In the aftermath of their presidential election defeat, many Republicans took out their frustration on Mitt Romney and his staff. Their manifold shortcomings and mistakes, both in terms of judgment and technical gaffes, were raked over with consummate thoroughness by conservative commentators. But with Romney sensibly gone to ground (though he will break his silence this month at the annual CPAC conference) and his advisors making poor targets on their own, that got boring after a while. So with the people who determined the GOP fate in 2012 no longer such inviting targets, the spleen of some conservatives is now being vented on Karl Rove.
In the years since his masterful supervision of George W. Bush’s presidential victories, Rove has assumed a larger-than-life role in the imagination of those on both the left and the right. To the left, he was the evil genius behind every Republican victory whose fundraising prowess was the engine driving the conservative agenda. To many on the right, he became the symbol of an inside-the-Beltway GOP establishment seeking to stifle the Tea Party in order to perpetuate the go-along-to-get-along payola culture that betrayed conservative principles and empowered Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama.
But lately Rove has been looking more like a consultant with feet of clay than a political prince of darkness. In the last month since Rove announced the creation of the Conservative Victory Project, conservative critics have been denouncing him and liberals have been crowing over his supposed demise. The right has seen his effort aimed at preventing GOP outliers from losing winnable Senate and House seats as an unconscionable establishment attempt to stifle the grass roots. The left views it as a sign of Republican weakness that can’t be masked by Rove’s tactics or fundraising skills. But the idea that Rove’s moment has passed, and that his virtual defenestration from the good graces of the same people whose votes he turned out in 2000 and 2004 marks the end of era, as today’s feature in Politico seems to indicate, is overblown at best. What’s wrong here is not so much the evaluation of the consultant and talking head’s current difficulties as it is the assumption that Rove is the giant bestriding American politics whose fortunes are in some way indistinguishable from that of his party.
Let’s specify that Rove has been an enormously successful political consultant whose guiding of George W. Bush to two presidential election wins would be enough for any mortal to dine out on for the rest of his life. Since then, he has continued to help raise large amounts of money for Republicans and his opining on the issues of the day on Fox News and in the Wall Street Journal has given him a unique status among GOP strategists and talking heads.
But the failure of many of the Republicans he backed last year in both primaries and general elections showed that he was neither infallible nor all-powerful. The spectacle he made of himself on election night when he disputed the decision of Fox News to call Ohio for President Obama (made memorable by Megyn Kelly’s long march from the studio to the office where the election nerds made the decision) linked him to Romney’s loss in a visceral way that was quite unexpected. The negative reaction of many conservatives who see his Victory Project as an establishment evil empire striking back against activists, and the way so many other mainstream GOP figures immediately distanced themselves from the idea, seemed to mark the moment when Rove ceased to be the center of GOP gravity.
But those reviling and writing off Rove need to get a better grip on reality. Just because Rove ran the last winning GOP presidential campaign and appears on Fox didn’t make him the head of the Republican Party. He may well have profited from the myth of his pervasive influence, but that didn’t make it so. Rove was and is a very big deal in American politics but he was, after all, just a consultant whose fortunes are bound to rise and fall with the candidates he backs.
Political junkies have long tended to mythologize campaign managers. But as Rove understands well, it was George W. Bush who won those elections, even if his turn-out-the-vote efforts helped make it possible. No matter how much of a genius a consultant may be or how much money he manages to raise, it is the candidates who are always the deciding factors in any political battle.
The attention paid to Rove now over his campaign to weed out people like Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle and Todd Akin from the party’s slates around the country is as much a matter of hype as was the glory he received after 2004. His critics are absolutely right when they point out his instinctive backing of establishment favorites has identified him with as many losers as winners. Moreover, the idea that Rove can do a better job than the Tea Party in picking prospective senators runs aground when you consider that many of his choices tanked in the last two election cycles and that winners like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz wouldn’t be in Washington if everyone had listened to him. But this proof that he isn’t really the GOP pope is not exactly a revelation. Consultants win some and they lose some. The techniques he pioneered in 2000 and 2004 are no longer the determining factors in elections, as the Obama machine proved twice since then.
