President Bush must be feeling awfully lonely in the White House this
weekend. Things are bad enough for him – battered by the war in Iraq, rock
bottom in the polls – without last week’s sudden departure of his friend of
34 years, his chief adviser and the man behind his rise to the presidency.
Karl Rove, the guru who crafted George W Bush’s two election victories and
boasted the title The Senior Adviser to the President (note the definite
article), had once envisaged a new America run on conservative ideals for a
generation, based on a mighty coalition backed by the religious right.
Bush deferred utterly to Rove, hailing him as the Boy Wonder and the
“architect” of his victories. In private he dubbed him Turd Blossom – after
the Texan flower that grows out of horse dung. So instrumental was Rove to
White House policy that observers called him “Bush’s Brain”.
When the two men parted last week on the White House lawn, it was like a
lovers’ farewell. Bush, red-nosed, granite-faced, could barely control his
emotions as he said: “Karl Rove is moving on down the road. And so I thank
my friend. I’ll be on the road behind you here in a little bit.”
Rove – a well known blubber – was even more upset, choking back the tears as
he said how wonderful it had been to help “a man of farsighted courage put
America on a war footing and protect us against a brutal enemy in a
dangerous conflict that will shape this new century”.
He has ostensibly left the Bush operation for that old reason: to spend more
time with his family – his second wife and 18-year-old son in Texas. The
real reason for his departure was that he has lost his magic touch and the
Republicans have lost the knack for the one thing they were good at, thanks
to Rove – winning elections.
Rove’s disputed involvement with the Valerie Plame affair – when the senior
Republican official Scooter Libby was jailed for identifying a CIA spy – did
not help matters either. It became clear that the Turd Blossom was no longer
blooming.
When I met him, shortly before his departure, he bore no signs of the
impending rupture. Over lunch he was very much at ease running the show. He
variously jousted and joshed, basking in the glow that radiates from that
massive brain and his all-powerful boss. An awestruck silence fell on the
room as he bustled in, unassuming, ungrand, but all the grander for it.
In the flesh, this master image-sculptor does not cut much of a prepossessing
figure. To start with, there’s a lot of flesh – Rove may be Bush’s Brain; he
is certainly not Bush’s Body. The belt that holds up the trousers of his
cheap suit bites deeply into the lower slopes of a large, overarching belly.
One former colleague fondly recalled how Friday was ice-cream day, when Rove
bought ice-cream for the whole office. He and his devoted secretary would
snack all day on the constant supply of sweets that she kept on her desk.
Rove is distinctly ungroomed. His remaining strands of white hair float above
his pate in a wild halo – the oddest comb-over I’ve ever seen – leaving a
sort of hatmark where his hair furls away from the scalp. He admits that he
is no pin-up. He says of his time at high school in Salt Lake City: “I was
the complete nerd. I had the briefcase. I wore Hush Puppies when they were
not cool. I was definitely uncool.”
And yet, unlike most political nerds, Rove has immense charm and presence, his
cheerful, confident smile and button nose the little anchor to his big face.
He relishes tricky questions. He opened each answer with a cutesy but
engaging anecdote, swiftly followed by a volley of nerdish statistics to
back up the Bush administration’s record.
Before making a point about wonky health issues, he said, in his down-home,
Nevada, folksy accent: “Mah daddy died on Medicaid [the basic American
health provider] and it shocked me. Now the average benefit is $11,890 a
year. My mother-in-law gets exactly that. I wish she didn’t but . . .”
Yet like all top spin doctors Rove prefers to stay out of the spotlight
himself. Over the years he has given precious few interviews and, in those
that there are, more quotes appear about him from other people than from the
man himself. He is artful at deflecting questions preferring to riff, say,
about “how in the real West Wing the lighting is nowhere near as flattering,
there are no glass walls and a lot less takes place in the hallway”. He is
careful always to show his boss in a good light, saying that his friendship
with Bush thrives on banter: “Ours is rather childish – and he gets the best
of me every time.” Really?
I saw myself how Rove’s smile can turn with lightning speed to a snarl. At a
lunch I attended with him and some other journalists, one of the hacks
accused the Bush administration of not being conservative enough in its
domestic policy.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Rove, his eyes roving round
the room to meet ours, all bonhomie gone in an instant. “It’s so easy for
journalists to look at any policy, decide it doesn’t fit in with their
preexisting rules of what’s conservative or not, and then say we’re going
soft. It doesn’t work like that.” The froideur was total. Then, snap, just
like that, Rove turned back to his old genial self for the remainder of the
lunch.
