What is clear is that he couldn’t have been more delighted that she died her splashy death. Or that the Super Bowl was all the rage just before that. Or that big snow storms hit just after. Or that Anna Nicole’s body has returned to making headlines in death, just as it did in life.

Anything – anything! – to divert attention from his personal train wreck is just fine with Karl. It is crucial for him that you not be paying attention to the disaster he has created in Iraq and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue generally. Hence all the recent drum beating on Iran, as well.

Unfortunately for Karl – but luckily for the rest of the planet – it ain’t working. And, the more you know of Rove and his ambitions, the more you realize just how much it ain’t working. This guy had really, really big plans. Like his 19th-century hero, Mark Hanna, he was going to build a Republican majority that would last a generation. He has instead brought the party to ruin, quite possibly destroying it forever.

But Rove was always way overrated, anyhow. And that is true, even taken on his own cynical terms. It is, of course, especially true if one considers such hopelessly idealistic factors like providing for the welfare of the country, improving the quality of our political discourse, or maintaining the semblance of truth that is necessary to sustain democracy. But even if we forget all that good stuff and adopt Rove’s own scorched earth approach to politics, where winning is everything and any means to that end is fair game, he is still a disaster. Only worse – he is a scorched earth disaster.

Bush now has job approval ratings in the low thirties and falling – on a good day. He singlehandedly delivered both houses of Congress to the opposition party in 2006. Serious academic historians are already describing him as the worst president in American history, with a fourth of his presidency still to go. And the chances that he will be impeached rise with each week. Quite an impressive record, eh?

But the single best evidence of Rove’s failure is, ironically, the election he (supposedly) won in 2004. This election was most remarkable for what didn’t happen, namely that Bush didn’t win in a landslide. Here was a guy who had been at ninety percent approval ratings three years earlier. Here was a guy who managed to fool the country into thinking he was some kind of hero before and after 9/11. Here was a war president – with all the rally-round-the-flag benefits associated with that status – also presiding over a decent enough economy. Here was an incumbent who could bring Air Force One to your town, and could make nationally televised speeches – before Congress, in massive churches, on the deck of aircraft carriers. Here was a candidate running against an opponent so embarrassingly lame he couldn’t find a punch to throw if it had been given to him gift-wrapped, and who couldn’t decide what he stood for and so tried to stand for everything all at once.

If that isn’t a recipe for a blow-out, I don’t know what is. And yet Rove only barely managed to push Bush across the finish line in a nail-biter. And even that only if we ignore the compelling evidence that Ohio was stolen. The true measure of Rove’s failure is that he should have presided over the very landslide he had long envisioned, perhaps even complete with the generation-long realignment of American politics he craved. Instead, he had to send out the Swift Boaters and all the other dirty tricks from his famous repertoire of black bag operations in order just to barely hang on to a twice-stolen White House. And you know they had Scalia on deck, too, ready to perform his little magic trick again, if necessary.

The story is told that shortly after the Selection of 2000 Rove’s analysis of the voting patterns convinced him that BushCo needed to govern from the far right in order to win reelection. His data showed him that the center had evaporated from the American political landscape, and that from this point forward the winning party would be the one that most successfully mobilized its base, rather than the one that could best appeal to the uncommitted middle. But while there may have been some shred of truth to that in January of 2001 (and even then there were better alternatives), it was certainly not the case by December of that year (regardless of who was responsible for 9/11).

Apart from the fact that he did manage to sell a near complete moron to 50 million American voters in 2000, Rove’s reputation as a master strategist has been a joke, advanced by the fawning fearful in the mainstream media. This president – Rove’s racehorse – could perhaps have even been considered by many to be one of the historical greats (gulp) if he had tacked toward the center, uniting the country and the world, and taking off from the lofty launching pad that widespread sympathy abroad and unified public support at home provided in the wake of 9/11. Had they pursued a centrist agenda, had they not excluded and demonized their opponents while questioning their patriotism, had they foregone their breathtaking arrogance, and had they genuinely and competently pursued national security at home and abroad, Bush and the GOP would have been unbeatable in 2004 and 2006, and Rove might have had his realignment for the history books.

But there were two reasons that didn’t occur. One is Iraq, where in a sense it is inaccurate to say that Bush is now doubling down with his escalation, but only because he had doubled-down once already, making the escalation a quadrupling of his wager. The very invasion itself was the original all-or-nothing bet of the entire Bush presidency, and not necessarily a bad one, really, from the ultra-cynical Rovian perspective. Had the war actually ended when Bush stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring “mission accomplished”, Rove might have achieved what he set out to do.

