unusualmusic_lj_archive

Karl Rove in a Corner

The mythologizing portrayals of a "boy genius" that characterized so much media coverage of Rove after 2000, and especially after the Republicans' triumphant sweep in the midterm elections, struck me as sorely out of date when I began this project. The Bush Administration was suffering through the worst of the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the President's approval ratings were plummeting. Clearly, there are many differences between the circumstances in which Rove has been victorious in the past and those he faces now. But that is no reason to discount his record. By any standard he is an extremely talented political strategist whose skill at understanding how to run campaigns and motivate voters would be impressive even if he used no extreme tactics. But he does use them. Anyone who takes an honest look at his history will come away awed by Rove's power, when challenged, to draw on an animal ferocity that far exceeds the chest-thumping bravado common to professional political operatives. Having studied what happens when Karl Rove is cornered, I came away with two overriding impressions. One was a new appreciation for his mastery of campaigning. The other was astonishment at the degree to which, despite all that's been written about him, Rove's fiercest tendencies have been elided in national media coverage

...

It is frequently said of him, in hushed tones when political folks are doing the talking, that he leaves a trail of damage in his wake—a reference to the substantial number of people who have been hurt, politically and personally, through their encounters with him. Rove's reputation for winning is eclipsed only by his reputation for ruthlessness, and examples abound of his apparent willingness to cross moral and ethical lines.

...

A typical instance occurred in the hard-fought 1996 race for a seat on the Alabama Supreme Court between Rove's client, Harold See, then a University of Alabama law professor, and the Democratic incumbent, Kenneth Ingram. According to someone who worked for him, Rove, dissatisfied with the campaign's progress, had flyers printed up—absent any trace of who was behind them—viciously attacking See and his family. "We were trying to craft a message to reach some of the blue-collar, lower-middle-class people," the staffer says. "You'd roll it up, put a rubber band around it, and paperboy it at houses late at night. I was told, 'Do not hand it to anybody, do not tell anybody who you're with, and if you can, borrow a car that doesn't have your tags.' So I borrowed a buddy's car [and drove] down the middle of the street … I had Hefty bags stuffed full of these rolled-up pamphlets, and I'd cruise the designated neighborhoods, throwing these things out with both hands and literally driving with my knees." The ploy left Rove's opponent at a loss. Ingram's staff realized that it would be fruitless to try to persuade the public that the See campaign was attacking its own candidate in order "to create a backlash against the Democrat," as Joe Perkins, who worked for Ingram, put it to me. Presumably the public would believe that Democrats were spreading terrible rumors about See and his family. "They just beat you down to your knees," Ingram said of being on the receiving end of Rove's attacks. See won the race.

...

If this year stays true to past form, the campaign will get nastier in the closing weeks, and without anyone's quite registering it, Rove will be right back in his element. He seems to understand—indeed, to count on—the media's unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness, or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove's skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media's unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

More

Karl Rove- The Architect

...

In August of 1973, a tape called the "dirty tricks" tape is leaked to The Washington Post, and it shows the backroom maneuverings of the president of the College Republicans, Karl Rove. Tell me about that tape.

Incidentally, he's never graduated from college, but [Karl] ran as a college student for the president of the College Republicans. It was not simply an adjunct group. It was really a group that was associated directly with and had an office and a desk inside of the Republican National Committee. So it was a big deal.

He was Southern coordinator at the time, [and] the campaign manager in the South was one Lee Atwater, [later a political consultant to Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush]. So the two of them would hop in a car and would travel around the South and elsewhere appealing to young collegians who were Republicans for this campaign to be the head of the College Republican group. During the course at this time, Rove and Atwater and others would periodically appear at seminars where they would teach politics to young College Republicans, people who were interested in those days in getting involved in politics.

Karl, during these seminars, began to talk about some of the dirty tricks and interesting things that he would do, as a College Republican. At one point he talked about going into the headquarters of a prominent Democrat running for state office in Illinois, stealing the stationery, dummying up a fake invitation for the grand opening of the Democrats' political office in Chicago, and then distributing that to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people: soup kitchens, hippie communes and others. The invitation invited people to come for free girls, free beer, free food, free everything. This account got a big laugh among these students who were watching. He also talked about other things -- going through the garbage of the opponent to try to find memos and so forth.

Then this thing came to light, and the reason it came to light was because there was a fight within the College Republicans over one group against another. The tape of one of these seminars, was leaked and given to The Washington Post and subsequently published. Now, normally this might not be a big event, but understand that it came at the heels of Watergate. And what you had was a young group of Republicans officially associated with the National Republican Party, following Watergate, talking about dirty tricks, and so it became a very sensitive issue for the Republican Party.

Ultimately George Herbert Walker Bush, who was the head of the Republican Party at the time, took the whole matter under advisement. Were these dirty tricks good or bad? Was this something that should nullify Karl Rove's candidacy? Was this something that these College Republicans should not have been doing, especially in the shadow of Watergate? He took about a month or two to evaluate the situation, and he ultimately decided that Karl Rove had done nothing wrong. Then he proceeded to hire him as an aide at the National Republican Party. And it was really there that Karl Rove and father Bush, Bush 41, got to know each other and work with each other. And the entire Bush legacy, which would lead ultimately to the election of the son, began.

So the tape itself, how did it define [for] Karl Rove what was acceptable in politics?

The key thing to understand about the tape, and about these presentations that Rove and Atwater were doing before these College Republicans, was that they were talking about politics, even at that very early stage, in a very dark way. They were talking about attacking. They were talking about ways to undercut your opponent in not too nice a form.

