Dullard Political Science Theory
The Atlantic Monthly had some pretty good timing with this one. The cover for the latest issue: What went wrong with Karl Rove.
Karl Rove was supposedly setting out to create a “Permanent Republican Majority”, using Mark Hanna for William McKinley as his role model, “The Architect” of a system of spoils which kept the Republican Party as the dominant force until the Great Depression and … um… Roosevelt’s system of spoils made the Democratic Party the dominant force until Vietnam and Civil Rights. Exiting from the playing field after engineering Bush’s two elections and the Republican victories of 2002, but not so much anything good in 2006 and not so much of a good situation going into 2008, I suspect he is still in the background, privately if not publicly in service with the RNC.
The image I remember came from Karl Rove with an NPR interview last October. The interviewer asked the question of how Bush would deal with a possible Democratic Congress. Rove responded that that wasn’t going to happen. The interviewer interjected that “the math shows” a strong likelihood that the Democrats would retake Congress. Rove retorted that “You’re entitled to your math. But I have THE math.”
One of the weekly news magazines followed Rove on Election Day. He apparently began the morning, or that weekend, planning a meeting of political scientists to discuss the new unreliability of election polling, because it was so off from “THE math”. There was a moment time when his black-berry rang off with the news that the Democrats had taken back the House. And they photographed him staring at the black-berry — the moment that he knew that his plans had been foiled.
But it is hard to quantify the success/failure rate of this adviser in concerns with sticking a political party on a good or bad footing. Compare Karl Rove to the success/failure quota with regards of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party. Bill Clinton, you will understand, came into office with his party the dominate party on the state level, and with a solid long-term Congressional lock. He left office with the Democratic Party largely in tatters on all those fronts. However, whatever one can say for the Kerry and Gore campaigns, the national electoral map certainly looked better for the Democrats than it did before Clinton came to office. As well, it is hard to imagine the morale plunge that would have taken place had the Democrats not been able to get victory in 1992 — coming off some 1991 book stating the Republicans’ Geographic lock on the White House, and with surprisingly strong murmurs that if the Democrats managed to lose, they might as well find a different horse than the National Democratic Party for the presidency while retaining its local and regional parties.
Karl Rove’s tag as “Genius” wore off very quickly, and after a spell all I can really say is he had a good run, but his success came in that he foisted Bush on us, and that was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode in his face.