Accidental Genius

Is Karl Rove really Bush's brain?

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the October 2003 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

Where Bush's Brain is not provably wrong, it relies overmuch on uneducated speculation. For instance, the authors devote two chapters to a 1986 incident in which Rove claimed that someone had bugged his office. He was running the Republican campaign for governor of Texas, and he hinted that Democrats might be responsible. At the time, some reporters suspected that Rove had concocted the whole thing in order to discredit the other side. "Maybe Rove did not plant the bug," say Moore and Slater, but it is "hard to disconnect him from culpability in the incident."

Why exactly do they think this? Rove had spoken of seeing Power, the silly Richard Gere movie about political consulting. In that movie, Gere finds a listening device in his phone. So that's where Rove must have gotten the idea, right? (I've seen The Godfather dozens of times, but I have not put a single horse's head in anybody's bed, or even thought about doing so.)

The ratio of speculation to fact in Bush's Brain goes way up as its story stretches into the Bush presidency. Moore and Slater have few sources in Washington's GOP community, so they depend on conjectures from fellow outsiders. It's like covering the Super Bowl by talking to people who couldn't get tickets.

After the September 11 attacks, they note, a former associate of Rove wrote an editorial saying that American foreign policy had helped spawn terrorism. He e-mailed a copy to Rove, who never answered. (It's possible that a senior White House aide might have been a tad busy at the time.) A right-wing Web site then posted the editorial, drawing volumes of angry e-mail to the author's inbox. Was Rove responsible, as his former friend suspects? "There was simply no way of knowing, not for sure," Moore and Slater admit, but nevertheless dwell on the tale at some length.

The authors' assessments of the power Rove wields in the Bush White House makes them sound like the coke-addled Sherlock Holmes ranting about Professor Moriarty in The Seven-Percent Solution: "He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order." They even refer to the Cuban embargo as "the Rove doctrine." Egad, Eisenhower imposed a partial embargo in 1960, and JFK expanded it the next year. Talk about a "boy genius" -- Rove was in grade school at the time. Would Bush drop the embargo if Rove went off the payroll? And given the Cuban vote in the pivotal state of Florida, would Gore have dared to change it?

Moore and Slater also blame Rove's evil genius for the decision "to fight the war on terrorism, which was a just cause, and use the pureness of that purpose to advance the Republican political agenda." They start with a smidgen of fact. In June of 2002, a White House intern lost a computer disk in Lafayette Park. A Democratic Senate aide happened to find it, discovering a PowerPoint presentation by Rove and White House political director Ken Mehlman. Moore and Slater find dark significance in one slide that urged Republicans to "focus on war and the economy." Democrats damned that advice as a Rove effort to "politicize" terrorism. The plain fact is that those are the administration's top policy priorities, and would be if Karl Rove had never been born.

Carl Cannon gets the story straight in Boy Genius: "In truth, most of the stuff in the presentation, delivered to GOP donors at the posh Hay Adams Hotel, was boilerplate political fare. Still, it was embarrassing to misplace your own campaign materials. Hardly the stuff of genius."

But Moore and Slater go even farther: Not only is Rove responsible for a political focus on the war -- he was behind the war itself. The failure to catch Osama and crush al Qaeda was threatening Bush's political standing, the argument goes, so the administration redefined the war on terrorism as a global conflict with evil. The war on terror was big enough, they say, but now we would go after any enemy whose destruction could gratify American souls and boost Bush in the polls. "Rove's political strategy for the president transformed a policy whose scope and tenets were unprecedented in American history. All it needed was a little justification. And Iraq was handy."

One of their "sources" on this point is a "political operative who has closely observed Rove's tactics for many years." This person says that Rove and Bush can now take their fight against evil and "apply that to anyone they want. Tom Daschle or Hussein." Another operative calls the Iraq war "the most evil political calculation in American history."

Despite the gravity of their accusation, the authors fail to offer a single scrap of evidence for Rove's masterminding the war. The "Rove-wags-the-dog" scenario does not even make sense on its own terms. Just suppose that Rove did have the power to start a war for its political payoff. When he was allegedly plotting the map to Baghdad, the generals could not guarantee swift victory. There was a small but serious chance that the conflict might drag on and on, leaving Bush and Rove in political body bags.

In a cold electoral calculation, would the probable benefits of victory have outweighed the risks of defeat? Not bloody likely. As an amateur historian, Rove would have known that successful wars are seldom good for the party in power. After World War I, the nation spurned Wilson's Democrats and turned to Warren Harding. In the first midterm election after World War II, Republicans took control of Congress. And the year after the first Bush won the first Gulf War, he lost re-election with the lowest popular-vote share of any incumbent since Taft.

Though they take the theory to loony extremes, Moore and Slater are hardly alone in painting Rove as the real power of the Bush administration. The cover artist of Boy Genius illustrates the idea by placing a photo of Bush above the word Boy and Rove above Genius. (Lest anyone miss the point, there is also a light bulb over Rove's head.)

Journalists can easily find people who will agree that Rove is Professor Moriarty. In Washington, there are two kinds of politicians with a stake in hyping Rove's influence: Republicans and Democrats. When Republicans disagree with the administration but do not want to criticize their president, they blame Rove. In 2001, for instance, the administration yielded to Hispanic groups that wanted to end Navy bombing tests in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Sen. James M. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican who backed the tests, grumbled to The Washington Post: "It was Karl Rove who made the decision. It was politically motivated."

And when Democrats have to admit that anything intelligent comes out of the Bush administration -- headed by a man they dismiss as a grinning, brainless frat boy -- they need Rove to take the credit. They simply cannot bring themselves to believe that that dummy Bush could have beaten Ann Richards, Al Gore, and the Taliban. In January, Sen. Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.) addressed House Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) on the Senate floor about economic policy: "I ask my distinguished friend from Tennessee, I know you will see Karl Rove, and I want him to see he is leading his distinguished president into the same trap that Bush 41 got led into."

It's hard to assess just how much Rove has guided the policies and strategies of the administration, since Bush is running a notably leak-free operation. White House aides and Republican operatives feel a genuine loyalty to the president, so they seldom talk out of turn to the press.