The President’s Brain is Missing
Karl Rove, who announced his resignation last week as President George Bush’s political and domestic policy consigliere, was always a man on a mission: he wanted to be the man who engineered a Republican realignment of American politics.
By their very nature, genuine realignments - the process by which political parties win and maintain a dominant majority of voters over several decades - are rare in the US. The classic example is that of 1932-36, when the combination of the Great Depression and Franklin D Roosevelt dispatched the previously ascendant laissez-faire Republicans to the political hinterlands and established a period of Democratic dominance that lasted until 1968, when the New Deal coalition was sundered by issues of race, the Vietnam War, and cultural upheaval.
When Republicans think realignment, though, they hark back to 1896 when, confronted by the populist challenge of Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the Republicans assembled a coalition of nouveau riche industrialists and North-eastern and mid-Western Protestant workers and farmers that was to keep them in power until the Depression.
As early as the beginning stages of Bush’s first run for the White House in 1999, Rove had realignment on the brain, and saw himself as Hanna’s second coming. He was, in fact, the fourth prominent right-wing Republican who saw realignment lurking just around the corner. The first, William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard warned Republicans against cutting any deal with President Clinton that would set up national healthcare, for to do so would cement voters ties to government and the Democrats, as had happened in the 1930s.
Kristol’s analysis served as a springboard for the theories, if they may be called such, of the Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the conservative activist Grover Norquist, who has been convening weekly meetings of right-wing lobbyists and leaders in Washington for the past 15 years. From the mid-Nineties, Gingrich and Norquist argued that the passage of the United States to an information-age superpower, from a nation of employees to a nation of entrepreneurs, meant that the market would supplant the government as the source of Americans’ security, and that if the Republicans championed that cause - privatising social security and Medicare, for instance - they would bring about a realignment as fundamental, and as rooted in economic realities, as Hanna’s or FDR’s.
These were the ideas that fired the imaginations of Bush and Rove. Privatising social security was a theme on which Bush campaigned unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress a quarter-century ago - a campaign on which Rove, then a young Republican operative, offered his advice. By the time Bush reached the White House, rolling back the New Deal was at the centre of their mental tapestry. The Republican Party had taken a quantum leap rightward during the 1990s, a period when the Democrats held the White House and when, for the first time, the Republican’s congressional leaders all came from anti-statist South.
The goals of Rove the realigner and Rove the campaign strategist didn’t always mesh, however, although the campaign strategist had to succeed for there to be any prospect of realignment.
As a campaign strategist, Rove embraced the idea, shortly after Bush’s 2000 victory, that America had an all-but-unbridgeable partisan rift, and that he would try to win votes at election time and in Congress by building support among right-wing Republicans and eking out 51 per cent victories. The 9/11 attacks created the possibility that Bush could govern with a broad, bipartisan coalition. But instead, Bush, Rove and Vice-President Dick Cheney concluded that they could wage an aggressive foreign policy and depict Democrats as dissidents whose loyalty to their country was questionable. They began by forcing a congressional vote on authorising war in Iraq shortly before the 2002 election. This line of attack, which informed countless campaigns the Republicans waged against Democratic members of the House and Senate, poisoned national politics, and helped the Republicans win narrow victories in 2002 and 2004.
So, too, did the politicisation of the government bureaucracy. Since the Democrats retook Congress in 2006 and began investigating the Bush administration, they have turned up numerous instances of the subordination of governmental agencies to narrow political ends. The Senate Judiciary Committee has been trying to compel Rove’s testimony in the matter of nine discharged federal prosecutors, whose sin seems to have been their unwillingness to file spurious voter fraud cases that the administration hoped would lead the curtailment of various Democratic voter registration campaigns, particularly in minority communities. The paper and email trail in the case leads to Rove, but he has thus far avoided testifying.
After Bush’s 2004 re-election, Rove’s formal portfolio grew from politics to all domestic policy. Bush and he had two great priorities for their second term: privatising social security and reforming immigration law to enable undocumented immigrants, chiefly from Mexico and Central America, to attain legal status. The imperative for these changes were purely political; there was no popular clamour for either.
Yet, both were essential if realignment were to be achieved from on high. The former would end Americans’ reliance on a successful government programme; the latter would endear Republicans to Hispanics, the fastest-growing part of the body politic. Both were exquisitely mistimed. Bush and Rove did not realise that the economic changes they had celebrated actually produced widespread insecurity among the American people.
The realisation of the neo-liberal vision - the outsourcing of jobs, the end of stable employment relationships, the abandonment by employers of healthcare coverage and pensions for their workers, the prolonged stagnation of wages - made this the worst possible time to dismantle the government’s retirement programme. The openness of the US economy to the downsides of globalisation helped engender a nativism, particularly in Republican ranks, that made this a terrible time to reform immigration as well.
