Bare Knuckle Politics: Karl Rove

Karl Rove, an Atwater protégé, had a reputation for “dirty tricks” and was considered a political genius. He had worked for George H.W. Bush and became advisor to George W. Bush, who called him “Boy Genius” and: “Turd Blossom.” Rove recommended that Bush readNeo Conservative authors in preparation for the primaries. In the 2000 South Carolina primary, Rove was to prove his effectiveness when that state was flooded with rumors that John McCain was gay, his wife Cindy was a drug addict, and McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh was really the product of a liaison with a black prostitute. Mc Cain learned his lesson, and hired Terry Nelson, an effective trickster, to run his 2008 presidential campaign. Nelson ran the 2002 New Hampshire campaign in which operative James Tobin was sent to prison phone jamming. Nelson had also headed opposition research for the RNC and was responsible for the advertisement that kept Harold Ford from becoming a US Senator in the 2006 Tennessee election. It showed a white bimbo indicating she had partied with Ford, a Black man.

Rove has been called the most influential presidential advisor since James Baker, who served Bush’s father and managed the battle against a recount in the 2000 Florida presidential election. Few policies are approved in the Bush White House unless they first pass through Rove’s office. Unlike his close friend and mentor Lee Atwater, he is a policy wonk who offers advice on all sorts of policy questions. Although he studies polls very carefully, he is careful to never frame suggestions for policy in terms of what he has learned from the polls. This is because the Bushies repeatedly expressed disdain for Clinton because he was often guided by polling data.

Rove made no secret of his intention of making the Republicans the nation’s permanent governing party. As the president’s chief domestic advisor, he constantly shaped policy to fulfill this goal. In the process, he sometimes appeared to have been “subverting the governmental functions of the executive branch.” Without getting indicted, he was instrumental in outing a covert CIA agent whose husband had criticized Bush policies. He was also involved in firing US attorneys who did not use their offices for political purposes or had made the mistake of investigated Republicans. The staff to the General Services Administration to instruct personnel on how to use government contracts to elect Republicans to Congress. Mississippi’s Republican governor was permitted to spend all but $167,000,000 of its $1.7 billion on helping business and the affluent even though the law required that half the federal aid most be spent on the poor.

Rove aides even showed charts that indicated who was vulnerable in the 2008 races. The New York Times blamed Rove for the Bush policy of ignoring the needs of Louisiana, which had a Democrat governor, after Hurricane Katrina while doing much more for Republican Mississippi, which had suffered less. That judgment might be a bit harsh, but the Times was on target in saying that Rovian policy led “the Bush administration’s far more menacing failure to distinguish the Republican Party from the government, or the state itself.” The great majority of Bush supporters shared this outlook, that anything the administration did to injure liberals and promote the Republican Party was acceptable in the great battle between good and evil. Rove left the Bush White House on September 1, 2007.

One technique for creating a permanent majority was to reduce the turnout of groups that were likely to vote Democratic. Funding purges of registration rolls that mistakenly removed legitimate voters in an effort to remove felons accomplished this. States were encouraged to enact measures calling for special Ids and other procedures that could be used to hold down the number of poor and minority voters.

To justify these steps, the Bush administration would continually complain about widespread voter fraud, and its US attorneys were expected to develop many cases of fraud. But by 2006, only 86 people –mostly Democrats—were convicted of voting crimes, “many on trivial, trumped up charges.” There was a cutback in prosecutions of officials who kept people from having access to the polls. Some of the US Attorneys purged in 2007 were removed for insufficient zeal in creating voter fraud cases. A report commissioned by the government noted that “there is little polling place fraud,” but the White House edited it to suggest the opposite


Sherman has written African American Baseball: A Brief History, which can be acquired from LuLu Publishing on line.http://www.lulu.com/browse/search.php?search_forum