My guess is that each of the principals in the administration brought to the table their own reason for wanting to invade Iraq. For Bush it was to do something better than Daddy for once in his life. For Cheney, oil and contractor bonanzas. For Wolfowitz and Perle, defeating an enemy of Israel. And for Rumsfeld, proving his theory about the application of 21st century military power. For Rove, though, it was to enhance and consolidate the president’s power – allowing Bush to jam his domestic agenda down the throats of the American people, via a compliant and very Republican Congress – and solidifying the foundation for his restructuring project.

Bush and Rove believed they had learned from history that a quick little rout of some punk country somewhere Americans couldn’t find on a map (which is to say, just about all of them) was a damn good elixir for a presidency. According to Mickey Herskowitz, who interviewed Bush and crew extensively in 1999, the gang was amazed at the domestic political benefits that had accrued to Margaret Thatcher from winning the Falklands War, and believed, conversely, that Jimmy Carter’s problem was that he didn’t do the same. In Russ Baker’s stunningly revelatory article on candidate Bush, Herskowitz quotes him as saying “One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander in chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.”

The great irony, and one of the enduring historical puzzles of our time, is that it might well have worked, had they done the thing right. What makes the sheer absurdity of their Keystone Kops-quality efforts in Iraq so mysterious is that so much was at stake for them, as we’ve now seen. It was an all-in bet. You either win the whole jackpot and rule the world, or you go home in just your underwear (if you’re lucky) or perhaps an orange jumpsuit (if you’re not). Imagine if you were sitting at that table. Would you somehow pass on drawing a crucial card to which you were entitled? Would you casually neglect to protect against tipping your hand to your opponent, with so much at stake? Of course not. So why did BushCo screw it up so badly?

The answer to that question brings us to the second reason for the failure of the administration, and of the movement it spearheaded: They don’t care about good governance. In fact, they don’t even care about it enough to practice it sufficiently to feed their true lust. Like, say, Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s sometime guru and sometime nemesis, Rove may ultimately prove to be rather more nonideological than not, in the same way (“Power! I must have more power!”) that he is profoundly amoral. Cheney, of course, certainly is not nonideological, though he is definitely as amoral as it gets this side of Dachau. But the whole lot of them represent utter throwbacks to the nineteenth century (on a good day, more like the twelfth most of the time), when the game of politics in America was far more about capturing government spoils for pillaging by your team’s special interests than it was about governance in the public interest.

It seems likely in retrospect that the real reason everything they touch fails – Katrina, global warming, North Korea, deficits and more, no less than Iraq – is because they never came to Washington to make any of it succeed. The fact that Bush is the very antithesis of a policy wonk is only partly explained by the same set of characteristics that account for him literally not reading books or newspapers. It’s not just that he famously lacks intellectual curiosity. It’s also that he just doesn’t give a damn about your boring little bourgeois problems, dude. You know, like having a job, educating your kids or accessing quality health care. And why should he? He and his people are taken care of, thank you very much. In this sense, David Kuo’s outing of the administration’s treatment of even its religious conservative allies was paradigmatic. The attitude has been, essentially: “We’ll pretend to care about your pathetic obsessions with embryos and queers and all things sexual just long enough for you freaks and your shock troops to deliver us power at the ballot box. Then we’ll throw the occasional Supreme Court justice your way, but otherwise, shut up already, wouldya? Why don’t you guys go off in the corner and pray or something?”

Apply that same governmental nonchalance mentality to Iraq, and what you get are a bunch of very bad decisions made by a bunch of completely unqualified cronies sent there to advance Bush family loyalty and Cheney style kleptocracy, rather than competent governance on behalf of the Iraqi people. But who cares? If you don’t give a damn about the American middle class, you sure as hell don’t care about a bunch of miserable Arabs, right?

Right. Except that Colin Powell actually got one thing correct in his life when he told Bush, “You break it, you own it”. And so, in one of the great cosmic comeuppances of all time, the same predatory indifference with which BushCo has been skewering all of us for six years came back to bite them, hard. In fact, hard enough to destroy this political disease masquerading as a presidency, as well as the horse it rode in on.

