Bush\'s Brain: How Karl Rove

Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential

Bush's Brain - How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential

This book was published in 2003, the handiwork of veteran political journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater. At the time of its arrival on bookshelves, Karl Rove was seen as an incredibly gifted and cunning presidential advisor and policy maker. He still is those things, but his star has fallen considerably. As the book went on sale, the 2004 Presidential Election was just ahead, and Rove's influence and reputation as a brilliant political tactician would grow even more. But following the Democratic takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in November, 2006, there is these days some tarnish on the luster Rove has built up as a strategist. In fact, it appears that Rove's strategy for the 2006 Mid-Term elections - to energize Bush's conservative demographics, to attack the Democrats (who opposed the war in Iraq) as friendly to the terrorists and to belittle them as "cut-and-run" cowards.

That strategy backfired, as apparently Rove (and Bush) forgot the concerns of the middle class, forgot how angry those in the middle of the political spectrum were about the disaster in Iraq, about high gas prices, about the daily revelations of corruption in Washington (much of it pointing at Republicans). But that having been said, Karl Rove will nonetheless go down in political history as the man behind whatever success George W. Bush is ultimately credited with.

Meanwhile, the opening page on James Moore and Wayne Slater's book, Bush's Brain - How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, quotes Plato as saying: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors." That is a very interesting choice of Platonic quotations, and even ironic. Its ironic for two reasons; one, there is a substantial body of opinion in the scholarly / progressive / academic communities that portrays Bush as intellectually inferior. When a person objectively analyzes the intellectual firepower of many presidents down the years, Bush's malapropos and fumbling / bumbling extemporaneous speaking leave the impression that he's not too terribly bright. As this book points out, Bush hasn't needed to be bright; he has had Rove to rely on.

A close examination of a question and answer Bush press conference by a media-wise individual will bring to light numerous misstatements and surprisingly shallow rhetoric. And two, the irony is there because the Bush family is seen as a rich clan from the east that became Texans for political reasons, and there is a perception, right or wrong, that they think they are better than others who don't swim in the same kind of financial glory.

There is a general perception in America that the Bush family is arrogant, and some of that comes from Bush's actions as a president (an extremely partisan politician notwithstanding the fact that he came into Washington saying he was "a uniter"; he also pushed his own personal covert anti-terrorist agenda in spite of federal law that requires certain steps prior to wiretapping innocent civilians), and some comes from his family. For example, his mother, Barbara Bush, was quoted making quite condescending remarks about the low-income folks who were refugees from the Hurricane Katrina and were brought to Houston when their homes were flooded.

And his brother, Neil gives off an arrogant vibe, as well; it was recently revealed that Neil bush is profiting from the legislation, No Child Left Behind, by selling an expensive interactive reading aid (video-powered) to a number of the schools that are receiving federal money from No Child Left Behind.

Review and Analysis of Moore and Slater's Book

Meanwhile, that having been presented purely as background into the bigger picture of the Bush presidential story, in this book Moore and Slater have done a very thorough job of showing readers Karl Rove's role in the George W. Bush success story. On page 7 the authors quote University of Texas presidential scholar Bruce Buchanan; "He wouldn't have had the vision on his own. He wouldn't have had the game plan. He wouldn't have had the agenda." These are all true statements, which makes an even more remarkable story when Rove's genius is factored in.

What has Rove got that powers him to work so hard, and strategize so effectively, that he can take a rather ordinary politician like Bush and send him to the White House. This book is packed with explanations and antidotal evidence of what Rove has not only meant to Bush, but to the Republican Party and ultimately to the United States.

The guy's got an extra chromosome," says Bush media advisor Mark McKinnon (p. 8), speaking of Rove's acumen. The authors lay mountains of praise on Rove throughout the first ten or so pages, until they finally begin to dig down a little deeper into what a manipulating, dirty-tricks-playing scoundrel Rove has turned out to be. Indeed on page 11, "Bush is the product. Rove is the marketer," the authors explain, and those statements are true, but they don't go far enough. "Rove was the whetstone that sharpened bush into a presidential device," Moore and Slater explain. but, also on page 11, they begin to peel away the veneer and get down to the wood of the matter.

The inherent danger in an arrangement where the political advisor also drives policy," Moore and Slater write on page 11, "is that the consultant is deciding what is best for the next election cycle and his political party while the president needs to be considering what best serves the country beyond election day." Indeed, Rove's mastery over strategy and policy issues has actually been far and away the reason Bush is where he is. "Those two interests are frequently divergent and in conflict," Moore and Slater write. Rove has in fact brought a "rigorous intellect" and "superior political expertise" (and "capacity for detail") into the executive branch of government, and from all appearances, he's Bush's alter ego. The end result, whether his own party leaders - or the Democrats - like it or not, is "Karl Rove thinks it, and George W. Bush does it."

