Black Box Report

Karl Rove to spend more time with Andy Card's family.

They called him "the Architect," and "Bush's Brain." Bush himself even referred to him as "Turd Blossom." Of course, people called him a lot of other things too, but I can't repeat them here (Hi, Mom!). But whether you admired or loathed him, you can't deny the man left his mark on Washington and the country:

He threw out the old conventional wisdom that to win parties must try to create winning coalitions that also include attracting independent, moderate and centrist voters.

He put into place a new kind of politics where not just campaigning but governing meant appealing to and serving members of a given party’s base with little effort to placate, win over or work with Americans or elected officials who weren’t in the party’s base.

This worked well when he could get enough party and base members to win an election by a)demonizing opponents b)demoralizing or dividing opponents...

It proved to be a highly flawed strategy since there was NO POLITICAL SAFETY NET.

I'm not the only one who believes it was Karl Rove who was the "senior adviser to Bush" who was quoted in Ron Suskind's 2004 article:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

And if it wasn't Rove, they were almost surely passing along something they'd heard him say. The mentality of that statement has Rove's musky odor all over it. Rove was the ultimate three-card monte hustler, always one step ahead of the rubes:

Rove, long touted by the media as a political genius, has proven to be more Macchievelli than Einstein, more the BS artist than one who could deliver convincing wins at the national level…If our intent is to laud him for any achievement, we may have to acknowledge his greatness as a master thief.

Politics is, and always has been, a contact sport. Political underhandedness is a long-accepted part of the game. But even during the final days of the Nixon administration, at the height of public scrutiny of political dirty tricks, no one played the game quite like the Rover:

Fittingly enough, Rove started his career by stealing letterheads from an opponent’s office to send out fake messages and going on to perfect his craft under the tutelage of Nixon’s dirty trickster Donald Segretti...

From the sliming of John McCain in the 2000 primaries to the outing of Valerie Plame and the firing of the U.S. Attorneys for not being political enough, Rove’s fingerprints have been all over every unethical, immoral and illegal move of the Bush Administration.

Karl Rove's purpose, his raison d'etre, was to turn everything - everything - that crossed the administration's path to their own political purposes. No department, no appointee or federal employee was too insignificant to squeeze some sort of political advantage out of. And for a while, Rove was on top of the world:

Make no mistake: No matter what you think of him, Rove did his job well, at least until the realities of the world outside the Washington Beltway became so crushing that they could no longer be subsumed or blustered away.

Rove's tactics may have helped Bush get elected twice and helped turn every nook and cranny of the federal government into an arm of the RNC, but pride goeth before the fall, and Karl never made good on his biggest promise, the one that got away when he went to the well once too often:

All Karl ever wanted was to be left alone to work in secret to destroy America's political landscape, and not be held accountable. His job was to create a permanent Republican majority, and he failed beyond his wildest nightmares.

A "permanent Republican majority." Rove's own words. Nevermind the party affiliation in that statement, can you think of any sentiment less suited to a representative democracy? But then, Karl Rove didn't do subtle. Unlike other Machievellian operatives, Rove didn't try to play down his tactics, or sweeten them with bipartisan-sounding caveats - he openly boasted about them. And that may be Rove's true legacy:

Rove’s legacy has nothing to do with his so-called strategic brilliance. His significance has everything to do with his cutthroat, win-at-all-cost style. Rove believes the political rule that there are no rules. Laws are meant to be broken. Scandals are meant to be covered up. Enemies are meant to be destroyed. The key to electoral success is to tear the country in half and see who comes out with the bigger chunk.
......
When history looks back at the disgrace of the Bush presidency, the one celebrated quote that will help capture much of what went wrong will be John DiIulio’s. It was DiIulio, the first director of the president’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who told Ron Suskind, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”

This was Rove’s idea, and it was Rove’s job to execute the strategy. He’ll be leaving the White House in a few weeks, but his place in history is secure. That’s not a compliment.

Karl Rove may be gone soon, but not soon forgotten.

Especially with some subpoenas with his name on them still floating around.