What they really show is the beginning of a long pattern of behavior by Karl Rove. In every campaign after that, what you see with Rove is the same kind of thing: You see some series of events that attack an opponent, really not simply on the merits of issues, but in some dirty trick way. This was an opening. This was the first salvo. This was the beginning of the Rove approach. "The mark of Rove" is what some people call it. When Rove gets involved in a campaign, the opponent is going to get smeared in a bad way, and most likely, Rove's candidate will win.

...

Why does Karl Rove see Texas Supreme Court races as winnable, important, and as a good place to start?
Karl Rove saw by the end of the 1980s that the demographics favored the Republicans, but that they weren't there yet. He saw that Republicans were increasingly voting in Texas for candidates in a state that traditionally, especially since the Roosevelt years, had been solidly Democratic. And he saw that a good place to begin building the infrastructure of the Republican Party was Supreme Court races, in part because they largely run under radar and in part because the constituency that's most important to Texas, to Supreme Court judges who handle civil cases -- suits against businesses, businesses against business -- are lawyers, business lobbyists and the business community, which by the mid-1980s had given very little money to Republican candidates. There weren't any, and so it really wasn't a part of an organized group.
Karl saw that if you began to run Republican Party candidates [for the Supreme Court] on issues that counted, you could begin to build a base of political financial donors, and you could begin to build this business group of supporters who would support the Supreme Court candidates. The issue that was key very early on, and Karl saw by 1998, was tort reform, lawsuits against business. Long before much of the nation saw this, Rove saw the tort reform issue, the fight against trial lawyers, as crucial to the success of building the Republican Party.
… What Rove saw implicitly very early on, was that the Supreme Court candidates and those races, were crucial to building the Republican Party at the very beginning, putting together candidates who would attract big money from business interests who had the money to support those candidates on an issue they cared about -- getting sued, and ultimately, if they were successful, could help de-fund the trial lawyers, the big source of money for the Democrats.
What happened in the campaign was that the business interests started talking to various folks, and then someone got the word to 60 Minutes that justice was for sale in the State of Texas. The 60 Minutes crew came in, did a piece. … It was an enormously powerful piece in Texas. Rove was a part of the business effort that encouraged 60 Minutes, that fed them information, and that was really a part of the success of the campaign, which depicted, in a very established way, that the business interests of Texas were being unfairly treated, that Democrats were on the take from trial lawyers, that "justice was for sale". You couldn't have written a headline that was better than the 60 Minutes piece, or more effective. …

First, he put together Republican Party candidates who want to limit lawsuits against business. So you get businesses to want to give money and support these candidates. Two, you begin to elect Republican candidates to office who will reflect a more business-minded agenda on the court, which decided these important questions. And three, you begin to devalue the importance of the Democratic Party's key source of money, trial lawyers. They helped fund, especially at the Supreme Court level, the candidates.

And so by working more successfully with Republican Party candidates, he got money; he got support; he began to put together a network of business-minded folks who would support [Republican] candidates, and the campaigns became ultimately successful. In fact, they were really the first part of the success of the Republican Party in Texas. These campaigns, largely under the radar, were ultimately won by campaign officials. ...
In 1985, [during] the [Bill] Clements [gubernatorial] race, Karl Rove writes a report which in some ways becomes a blueprint for '94 and every other election afterward. What was this report, and why was it important?
The report was a sort of view inside the mind of how Karl Rove would run every subsequent campaign. It had a line from Napoleon where he talked about a rapid and audacious attack. That's the Karl Rove model in the future. It talked about how you as a candidate can appeal to people in ways that are not direct. You might appeal to teachers, for example, by talking about pay raise for teachers, but that's to rally your audience; your audience are suburban mothers of students. You may appeal to minorities and women by showing what you do in your support for them and your appointments. But your appeal, as Karl lays out, is not so much for feminists and the leaders of minority groups as it is for others, those who are moderates and independents, to show that you're no longer a mean-spirited party, that you're not a party with sharp elbows, but a party that really commiserates. You see the beginnings of the "compassionate conservative" message. You see a party that will attack, attack, attack an opponent.

At one point the memo explains that attacks against the opponent are more important than positive messages about yourself. Now, clearly a campaign is a balance of both, but Karl was very, very aggressive in understanding that in order to build this party, it had to be a combination of attacks on an opponent in a very strategic way, but also an appeal that your candidate is "one of them," something the Republican Party had not been particularly successful in doing. In putting together this memo, Rove was successful in encapsulating the model, not simply for the candidate he was writing for, but a model for an approach that every subsequent Republican who he represented could appeal to voters on, a larger audience, a bigger group, a larger machine, and the success of the Republican Party.

...

When in trouble, there's a precedent in a Rove-Bush campaign that basically [says] you hit back, and you hit back hard. You find the strongest card in the other guy's hand, and that's what you take him down on. In this election it was Vietnam. Explain that.

Very early on, Karl Rove did something that many other political operatives don't do, and it's really an element of why he's a unique figure in American political life: He understands that while other people look for the weakness in an opponent and exploit that, Rove has long looked at the strength of an opponent. In the case of Ann Richards running for governor, it was that she was tolerant and appealed to many constituents, so you attack her as an advocate for the homosexuals' agenda. In the case of John McCain, it was that he was a POW in Vietnam, and so you raise questions about his service in Vietnam through surrogate groups.

In 2004, the number one thing that John Kerry offered was his heroic service in Vietnam, and so what Rove did was attack the strength of Kerry, not his weakness. What you had to do was confront Kerry's strength in Vietnam by raising doubts about whether or not he was a hero and whether or not his service was really all that noble. And you do that in part with a surrogate group, raising questions about whether his medals were truly warranted, and beyond that, pressing the case of John Kerry, who came back from the war as an opponent of the war.

More