Both initiatives were stillborn. And such abject failures in domestic policy, when compounded by such other débâcles as the government’s failure to deal with Hurricane Katrina and the war of the president’s choosing in Iraq, led to a decisive Democratic victory in 2006. Americans who call themselves Democrats now exceed those who call themselves Republicans by roughly 15 per cent; young people are rejecting Rove’s party by huge margins; and Republican prospects in the 2008 elections look dire.
So Rove will not be remembered as the man who brought a Republican realignment. The only question is whether he will have hastened a Democratic one.
Harold Meyerson is executive editor of ‘The American Prospect’ and a columnist on ‘The Washington Post’
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited
Rove has only relinquised officialdom to dodge the focus of congress. He’s still operating behind the scenes but he is not the only on that makes up “Bush’s brain.” A truly evil junta lurks behind the curtain.
The photos of smirking Bu$h and sniggering Rove together gives you the creeps….
Maybe a combination of repressed latent homosexuality and the abominable secrets untold makes for a sick duo….
Unfortunately, America will pay an horrendous multi-faceted price for generations to come….
“Rove is getting out of Dodge City just as the Posse is riding in” - Bill Moyers
Never forget the damage the republicans did. Never, ever forget.
Karl Rove’s departure will now allow him to conduct his destructive abominations behind the scenes, but with less scrutiny & vulnerability. The extent of his unconscionable deeds are unprecedented. They include election fraud, character assassination (even against triple amputee Vietnam vets), and the list goes on. His dreadful antics have enabled the most inept and deceptive administration to wrought more destruction to this nation, and the world, than any previous American administration.
Americans have been grossly negligent for tolerating these dreadful outrages. If we fail to force our legislators into pursuing charges against this ruthles character and his boss, now, we will have rewarded him and this administration for their destructive perversions–this can only lead to more of the same.
“Americans have been grossly negligent for tolerating these dreadful outrages. If we fail to force our legislators into pursuing charges against this ruthles character and his boss, now, we will have rewarded him and this administration for their destructive perversions–this can only lead to more of the same.”
Robert…Face it as I have had to: “We The People” are DEAD!
We sit on our asses writing this intellectual-sounding drivel (As I now do–and you did before me) when we should be rioting in the streets of D.C.
So what if we did all head for the hub of political hubris called Washington, yelling and screaming for justice? Well, we would be gassed, shot at, and arrested by people (like us) who have been programmed to “do their jobs”; therefore, the revolution ain’t happening–peacefully or otherwise until that same “We The People” truly unite en mass. And when will that happen? NEVER!
I thought this was about Bush. Let’s try to forget about Rove and focus on the problem at hand:
THE PRESIDENT’S BRAIN IS MISSING!
“The President’s Brain is Missing”
Yes, we understand it went home to spend more time with its family.
For me an important side of this story is HOW THE PRESIDENT’s BRAIN GOT SO TWISTED! Rove is an example of the abusive culture the Republican Party has created to condition its young foot soldiers in the College Republicans and the staffs of Capitol Hill to employ any and every dirty trick in order to win. There is now a pantheon of such disgraced College Republicans, Rove is just the worst example. For more, see my article, “The Pride and Prejudice of Karl Rove.”
Rove may have been a political brain, but he was not a good policy maker. There may be others who are more effective at that, but either they do not care about America nor its people, or they are giving good advice and are ignored.
I always believed that before every speech or public appearance Rove slapped a mirror on the table, busted out a razor blade, and gave the former Ivy-League Coke dealer a good rail or two and sent him on his way. Think about it. That would explain the illusions of grandeur and the plain fact that Bush was a moron when he entered office but could currently be a stunt double for Forrest Gump. There is no question in mind the man has lost whatever mental faculties he had left while in office the last six years. That kind of cognitive decline can’t be explained by the aging process alone.
Er, a few corrections: Rove and his small cult weren’t interested in any sort of “realignment” based on the strength and proven track record of their “American” ideas. They want a “one-party America,” AKA, a dictatorship, and not one based on ideas, but one where the public is bamboozled by the “idea” of ideas while our Treasury and wallets are looted from every and any angle imaginable. Everything else - their bullsh*t security propaganda, their “ownership society,” the threat to civilization from gay marriage, the illegal leprosy-spreading immigrants, the liberal climate change hoax - is nothing more than PR cover for their true agenda: more and more in the hands of fewer and fewer.
The American people have not been very “street smart” in dealing with this herd of swine. But then, Mr. Settgast, I might point out that this is absolutely without precedent—- The American people have never seen anything like it before. They have been absolutely blindsided. This has all been done within three election cycles, two of which were stolen. I ask you, does one immediately resort to armed rebellion, or instant reaction to a bully?
Did you take up arms against them? I don’t claim to predict when or how they will react, but I predict that they will. I certainly hope it is in the next election cycle, by tossing out both the rotten bastards who are working steadily to eliminate the middle class, and to toss out the rotten bastards who are enabling them.
