Karl Rove - Master Tactician, Lousy Strategist
Today Andrew Sullivan linked to a David Frum Op-Ed in the NY Times which artfully discussed the conservative movement Rove leaves behind. Frum is a committed conservative as opposed to Rove, who Frum clearly believes is primarily a partisan.
As a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.
The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?
The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?
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?
More so Sullivan than Frum, both commentators now have to wrestle with the mess that is the Bush presidency, which both thankfully care less about than their overall allegiance to conservatism. People on both sides of the aisle are prone to the ideological brittleness and elevation of politics over principle that characterized Rove. He won, and that made him popular. But it did not make him right. By abdicating the core of conservative principles (Rove is no conservative Russell Kirk would have recognized), he clearly enunciated the thought process we now hear from people like Malkin and Hewitt who believe winning is more important than commitment to a particular guiding philosophy; consequently, it becomes easier to justify doing wrong, suppressing dissent and giving into our bullying tendencies in the interests of being right and victorious.
A popular book labeled Rove Bush’s Brain. The nexus between Bush, Rove and Cheney is yet to be fully unpacked and understood, but when it is it will likely show a group of men less united to conservative doctrine and more committed to doing what they had to win (both politically and properly in the context of global threats), and what they had to do to stay in power.
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“If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion and ignorance which does harm.”
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