The resignation of Karl Rove will be seen in many quarters as the end of George W. Bush’s administration. With 18 months to go before the next president takes office, the sudden air of finality is a measure of the man’s influence and reputation.
Mr Rove has been Mr Bush’s partner in politics since the president’s Texas days, and Mr Bush himself called Mr Rove «The Architect» after the Republicans captured the White House in 2000. In power, Mr Rove continued in his role of most trusted policy adviser and chief political strategist, helping to secure victory in the 2002 mid-term elections and to defeat John Kerry in 2004. Only as the wheels came off the administration in its second term, and the Republicans went down to defeat in last year’s congressional elections, did Mr Rove’s aura of tactical infallibility begin to fade – and even then more slowly than the president’s dismal poll ratings had long seemed to warrant.
He has been a quintessentially polarising figure. Mr Rove’s friends and foes alike attributed to him remarkable powers of judgment and foresight: his admirers thought him a mighty force for good, his detractors saw him as downright evil. These exaggerated and sometimes hysterical assessments are of a piece with the way the administration itself is judged. Mr Rove was not the monster his enemies thought him to be, nor the beneficent genius his Republican fans perceived. He was a shrewd adviser with an impressive record of winning elections. But he got many things wrong – and in the end the presidency in which he was a junior partner will be judged a failure.
Mr Rove’s distinctive tactical contribution, which also shaped the administration’s substantive record, was to energise the Republicans’ base of committed supporters. Stroke the prejudices of that part of America, play on its fears and demonise its enemies: that was the watchword. It was a bold and in some ways implausible strategy, because it always risked energising the party’s enemies more than its friends. Nonetheless, in three national elections – albeit assisted by weak opponents, and in the tied 2000 election by the Supreme Court – it worked. From the outset, though, it tainted the administration with dishonesty. Mr Bush memorably promised to govern as a moderate, as indeed he should have, given the narrowness of his mandate in 2000. But he did not. The Rove strategy precluded it.
Mr Rove helped secure two White House terms for George W. Bush. By the lights of his profession, he was a success. America is in no mood to thank him for it.
"The Financial Times"