I wanted to know what the master of compassionate conservatism and wily
election warrior reckon to our own Conservative challenger – did he think
David Cameron had a chance of beating Gordon Brown?
“It’s going to be difficult,” Rove told me. “They haven’t got the religious
backing the way we did.” So how did the Republicans change people’s minds
about the party?
“It’s about being for something as opposed to against something. Conservatives
find it very easy to be against something. We’re against slovenly behaviour.
We’re against welfare rolls. We’re against people being on the dole. We’re
against this bad thing and that bad thing. Instead, what we should do is
find ways to herald things that are positive. We’re for ending dependency on
government. We’re for helping people to achieve the best that they can be in
life.”
Steve Hilton, Cameron’s ideas guru, could certainly learn a thing or two from
Rove.
At the height of his powers, Rove assembled a bag of electoral tricks that
make Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell look like relics from the Pathé
news age. Rove was responsible for couture Republicanism, salami-slicing the
conservative message and tossing choice morsels at particular groups.
The most fertile targets in 2004 were the Bible-Belt voters, courted with a
strong Christian message wrapped up in pro-life, antigay marriage mood music.
His genius was for courting floating voters. Say you were pounding the rubber
steps on the office gym StairMaster at eight in the morning. Rove was there
to catch you. He and his team worked out that lots of voters, particularly
upmarket ones, are not at home for the morning or early evening network
news. So the Bush campaign pays for Republican advertising on closed-circuit
gym channels at peak hours.
Rove’s sophistication took on board all the latest technological wheezes. The
Republican news machine – the so-called “political shop” – used bloggers,
lobby groups and radio hosts to push home the message. Google Earth
satellite pictures were employed to get the quickest possible routes for
on-street canvassing. Republicans took advantage of YouTube to target
teenagers – recently they posted antidrug videos on the site.
However, while Rove was great at winning elections, he and his boss were not
so good at getting things done. Iraq is the great spanner in the Bush works
– fine in conception, inept in transaction. On the domestic front, where
Rove had so many plans, things have also stalled. The attack on America on
9/11 meant that, whatever the Republicans wanted, they could get – Bush’s
approval ratings soared.
Rove deftly used security issues to damn the Democrats. As he puts it:
“Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war;
liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare
indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.” Six
years on and Iraq blots out most of Bush’s domestic record but, all the
same, few of Rove’s ambitions were fulfilled. Hurricane Katrina did not help
– it was Rove who said that Bush should not land in Louisiana shortly after
the disaster, leaving him hanging, ineffectual, mid-air, over New Orleans.
If anything, the complete domination of American politics orchestrated by Rove
also brought him down. His utter confidence and bombast alienated Democrats,
the electorate, Republicans even. Recently Bush has become aware of the
problems attached to his consigliere. When he tried to get his immigration
policy through Congress this spring, he made it clear that Rove would not
take part in the negotiations. As Dick Armey, a former Republican
congressman, said of Rove’s dealings with Congress: “You can’t call her ugly
all year and expect her to go to the prom with you.” Rove, now 56, will not
disappear from the political scene altogether. He is to write a book about
his three decades with Bush. And he will remain a significant Republican
operator for next year’s presidential election. But his fall will be a hard
one – he has lived and breathed the Republican party since his childhood in
Nevada where he was deserted by his biological father and took on the name
of his Norwegian-American stepfather, a mineral geologist. His mother
committed suicide in 1981. No great student, he attended three universities
and graduated from none of them.
What were never in doubt were his Republican credentials. At the age of nine
he decided to support Richard Nixon and, as soon as he flunked out of Utah
University, he became head of the College Republicans, a powerful student
body. From the late 1960s onwards he was moulding himself as the ultimate
election winner, setting up his own direct mail firm to back Republican
campaigns. Since then he has been the primary strategist for 41 statewide,
congressional and national Republican campaigns; he has won 34 of them.
He first met Dubya in 1973 while he was working for Bush’s father. “Huge
amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile,
just charisma – you know, wow,” he says of their first encounter.
In 1989 he was encouraging Bush to run for Texas governor. By 1999 he was
working full-time as Bush’s chief strategist for the presidential bid – a
year later they were in the White House.
As the architect of Bush’s dream strolled off into the sunset last week, he
left behind him an increasingly embattled figure in the White House. For
Bush, the shadows really are drawing in.