The bottom line? Rove is the "co-president of the United States." Is that a good thing? The rest of the book provides myriad and diverse answers to that question, and while only history will really be able to answer the question thoroughly, it is obviously a very dangerous dynamic to have one man, a man of questionable ethics, who was not elected by the voters, steering the country, pushing policy, manipulating issues in a way which allows his boss to get reelected, and to run roughshod over the Constitution and the Congress in order to consolidate power.

The candidate that Bush beat to repeat as Texas Governor in 1998, Garry Mauro, believes that Rove has "corrupted the democratic process" (p. 13). "Yeah, I think he's an evil man," Mauro is quoted as saying. Well, just how evil is Rove? Moore and Slater point to the wild flurry of vote counting in Florida in 2000, after the election that was to decide who would be president, Al Gore or George W. Bush. In the days immediately after the various recounts were launched, Moore and Slater point to documents release to the IRS 19 months after the election that show the Bush team had spent over a million dollars to "fly operatives into Florida and another million to pay their hotel bills" (p. 14). These "operatives" were hired to create "rowdy distractions at the recount headquarters," and the mastermind of dirty politics, Karl Rove, created all their mischief.

But the authors needed to go back much farther than that to show Rove's style of spreading rumors, initiating whisper campaigns, playing dirty tricks on opponents to make sure his candidate wins out. A newspaper article that appears on pages 25-27 of the book, reprinted from the Dallas Morning News reviewed some of the unethical Rove tactics. In 1973, Rove "organized conferences that instructed young Republicans on campaign dirty tricks, such as going through a rival's garbage to obtain inside memos and contributor lists."

In 1982, Moore and Slater continue, Rove was a consultant to Texas Governor Bill Clements, and Rove "distributed a mock newspaper suggesting that democratic challenger Mark White was drinking while driving when he had a wreck as a college student," according to the newspaper article written by Wayne Slater. White lost the campaign, having been smeared by Rove. In 1990, Rove was up to his old tricks, spreading information about an "alleged kickback scheme involving Democratic Agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower." Three of Hightower's aides were convicted on federal charges.

And in 1992, Rove passed along information that Lena Guerrero, State Railroad Commissioner and a "rising star in the Texas Democratic party," had "lied about graduating from college." After the story hit the front pages of Texas newspapers, Ms. Guerrero's political career was toast. Rove made an art form out of stirring up his client's opponents with whispers, innuendos and lies, while his candidates stood high above the dust and dirt. "A lot of times it wasn't enough for Karl to just win. He had to crush you in the process," according to "an adversary" quoted in Moore and Slater's book on page 28. On page 175-176, the details of Guerrero's demise are written out fully; Rove produced a "mass mailing" in 1992, as Guerrero was running for re-election as State Railroad Commissioner; it suggested she was "soft on crime, pro-gay rights, antigun, and an enemy of traditional family values." Soon thereafter, came the Rove-driven word that Guerrero was not a graduate as she claimed, and she fell like a big oak tree.

The methodical way in which Rove plowed acting Governor Ann Richards into the dust for his candidate, George W. Bush, is a perfect example of the kinds of skullduggery and outright vicious tactics that Rove is known for, Moore and Slater assert. Rove began picking away at Richards' credibility at the outset of Richards' re-election campaign by going after people around her. Guerrero was the first to be gunned down, after Rove passed information along to media about her slip-up in her resume. Next came Jane Hickie and Cathy Bonner, both well-known political colleagues and supporters of Richards. Hickie was head of the Office of State-Federal Relations in Washington, and Rove circulated rumors in the media that Hickie had been doing political work on government time, and soon Hickie was gone. Then Rove persuaded reporters to investigate Bonner's business dealings, and she too was discredited, casting a negative light on Richards. For this book, Bonner gave this quote to Moore and Slater on page 182: "The fact that he comes after you and tries to ruin you professionally is kind of bizarre."

Another connection to Richards was beaten by Rove's big stick when George Shipley - a Democratic consultant who had represented Richards in her campaigns - was removed from the board of directors of the Texas Medical Association (TMA), which was a key client for Shipley; Rove's phone calls to key people had caused Shipley to lose face, and power, with the TMA. "It was in Karl's nature to engulf and devour and control and to rule," said Kim Ross on page 182; Ross was a lobbyist with the medical association.

