The genius of Karl Rove as a political operative cannot be denied. Neither can we ignore the ferocity of his offense when confronted by any threat to his beloved neo-conservative philosopy. Time and again, Rove has delivered, through his brilliance, deep understanding of political history and unerring attention to detail, great campaigns, that resulted in decisive victories for his right-leaning, bible-thumping and liberal-trashing GOP candidates.
The willingness of Rove to play the dirty tricks game was evident in the Republican primaries in 2000, when Rove, stunned by a 20+ point thrashing of his candidate, George W, by Arizona senator John McCain, initiated a direct mail campaign to smear McCain. South Carolinian evangelical christians received McCain's christmas card picture, showing his adoptive daughter from a Mother Theresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Rove claimed in the ad that the girl was McCain's illegitimate black daughter, conceived during sex with a black prostitute. Furthermore, it was claimed that McCain was a homosexual and that his wife, Cindy, was a drug-addict, and that McCain had committed treason while a POW in the infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' prison in Vietnam. (New Yorker, 5/12/03)
That Karl Rove hasn’t always abided by the Marquess of Queensbury rules of political engagement is not exactly breaking news. Rove, after all, works in the tradition of the late Lee Atwater, the Republican attack-dog/consultant who said of Michael Dukakis that he would "strip the bark off the little bastard" and "make Willie Horton his running mate," a reference to the former Massachusetts governor’s ineffective answer to a question about a convicted murderer and rapist during the 1988 presidential debate.
Rove’s first foray into politics involved gaining entry to the office of Alan Dixon–a candidate for state treasurer in Illinois in 1970–stealing some campaign stationery and printing and distributing a fake invitation to Dixon’s campaign headquarters, promising "free beer, free food, girls, and a good time." "I was nineteen and I got involved in a political prank," Rove told the Dallas Morning News in 1999. A year later, Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for the presidency of the national College Republicans, and working together they defeated Terry Dolan, the Republican operative who later founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee that helped elect Ronald Reagan.
When, in the wake of the Watergate break-in, Rove was accused of teaching dirty tricks to college Republicans, he attributed the accusations to rumors started by Dolan. After the FBI interviewed Rove, the Republican National Committee–then chaired by Bush the Elder–looked into the charges, decided they were baseless, and offered Rove work. Rove later joined Bush and Baker to work on the PAC that Bush set up to position himself for the 1980 presidential campaign, which he lost to Ronald Reagan.
Just as the 1986 Texas gubernatorial race was becoming very close between Democrat Mark White and Republican Bill Clements (Rove's client), on the day before a pivotal debate between the two men, a bugging device was found in Rove's office. Despite general speculation that Rove planted the bug himself, Rove achieved his goal of distraction from the debate and key issues confronting the state of Texas that voters should have been concerned about.
In the 1994 Texas gubernatorial race, Rove knew George W. Bush could never defeat Ann Richards by openly attacking her. So he helped launch a whisper campaign against her, capitalizing on the fact that Richards had named "avowed and activist homosexuals" to high state offices. From there it was easy for Rove to morph this fact into spreading rumors that Richards herself was a lesbian. When Richards responded angrily to these rumors, Bush then claimed that Richards was attacking him.Rove’s was also involved in some other shenanigans, such as the 1994 defeat of Georgia senator Max Cleland, a veteran who left two legs and an arm in Vietnam. A $14 million campaign against Cleland included TV ads that placed him next to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden based on his votes in Congress. “It was just character assassination,” his campaign manager says; “I don’t know how they can sleep at night.”
Finally, in the 2004 presidential election, Democratic candidate John Kerry suddenly found his military service in Vietnam under attack by a group ironically calling themselves "Swift Boat Veterns for Truth." These attacks began in August, only a short time following the release of the Senate Iraq Intelligence Report (July 9), the release of the 9/11 Commission's Report (July 22) and, finally, the Democratic convention (July 26-29), in which Kerry's acceptance speech strongly emphasized his personal background and military service. None of these things, obviously, favored George W. Bush. But within one month, suddenly American political discourse was dominated with the 35-year-old issues of whether Kerry suffered self-inflicted war injuries or how "superficial" they were, instead of the far more serious issues that would face voters in November.
But what drives Karl Rove to his tactics? We know the following about him: Rove operates from deeply held conservative beliefs, shaped when he was a child growing up in Utah. His sister told Miriam Rozen of the Dallas Observer that as a child Rove had a Wake Up America poster hanging above his bed. Rove has said that while going to college, he was never inclined to identify with the antiwar movement and supported the troops because "it was hard to sympathize with all those Commies." The "die-hard Nixonite" remains deeply resentful of the legacy of the counterculture of the sixties.
Visitors to his Austin office would often leave with a copy of The Dream and the Nightmare by Myron Magnet, a Manhattan Institute fellow who argues that the political and cultural left corrupted the nation’s poor and deprived them of the work ethic they now need to lift themselves out of poverty. Rove is an eclectic and voracious reader and, although he never completed college, a self-taught historian.
I attribute Rove's use of dirty tricks to a deep, driving desire to win at any cost, inculcated in him by political mentors, including Atwater over his years in East Texas politics. Bare knuckle brawlers can be admired for their courage, but never for punching below the belt.
If your yardstick of measure for Rove is success as a political operative, he is the zen master of American politics. If it is acumen and statesmanship as a top advisor to the President, then he is nothing but a master of dirty tricks.
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