Richard Whalen

In an unprecedented political move, Karl Rove, President Bush’s “boy genius,” chose Sunday’s Financial Times to give Barack Obama some unsolicited advice in the form of an open letter.

Rove said that Obama appears “weak and ineffectual” and should “stop acting like a vitamin-deficient Adlai Stevenson.” Rove also said: “…focus on the fact that many Democrats have real doubts about Hillary. They worry she cannot win, will be a drag on the ticket and that if she got to the White House it would be a disaster.” Rove believes that “she [Hillary] is beatable” but Obama needs to raise his game. Obama should “blow the whistle on her when she tries to become a victim….Do it with humor and a smile and it will sting even more.”

What’s going on? After the 2000 election, I met Rove who quoted at flattering length from two of my books and told me that he had wanted to work for Richard Nixon, but was too young. Rove never stopped trying to impress anyone who might be useful to him, even a retired Nixon-Reagan operative.

The pre-Watergate Nixon of the 1968 campaign vintage would have snapped up Rove even if he was still in knee pants. Rove had the same simplistic hatred of his enemies that drove Nixon in his long, cheerless career as an elected politician who was shy and reclusive around people.

Totalitarian European and Asian politics is about destroying your enemies and trying to survive if you fail in a deadly winner-take-all. In Nixon’s White House, that kind of thuggish politics prevailed until the president led the Watergate burglary cover-up, lied to his crucial ally conservative Senator Barry Goldwater about it, and faced certain impeachment unless he resigned.

Rove’s generation of College Young Republicans embraced the partisan post-Watergate myth that the despised “liberals” had brought Nixon down, rather than the truth that he had caused his own downfall. They helped organize the Reagan landslides, becoming expert vote-gathering technicians in the states, but were far removed from Reagan’s Washington and his moderate pragmatic and balanced bi-partisan approach to governing, which made conservative Democrats like party boss Bob Strauss and AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland faithful allies of the Gipper and his Big Tent brand of center-right politics.

The small, exclusive pup-tent ideological politics of the hard-core Republican Radical Right would never have been enough to deliver to Reagan his huge 1980 and 1984 electoral majorities and his mandate for a peaceful end to the Cold War abroad through rebuilt U.S. military strength and a respite from overweening bureaucratic government regulation at home. The Reagan majorities were enormously swelled by like-minded Independents and Democrats moving to the congenial Reagan center-right.

The post-Reagan polarization of American politics and the Republican presidential merger with Christian fundamentalism caused a needless political and strategic retreat. The Clintons exploited it and were able to corner the vital center that the post-Reagan Republicans foolishly abandoned under the influence of rightist technicians such as Rove.

Modern American politics is about winning, losing and playing the game, again and again, as Rove did so well. His electoral achievements will be analyzed for years to come: He made Texas a Reagan Republican state not only in presidential elections but also for state offices, advising George W. Bush, the first governor in Texas history who was elected to consecutive four-year terms, 1994-1998.

His first national victory was the 2000 Republican primary, when Bush won over Senator John McCain, and then went on to defeat Al Gore. To win the 2002 mid-term elections, Rove exploited 9/11 and manipulated the “war on terror” by turning on the Democrats who had supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the USA Patriot Act. “We can go to the country on this issue,” he predicted, “because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America.”

Rove’s time essentially ended with Bush’s victory over Senator John Kerry in 2004 – an enormous get-out-the vote effort. Notwithstanding his recent, parting words about a Republican victory in 2008, Rove had to tip-toe out the White House’s back door because he was not about to find out if he could possibly organize another national GOP victory from the party’s now shrunken, war-ravaged and economically devastated base.

A Clinton spokesperson asks: “Does he [Rove] think it will be easier for Republicans to run against the unknown gentleman from Illinois?”

Rove – the architect of a grandiose plan to realign American politics under right-wing Republican domination – has been accused of inflicting lasting damage on our nation. This inflates his ego and seeming importance. Rove is mean, negative and phenomenally long-memoried and apparently, enjoyed his role so much with Bush that he has decided to switch parties when it comes to giving advice. The Democrats are welcome to him.