Though I’m far from sanguine about the ability of his new group to steer the GOP back to control of the Senate, he doesn’t deserve the abuse he has been getting lately any more than he really merited the god-like manner with which some wrote about him in the years prior to 2012.
Whatever the state of Rove’s current fortunes, this tells us nothing about how he or the party will do in 2014 or 2016. Republicans should welcome any group, including that of Rove, aimed at helping them win elections. But that makes him just one voice among many seeking to help influence events. Liberals may want to hold onto Rove as a right-wing boogey man, but conservatives need to stop obsessing about him and the mythical establishment he represents. If they are to win again, they will need all they help they can get–even from the likes of Rove.
The number one problem afflicting the GOP is the culturally conservative voters. I say this as a man, who while he rarely attends religious services, still strongly opposes abortion and gay marriage. These people have a problem adhering to the principle the perfect should never get in the way of the good. They too often support incredibly weak candidates who are doomed on Election Day. Leftists play them for fools—and literally run ads encouraging them to pick losers like Sharon Angle and Todd Akin. Sadly, I am not even slightly exaggerating. This madness got out of control during the 1992 presidential election, and has only gotten worse since then.
The number one problem afflicting the GOP is the culturally conservative voters. n nAmen! n nNow how will the GOP deal with this: n nMedical Marijuana prohibition is a crime against humanity and a violation of the religious precept – heal the sick. n
No, the #1 problem afflicting the GOP are spineless wimps like you on the social issues who believe the social conservatives should check their principles at the door for the sake of a worthless "majority" in Congress that never does a damn thing when they HAVE a majority. If that philosophy was somehow supposed to bring us into a golden age then why DIDN'T it after 2004 when we had a GOP President AND control of the House AND a five vote majority in the Senate? Instead we got ourselves stuck with a lemon of a Supreme Court appointment in John Roberts who gave us the ultimate betrayal of our liberty, we saw establishment hacks in the Gang of 14 let Harry Reid get away with preventing good judges from being on the Federal courts, we saw NOTHING done to safeguard the institution of marriage from the assault its gone under since etc. etc. As for Sharon Angle, she would have won but for Harry Reid's fraud, and the fecklessness of the same kind of GOP people who also were responsible for betraying Oliver North in 1994 in Virginia yet who constantly expect the rank and file social conservatives to get behind them for the sake of party unity. No more of that from me. n nThe madness began in 1992, you say? Gee, you mean because principled conservatives had decided they weren't going to automatically roll over for the guy who betrayed every last element of Ronald Reagan's legacy and who gave us the 1990 Budget deal and the broken tax pledge, feckless cowardness on recognizing the end of the USSR, anti-Israel foreign policy run by James Baker, David Souter on the Supreme Court and John Frohnmayer giving us pornographic art on the taxpayers dime at the NEA?
Got a spine for this: n nMedical Marijuana prohibition is a crime against humanity and a violation of the religious precept – heal the sick. n
The institution of marriage has been under assault from divorce. Gay marriage is just the moping up operation.
The day you tell me how getting a divorce changes the definition of what a marriage is, in contrast to how gay marriage changes what it is, is the day I can take that argument seriously. The concept of divorce is not an alien invention created by secular bigots who hate the Judeo-Christian tradition, which is more than can be said of those who are so anxious to shove gay marriage down our throats (enabled I might add by certified fakes in the GOP ranks like Ted Olson who give cover to the bigots by being advocates for it)
This reply is beautiful. (And really, "gay marriage" pairs with the word "marriage" a modifier of it, while "divorce" is something differently entirely. Else, if we want a term for divorce that gets across its relation to marriage, we might call it "unmarriage," or something to that effect, as a thing that undoes the act of marriage, but being nothing that changes the character of it.)