Bush is over. The only remaining accomplishment possibly within his and Cheney’s grasp would be the miraculous completion of their term. Meanwhile, both the movement of the regressive right and the Republican Party itself might be over, as well, especially if the Jim Webb wing (stones) can wrest the Democratic Party from the Harry Reid wing (sans stones), and start calling things for what they are in this country. It’s the thirteenth round now, and bloodied Democrats have mostly forgotten how to slug their opponent, not having employed that particular technology for about twenty-five years. Republicans, meanwhile, drunk silly on their own hubris, teeter senselessly about the ring, waiting for a mere exhalation from the other guy to knock them over and out.

Americans know they hate Iraq. They know they hate national debt. They’re pissed off about Katrina and global warming. Their children’s schools suck, their healthcare security is crumbling and their income streams feel precarious. And there’s a lot more where all that came from. All that’s missing now is for the Democratic Party having the courage to weave all of this together into an integrated narrative frame. On the day that happens, this sick monster that has haunted America and the world for a quarter-century will crawl back under the rock from which it came. On the day you hear Democrats talking about the failure of conservatism as an ideology – in the same fashion that Republicans have so successfully wrongly articulated a general failure of liberalism – on that day this nightmare will be over.

The only thing saving regressive conservatism today is the knock-kneed weakness of the alleged opposition party. And even that seemingly intractable pattern of political cowardice now appears to be thawing, as a disgusted public leads its Democratic (and, increasingly, Republican) ‘leaders’ in a serious course correction – a wee bit of national behavior modification, you might say – to the point where even the New York Times is now getting it and running op-eds pondering whether America is turning left. Progressives just need to regain the courage of the correct convictions, and start verbalizing those straightforward notions in ways that they (or at least Democrats) have not since Ronald Reagan rode into town selling his feel-good tonic of one part voodoo economics (“Hey, free money!”) and one part Hollywood jingoism (“Hey, kick ass!”). It fairly boggles the mind that such a patently bogus ideology could be so successful for so long, based more or less exclusively upon Madison Avenue magic. But then I guess if P.T. Barnum could keep the gawkers moving by painting "This Way To The Egress!" over the exit door, the ability to sell political snake-oil by employing a combination of primal fear, Oscar-caliber stagecraft, and sophisticated computer and communications technology shouldn’t be so surprising.

In any case, the regressive cancer which has been too long ripping apart this country and the world is today just one good framing away from the ash bin of history. If we could just move the genteel and ineffectual Harry Reids of this world gently aside, we could stick a fork in this beast once and for all. I think the public is already there, in pieces (Iraq, debt, Katrina, global warming, etc.). What is lacking now is the unifying narrative to weave together those pieces into the general discourse of a failed ideology.

Meanwhile, boy, that Karl Rove sure is a genius, isn’t he? What else but genius does it require to take a president from ninety percent to thirty percent job approval ratings? Who else but a genius could make a country loved worldwide in 2002 into a country hated by 2003? What else but genius is needed to unravel a political party that has been around for a century and a half, the party of Abraham Lincoln, a party which controlled both houses of Congress and has historically won better than 60 percent of the presidential elections it contested, including seven out of the last ten?

How ‘bout that, eh? This guy’s a one man weapon of mass destruction! If only Bush had sent Rove to Iraq as a political advisor, instead of deploying 150,000 American troops, Saddam’s regime might have been destroyed without any loss of life.

Instead, after six years of disastrous policy, after six years of arrogant determination to do everything different than the hated Clinton administration no matter how absurd (like the Contraries in “Little Big Man”, who bathe with dirt, dry themselves off with water, and ride their horses facing backwards) – after all that, there’s Bush and his minions now desperately trying – on Palestine/Israel, on North Korea and, truth be told, on Iraq – to scramble back to where Clinton left off in 2001. Good one, guys! Nice try at that whole shuttle diplomacy thing, Condi.

Those issues were hard enough to resolve back then. Add in six years of Bush administration neglect (in the best case scenarios) or foolish meddling (in the worst), and they’ve become hopelessly intractable now.

It’s worth remembering that when the Bushistas came to town – false arrogance borne of personal insecurity oozing from their every pore – they literally told the press that everyone could now relax because “the grownups were back in charge”.

How ‘bout them apples?

Yeah, sure, technically these are grownups – but then so was Anna Nicole Smith.

If these are grownups, I’m ready to take my chances on a bright teenager or two.

And if these are geniuses, I’m the Queen of England.

(Hint: I’m not the Queen.)

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Discuss This Article

click here...

###