Mr. Rove answered his chosen question by courting carefully selected constituencies with poll-tested promises: tax cuts for traditional conservatives; the No Child Left Behind law for suburban moderates; prescription drugs for anxious seniors; open immigration for Hispanics; faith-based programs for evangelicals and Catholics.
These programs often contradicted each other. How do you cut taxes and also create a big new prescription drug benefit? If the schools are failing to educate the nation’s poor, how does it make sense to expand that population by opening the door to even more low-wage immigration?
Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, “compassionate conservatism” started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them. To what problem, exactly, was the faith-based initiative a solution?
Frum should know about meaningless sloganeering; after all, it was his job in the White House, to help Bush convince Americans that bullshit was butter. That the programs contradicted each other was both obvious and essentially irrelevant, as such things tend to be in a pure shell game. Whether the initiatives and slogans even made sense (much less had any basis in fact) didn't matter. What mattered was bamboozling people.
This was a politics of party-building and coalition-assembly. It was a politics that aimed at winning elections. It was a politics that treated the problems of governance as secondary. But of course governance is what incumbents get judged on — and since 2004, the negative verdict on President Bush’s governance has created a lethal political environment for Republican candidates.
Inspiring rhetoric and solemn promises can do only so much for an incumbent administration. Can it win wars? Can it respond to natural disasters? Can it safeguard the nation’s borders? Can it fill positions of responsibility with worthy appointees? If it cannot do those things, not even the most sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation can save it.
So Frum implicitly acknowledges that Rove's tactics -- by design -- minimized the importance of governance, though even on that point he doles out half-measures. Governance wasn't even secondary for these guys, not even tertiary, except perhaps for something to point to come election time (which too failed on every conceivable count). What comes after quarternary?
Actual governance was a piddling afterthought, as Katrina finally made tragically clear. Indeed, most of this gang were cut from the same cloth who chuckled and mumbled at the "wonkishness" of Clinton, and not much later, Gore. I've said it before and I'll say it again -- politics is perhaps the only profession where being good at your job -- that is, being proficient at understanding and extending existing policies, and forming new ones -- is seen as a detriment. Expertise takes a major back seat to moronic intangibles of "likability" or "authenticity", most of which are bullshit anyway, seeing as how Bush (for one) is neither authentic nor likable.
Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.
In my brief service as a speechwriter inside the Bush administration, I often wondered why it was that skeptical experts on issues like immigration could never get even a hearing for their point of view. We took the self-evident brilliance of our plans so much for granted that we would not even meet, for example, with conservative academics who had the facts and figures to demonstrate the illusion of Rovian hopes for a breakthrough among Hispanic voters. We were so mesmerized by the specious analogies between 1996 and 1896 that we forgot that analogies are literary devices, not evidence.
In 2006, Republicans and conservatives paid the price for this we-know-best attitude. I fear that we will pay an even higher price in 2008.
Building coalitions is essential to political success. But it is not the same thing as political success. The point of politics is to elect governments, and political organizations are ultimately judged by the quality of government they deliver. Paradoxically, the antigovernment conservatives of the 1980s took the problems of government far more seriously than the pro-government conservatives of the 2000s.
Frum then winds up with a briar-patch warning to Democrats who may be seeking to utilize Rove's road to ruin. Per usual, Frum is over-reaching; like most Washington speechwriters, he gets caught up in the supposed grandeur of his milieu, and feels required to endow even the most inane cocktail-napkin thoughts with quaint furbelows. See also: Gerson, Michael; Noonan, Peggy.
Well, to a certain extent, the Democrats can, should, and probably will employ some of Turd
One thing I've noticed missing in all the Rove post-mortems I've read so far, is how much he was really a creature of his circumstance, once he hit the national stage. Everybody's talking about the guy like he was the boy genius with a new and innovative master plan that rilly rilly worked at first, but....somehow, the poor fella lost his mojo somewhere in a sea of self-importance and Rush Limbaugh trouser chowder.
But that's not true. The Republicans had embarrassed themselves by pushing impeachment to the brink, demonstrating to all but their own idiot lackeys that they'd gladly rent the country asunder over a few blowjobs, just for the fun of it. Their leading political intellectual at that point was the thoroughly-disgraced Newt Gingrich. The only reason they were even viable in 2000 is because people had also tired of Clinton's endless triangulating, and Gore's retarded litany of dog-ate-my-homework excuses over campaign fundraising.
The election was really John McCain's to take -- he had juice, momentum, gravitas, you name it. He was the darling of the independents at the time, including yours truly. And people were snickering at the idea of the dimwit black-sheep son of a one-term president even having the nerve to try, when he was so clearly out of his depth. I mean, "subliminable". Remember that shit?
But Rove made his national bones on McCain in even dirtier fashion than he did on his opponents back in his college days. He got Pat Robertson's flying monkeys to push-poll every rube in South Carolina about McCain's "black love child", certainly one of the more despicable electoral ploys in recent memory. Naturally, it worked, and McCain's New Hampshire upset of Mister Man got squashed by the Rhodes scholars in South Carolina. And Daddy had already lined up the money for Junior, so it didn't take a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing.
That's Karl Rove's real legacy -- as a man who, after nearly four decades in politics, still has yet to find the bar for just how low he was willing to stoop, just to get an empty, incompetent suit elected to lawn-dart the country. Part P.T. Barnum, part Richard Ramirez. A less forgiving country would be burning him in effigy and preparing to string him up by the heels, but someday we can just settle for pissing on his grave.
As for Frum, while he may think that his light flagellating of Rove's back fat absolves him from his own role in getting this country's foot stuck in a huge bucket of shit, he should think again. And then enlist.
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