home
about
archives
|
KARL VON HINDENBURG
08/15/2007
The announced departure of Karl Rove from the White House, and the editorializing surrounding his legacy, is fascinating. He is praised for being the mastermind of Bush's two gubernatorial victories and two presidential wins, and for forging and keeping a winning political coalition of economic conservatives, corporatists, and evangelical Christians, at least until 2006 when something went wrong with his diabolical plan.
The president calls him "the architect."
On the other hand, Rove is demonized by his opponents, and also by some traditional republicans, for focusing only on the "base," and thus alienating the more libertarian and moderate wings of the Republican Party and for perfecting a scorched earth type of campaigning that polarized this nation. If George W. Bush claimed to be a "uniter, not a divider," it is Rove who proudly functioned as "the divider," carefully crafting a slim majority of 51% in the electorate and the Congress so that he didn't even have to acknowledge the losing 49%. One cannot dispute that the nation is more divided today than it was when Bush came into office, in spite of the sense of unity nearly everyone felt immediately after 9/11. And that is largely Rove's doing.
And the Republicans call him a genius.
Rove has been behind some of the most disgusting and disturbing strategies and tactics in both politics and government. Rove pandered to evangelical Christians in both the general elections and the primaries. By making sure abortion and gay marriage were constant topics in both elections, he kept evangelical pastors in the republican camp, and they in turn got out the vote. Anyone who doubts these were phoney election issues need only ask why there has been no federal legislation on these issues since the 2000 election. Yes, there was that veto of the legislation funding stem cell research, but that is a ridiculous example of pandering with no real effect on stopping the destruction of "life." If Rove and Bush were really serious about "protecting life," why didn't they propose ending in vitro fertilization, which creates all the embryos that will ultimately be destroyed? And yes, there was the ban on what Republicans call "partial birth abortion," but that only outlaws a type of abortion, and does not prohibit other late term procedures. So in effect, it does nothing to end abortion.
The plan to bamboozle the voters worked, however, at least until 2006, and so the Republicans call him a master strategist.
Rove's tactics in campaigns went far beyond focusing on issues, however. Continuing in the tradition of Lee Attwater, he took negative campaigning to new levels, smearing bona fide heroes of past wars to get his cowardly friend into the presidency. Who can forget what he did to John McCain, using push polls to ask voters if they would still support McCain if they found out he had an illegitimate black child, or to Max Cleland, equating him with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or to John Kerry? And now, it turns out that Rove has been up to his bald little head in trying to fix the justice system by hiring and firing federal attorneys who would help win the next election by disenfranchising democratic voters. It makes the dirty tricks of the Nixon administration look amateurish.
And so the journalists and politicians marvelled and call him a political visionary.
But Rove didn't just confine his shenanigans to elections. His office in the West Wing for the past six years gave him enormous influence over governing strategy, which was always geared to creating a "permanent Republican majority." From the Terri Schiavo fiasco to the gay marriage initiatives on the 2004 state ballots, from the outing of Valerie Plame to the firing of U.S. Attorneys in an attempt to control ballot access in state elections, Rove has called many of the shots that have both violated the Constitution, changed the tone of governance, and disgusted much of the electorate.
The media still call him he most powerful man in Washington.
Yet, the word most often used to describe Rove is the one the president gave him: "the architect." What, we might ask, did he build? What great edifice did he design? Supposedly, his goal for the past decade was to create a "permanent republican majority." From my perspective, Rove didn't so much design a great monument to republicanism as he did a doomed structure, destined to crash and burn. If Rove is indeed an architect, what he designed was the Hindenburg.
The Hindenburg, of course, was the largest aircraft ever to fly, a zeppelin that was longer than three Boeing 747s or four Goodyear blimps, end to end. It was a sight to behold and made several dozen passenger flights across the Atlantic in 1936 and 1937, until it exploded in flames and crashed in New Jersey in May, 1937. Up until that fateful day, the Hindenburg was praised as a modern wonder. No one had ever built anything like it. Yet its glory was fleeting. Whether the fire was caused by a static spark, sabotage, lightning, or some other unknown flaw, the Hindenburg's promise was lost, along with many of its passengers.
This, to me, is a more apt description of the legacy of Karl Rove. While trying to bully, smear, trick, and out manoeuvre his opponents, Rove and his many fans thought he was indeed building a political structure that would rule America indefinitely. Instead, what he did was overreach, and destroy the very thing that he had worked so hard to construct. As proof, we see polls showing that membership in the democratic party is rising, while numbers of republicans are declining. In those under the age of 30, there is not even a contest. The public is largely fed up with the republican party and what was once a carefully crafted 51% majority seems to have vanished. What happened to the plans of the boy genius, the architect, the master strategist?
Just as we still do not know what brought down the Hindenburg, we may never know what brought down Karl Rove, but we can speculate.
Rove was interested in only one thing: power. He wanted power for George W. Bush and thus power for himself.
Rove had no interest in what was best for the people of the country. In other words, he craved electoral victory not so that he and his candidate could actually do anything to make conditions better for the people, but so that he could be a winner and reap all the rewards that winning would bring.
Rove was a phoney and a user. He didn't believe in any of the issues that he used to secure a win, and he would use anyone and anything to achieve that win.
Rove's goal was fundamentally un-American. To want to achieve a permanent majority means you have no interest at all in what the minority wants, and you have no desire to work cooperatively with them. It means you want permanent power, which goes against the entire concept of democracy and elections. As nothing is permanent, and the needs and concerns of a nation change from decade to decade, it is only reasonable that the people will vote differently from time to time. Sometimes one party will have better answers. Other times, the other party's ideas will make more sense. Therefore, the only way any party can achieve a permanent majority is to give up ideology and always respond to the people's needs (which the republicans will never do) or trick the people. And as Abe Lincoln once famously said" "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
People like Karl Rove ultimately always fail. Grand schemes never work out the way narcissists want them to, and Karl and his boss are definitely narcissists. What such men never factor in is the one thing you can't count on: the opinions, needs, wishes and even wisdom of the people they are trying to manipulate. The mass of people may always be looking for a strong and good leader, but with enough time they can tell the real thing from a phoney. The people don't take kindly to being bullied, tricked, lied to, used, and manipulated, and that is what Karl Rove did, in spades.
And so we watch Karl von Hindenburg ride off into the sunset, to his native Texas. Let's hope he stays there to write his memoirs, while historians, politicians, reporters, and hopefully lawyers, begin to dissect what really happened when Karl and George rode into Washington to create their permanent republican majority.
-Ellen Terich
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
|