Short of insurrection, and placing ones self on the “domestic terrorist” list, with all that entails, that looks to be the best solution. This supposes that there will be another election. If there is not, then it is time for the uprising , but to blame the victims “Americans have been totally negligent for tolerating these dreadful outrages” seems to me to be just that, blaming the victims.
The game is not over unless the elections are called off.
Direct quote from the just published REAGAN DIARIES.
The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
‘A moment I’ve been dreading. George brought his ne’re-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I’ll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they’ll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work.’
No offense to any of the well-meaning contributors here but anyone who thinks subversion of democracy at home or abroad is anything new is not a very keen student of history…the whole idea that America was fine until Reagan’s senile ass got elected is BS.
And these New Deal liberals who think FDR was be all and end all of liberalism in America wake up would you please? FDR wasn’t fighting unregulated capitalism he was fight uncontrollable radicalism. He wasn’t rectifying the system…he was saving private power from certain obliteration.
I thought when he had his colonoscopy they were looking for his brain.
So Rove’s head is thrown to the masses, and we now continue on with business as usual, vote democrat, don’t split the “left”, etc, hup ho and so forth.
I’m with thenihilist on this one. It’s all much ado about nothing. And nothing is what we’ll get until we kick the “democrats” in their worthless asses. My god, they don’t even defend honest dissent within their own ranks anymore. At least in Roosevelt’s day, the boojwahzee knew they had to cough something up if they were’nt going to lose everything. The “democratic” party ideology now does nothing to contribute to a fighting comeback of democratic practice and ideology, it does nothing but create demons “Reagan”, “Bush”, “Rove” to frighten people into acquiesence with their do-nothing bullshit.
broken robot August 19th, 2007 10:29 pm
Direct quote from the just published REAGAN DIARIES.
The entry is dated May 17, 1986.
UNBELIEVABLE….. I bet that little tit-bit of valuable insight will ever make it to the MSM….
If average Americans really knew the true extent of Bu$h’s nit wit past they would be fuc@##$$#@ rioting………………..
Rove, Bush, Clinton, Obama, rich appointed candidates all with the same agenda. Hopefully these current criminals will suspend the ‘08 election and prompt Americans to do the only thing that can save the country. Full tilt, all out revolt.
The names will change but the policies will remain. The busllshit we have accepted for the last few decades has grown incermentally worse. At this point our “leaders” don;t even attempt to hide the injustice. Ge very goddamned suree that whoever they say wins the next election will offer more of the same and less life, liverty and pursuit of happiness to the masses.
We should either have a good ol’ fashioned revolution, or stage a financial refusal to support billionaires.
I like to think of it as voluntary simplicity. Stop spending your money with the mega corporations. Stop working for them. Stop paying interest. Stop buying insurance. Stop giving them ways to manipulate money without producing tangible results. Sell your stocks and bonds. Withdrawl your bank accounts. Buy local, buy only necessities. Cut em off in the bank book.
The system is rigged by big money. It is run with our money. It is snowballing. Every tax dollar and every purchase made only contributes to our oppression, suppression and consent to murder…
The debate isn’t about which elite criminal will be next, or who has gone home to live a life of luxury or deciet, it’s about what now…
we should remember george bush, karl rove, dick cheney and donald rumsfeld for a long time.
…and vote democrat.
citizen: Lacking any of their own merit, what would the Democrats do without the Republicans?
I agree with others here — there’s something deeper to worry about. Namely, we’ve got an inherrently broken system, and the Democrats have allowed it to become personified. They didn’t go after Ken Lay because he “died”. They didn’t over after Reagan because he was untouchable. They didn’t go after King George I for lying about being “out of the loop” because he was untouchable. They put impeachment “off the table” on Bush & Co. Why is Gonzo still in office? Etc…etc…
I’d call them a potted plant opposition, except that it makes more sense just to call them potted plants.
People in the advertising profession say that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising. We should probably be thankful, therefore, that Karl Rove was such a good advertiser. His competence in this area ensures that many bad products will die: the neo-con movement, the Religious Right, conservatism, and privatizing social security, to name a few. Thank you, Karl!
This is so 1992… the Texas Governor’s brain was missing then…
but hey thanks for the great journalistic work, now I have some TP!!
It always strikes me as weird to see. in otherwise accurate and perceptive articles, references to the Republican “victories” in 2000 and 2004. In my book thefts are not victories.
Maybe Republican “victories” in 2000 and 2004 could be translated into victorious grand larceny…
marctileston,
“voluntary simplicity” I like it. I’m in. Just found out my satellite TV company is owned by Rupert Murdoch. I’ll be cancelling that this week.
The President’s Brain Is Missing. Yeah, we all knew that___ and now Rove is gone too.
Broken Robot
It’s a great shame, but the quote from the Reagan Diaries is a hoax, written by the said Kinsley a few months ago and now whizzing round the web as these things do
secretarybird
Never mind. I checked on this and you are correct. The quote is hereby retracted with my apologies. -br