efforts, even more socially conservative than in the past.

To the surprise of no one who knows him, Rove is not exactly chastened by all the criticism. When I spoke to him the day after his announcement, Rove said he was immensely proud of "participating in an Administration that had a bold and positive agenda for the future of the country." He went on to cite some of what he views as the Administration's high points, beginning with the war, the Bush doctrine, the Patriot Act and the Terrorist Surveillance Program -- all elements of Bush's record that remain controversial at best.

Rove expresses disappointment but accepts none of the blame for the fact that the President failed to make good on his promise to "change the tone" in Washington. Bush has tried to build bipartisan consensus, claims Rove, but "the animosity toward the President from Democrats has been so strong." Even the overwhelming evidence that America's image in the world has suffered during the Bush years does not faze Rove. "You're endowing polls with a false scientific precision that I don't buy!" he declares, as if he weren't a political professional who freely wields poll numbers when they're useful to his own argument.

And what of his goal of realigning the U.S. political landscape in favor of Republicans for a generation to come? According to Rove, last year's elections were a minor speed bump on a road that will still lead to that durable governing majority. He points out that the number of Republican losses in 2006 -- 30 seats in the House, six in the Senate -- was only a shade higher than the historical average for the party of a President in his sixth year in office. And it's also true that many of the races that delivered Democrats their majorities in the House and Senate were extremely close. Which is why, Rove says, he doesn't accept assertions that the U.S., after a 35-year pendulum swing to the political right, is now swinging left. Instead, he says, "I think the country is very much up for grabs."

But "very much up for grabs" is where the U.S. was in 2000, the year the closest presidential election in history was decided by the Supreme Court. Which means that Rove's description of today's electorate, however tilted in his party's favor, is also an oblique admission -- not of failure, exactly, but of a lack of forward progress. If America remains more or less evenly divided, the presidency that was supposed to produce a watershed change in U.S. politics has, in this view, made almost no change at all.

As verdicts go, that's the best Rove is likely to get for a while.