Childishly immature social conservatives cut their own throats in 1992 by helping pro-abortion Bill Clinton capture the White house. John Roberts has been mostly a solid conservative U.S. Supreme Court justice. His unfortunate decision on Obamacare was an exception. Sharron Angle was the preferred choice of Democrat activists—and they even ran TV ads helping her win the GOP nomination. You should also mention that Bush 41 picked Clarence Thomas! He was more philosophically aligned with Ronald Reagan than either Clinton or Ross Perot.
No sir, George Bush 41 was his own worst enemy and caused his own defeat when he decided to flip the middle finger to EVERY Reagan conservative by governing as a country club RINO who treated conservatives as the enemy after spending the 1988 campaign pulling a con job claiming to be the third Reagan term. How exactly did Bush 41 help the pro-life cause by giving us DAVID SOUTER on the Supreme Court? Yes, he gave us Clarence Thomas, but I also remember how Bush 41 was ready to throw Thomas to the wolves and it was only when Thomas broke free of all the handlers of the Bush White House and fought back HIMSELF that he saved his nomination. n nBush 41 was a worthless fraud on all levels who damaged the GOP for a generation. He could have gotten himself a second term if he had remembered what the Reagan coalition was comprised of and instead he flushed it all away and your blaming social conservatives for that is pitiful. n nAnd as for Democrats wanting Angle, just remmeber this: Democrats wanted Reagan in 1980, so let's dispense with that stale chestnut argument.
The bottom line is this: the election of Bill Clinton was a disaster. We would have been much better off with Bush41. He gave us one strong pro-life U.S. Supreme Court justice. Bill Clinton gave us none! You should not have allowed your anger to get the best of you.
The sooner the Rove Cancer is gone from the GOP, the better. The man is a Democrat operative. Always has been, always will be. It's all about who pays him the most, not who should win an election with him.
Rove sparked the attacks on him when he created an entity that he said is dedicated to weeding out Tea Party candidates. If Rove's new entity were operational sooner it would have opposed Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Donors who consulted Mr. Rove gave money to Dewhurst and Crist. Rove has had some success as a political consultant and some big failures. Yes, Bush became President in 2000 and his campaign frittered away a double digit lead in September and lost the popular vote to a weak candidate named Al Gore. Rove's biggest weakness was on display on Fox News on election night 2012. He refused to accept the fact that Romney had lost Ohio. He embarrassingly insisted the race was too close to call when every other political expert knew Romney had lost. Its important to knock Rove down to size because every dollar he raises (last year it was more than $300 million) is a dollar that is denied to worthy candidates and organizations. When I heard about Rove's new attempt to control the Republican political process I responded by saying why doesn't he spend his resources attacking Obama.
Strictly from the standpoint of deciding which party controls the Senate (which I would argue is more important than the qualities of any one senator), it is not an indictment of Rove's judgment that "winners like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz wouldn’t be in Washington if everyone had listened to him." And those victories do not really support the argument that the Tea Party can be more successful than "the establishment" in identifying winners. In the case of Angle, O'Donnell, and Mourdock, tea partiers turned almost guaranteed GOP wins into Democratic seats. In the case of Buck, they turned a very winnable race for the GOP into a Democratic seat. On the other hand, in the case of Cruz they turned a guaranteed general election win by a solidly conservative candidate into a guaranteed general election win by a different solidly conservative candidate. And in Florida, they turned an almost-certain win by a (then) popular GOP candidate into a win by a different GOP candidate. Cruz and Rubio may be superior senators compared to their primary opponents, but if they had never run the GOP would still hold at least one and probably both of those seats. So in terms of controlling the Senate, it is hard to count Cruz and Rubio as any sort of mitigation of the Angle, O'Donnell, Mourdock and Buck disasters. (I didn't list Akin among the tea party's self-inflicted wounds. Akin, who even before his rape comments was described to me by a Missouri political activists as "probably the only person in the state who could possibly lose to McCaskill," was the product of extreme social conservatives who didn't understand the need to build electoral coalitions, not rule-or-ruin tea party groups.)