Rove simply worked harder than anyone else," Moore and Slater explain (184); Rove worked "harder and longer, driven by some internal need to tackle 100 things at once in pursuit of the single goal: making George W. Bush the most powerful political figure on earth, and lifting himself up in the process." Next, was Richards herself; Rove carefully, skillfully began a plot of planting rumors that Ann Richards had surrounded herself with gay staff members. "It was virtually impossible in the summer of 1994," Moore and Slater wrote on page 208, to get a haircut in East Texas or visit a coffee shop or go to a church Wednesday nights without hearing about an Richards and the lesbians."

It was a viciously untrue whisper campaign launched by Rove; it was true that Richards had "opened the process to record numbers of women, Blacks, and Hispanics," and within that fact was the reality of naming so many women to posts; and with Richards' liberal politics out in front, Rove only needed to learn that one or more of her high-profile appointments were indeed gay, and his gun was fully loaded. Remember, all these attacks Rove launched against Richards and her appointees early in the campaign were designed to be backroom, under the table, but to spread nasty rumors like a Texas brushfire.

So up until about a year before the election, Bush was not seen as having made anything other than a very straightforward upstanding campaign. But then, after Rove had planted the evil seeds of doubt and innuendo with business groups and conservative religious groups in Texas, Bush stepped in with the statement that follows: His opponents appointments "...have been people who have had agendas that may have been personal in nature," Bush stated. "The code word was 'personal,'" Moore and Slater noted; no one mentioned "sexual orientation" because they didn't need to.

There is no secret that Texas is a conservative state where gay rights are not among the concerns; but what is on the minds of Texans is crime and personal safety, so Rove put out a campaign brochure attacking Richards for vetoing a bill to "allow people to carry concealed handguns." Meantime, the whisper campaign "had metastasized into lurid gossip," and the dye was cast, when state Senator Bill Ratliff (Bush's east Texas campaign chairman) told the Houston Post that "Richards' appointment of homosexuals could cost her support in the region"; now the rumors and whispers were front-page headlines. Now, Bush was Texas governor, and was to be reelected four years later, and during both of Bush's terms, Rove would be laying the groundwork for Bush to be president.

But to get to the White House, Rove had to make sure his candidate worked his way successfully through the minefields and booby traps of the Republican Primary campaigns in 2000. After candidate and U.S. Senator John McCain won the first primary in New Hampshire, Rove's dirty deeds began to be implemented, in an effort to discredit McCain. This is Rove's playing field - a wide open, no holds-barred kind of brainstormed strategies designed to put doubts in enough people's minds to harm the opponent.

In the case of New Hampshire, Rove was livid that his man had lost, and that McCain had grabbed the early lead in the brutal game of primaries. So, "what followed," Moore and Slater wrote on page 256, "were two weeks of slaughterhouse politics in Dixie." Rove sent direct mail to South Carolina voters warning that McCain "wanted to remove the pro-life plank from the GOP, which wasn't true but stirred the attention of the state's sizable antiabortion voters." To help with this underhanded, unethical strategy, Rove recruited Ralph Reed, former lead person for the Christian Coalition, to energize the conservative Christian movement. Others paid by Rove claimed that McCain, a past prisoner of war in Vietnam, of "abandoning" veterans (257). Still others in the Rove conspiratorial caper sent out emails claiming McCain "had fathered illegitimate children"; several hundred "push-poll" calls were made to South Carolina voters "asking harsh questions" and making "darker warnings" that Cindy McCain had drug problems and that the McCain's "had a black child."

When those kind of whispers are made in a Southern state, they have a life of their own, even if they seem preposterous on the surface, they do serious damage in the "word of mouth" genre. The tactics were exactly the same as Rove had taught at the University of Texas in the 1970s; a former teacher assistant to Rove, Bill Israel, recalled (p. 258) that Rove told students "Radio is really good for a negative attack" because it is "tough to figure what the opposition is doing." And Rove also taught the students how to "narrowcast" - the technique of "passing powerful messages to small groups without stirring the larger public" - along with using direct mail as a weapon. "The only thing worse to face is mail," Israel recounted Rove as instructing; after all, direct mail "is immune from press coverage." The dirt worked, the whispers were effective, and Bush not only won South Carolina (by poisoning voters against McCain along with building up Bush as an "outsider" who is a "reformer," he won the nomination and now Rove could put Al Gore (the Democratic nominee) into his cross hairs.