INSIDE THE MIND OF KARL ROVE: A GUESS

Dr. Richard Ferrier

Following the impressive victory of the Republican Party in the midterm elections of 2002, President Bush’s political policy advisor, Karl Rove, basked in the political limelight. Rove was credited with designing the winning strategy, not only for 2002, but also for the two victorious campaigns of his boss in Texas, and for the Presidential win of 2000. A number of interviews and public appearances followed, and several books. The full titles of two of them speak for themselves: Boy Genius: Karl Rove, the Brains behind the remarkable political Triumph of George W. Bush, by Lou Dubose, Jan Reid, and Carl M. Cannon, and Bush’s Brain: how Karl Rove made George W. Bush Presidential, by James Moore and Wayne Slater.

Bush’s Brain is about as charming and intelligible as the public dump. Rummaging through it, a devoted political scavenger can find useful throwaways. But it lacks structure and clarity, and in large measure because it never entertains the notion that Karl Rove has rational views of public policy and the public good. Rove is, for Slater and Moore, first, foremost, and last, the consummate party hack and consultant, an electoral junkie with no scruples and no interest in statesmanship. In consequence, the interface between political tactics and real policy aims never appears in their account, which wallows in breathless stories of personal grudges, fundraising techniques, investigations, and deal making. Bush’s education reforms in Texas are all about money, teachers’ unions and their electoral activities, and personal relations with prominent Texas politicos, as Moore and Slater would have it. Accountability, standards, phonics, bi-lingualism … anything, in short, that actually affects students and teachers … is absent from their account.

The crowning absurdity of this vulgar, journalistic refuse heap is a chapter called, “the Baghdad Road.” Its thesis appears to be that Rove engineered our national foreign policy, including the current war, in order to win the 2002 and subsequent elections. It foolishly quotes, with approval, an expert’s prediction of “tens of thousands” of casualties and a ruined presidency. And all to placate the Jews and big oil. I am not making this up. Consider this excerpt from page 320 of Bush’s Brain, which I quote in full:

“There was one person who articulated the facts. Of course, Karl Rove had him cornered, too. No one was listening to Iraqi foreign minister Tareq Aziz because he worked for Saddam Hussein. But in one, short sentence, he captured the issues no American politician had the courage to confront.”

“’This,’ he said, ‘is all about oil and Israel.’”

Boy Genius, by way of contrast, seems a thoughtful and lucid book. But then, nearly anything would, after Bush’s Brain. Carl Cannon and his co-authors show some objectivity, and some attention to public policy. They provide an interesting, if brief, narrative of the growing interest of Rove and Bush in the social thinking of Myron Magnet and Marvin Olansky, and they at least mention then Governor Bush’s genuine indignation at the low levels of achievement of poor kids in the Texas public schools. Their account of the bitter war between Rove, Bush, et. al., and the Texas Evangelicals and conservatives who supported Tom Pauken as state Party chief is somewhat more informative than Slater’s and Moore’s version, which could be about a high school student government election for all I could make out. As one deeply involved in the affirmative action issue, I was pleased to see Democrat Attorney General Dan Morales credited with his politically brave stance in the Hopwood case, [pg 101] where he ruled that the decision against race preferences extended to financial assistance in the University of Texas system. That ruling was later overturned by Rove’s candidate, and Morales’ successor, current Texas AG, John Cornyn.

Still, Boy Genius is not without its faults. It mis-identifies [page 155] the ardently Catholic Alan Keyes as an evangelical. It substantially ignores the Forbes and Keyes campaigns, the two men who, after John McCain, won the most votes and caused the most trouble for George Bush in the 1999-2000 primaries. It fails to explain in any depth the bad blood between Pauken’s forces and the Bush wing of the state GOP, much of which can be traced to the high profile issue of education. There is a most interesting story to be told about Governor Bush’s hostile neutrality regarding the 1997 Houston Civil Rights Initiative, a matter of some interest now that his administration has filed a tepid color-blind amicus brief in the Michigan cases now before the US Supreme Court. But you won’t find that story in Boy Genius. Nor will you find any account of the role Rove played in what was, for pro-life Americans like me, the watershed policy decision on embryonic stem cell research. The authors do note that Rove has learned that he and Bush must “appease the Christian Right,” but leave unnoted just how that was done over ESCR in August 2001. My sources tell me that Rove took a hard line against any use of human remains for “science.” I hope they’re right. I’d have liked a confirmation from Boy Genius.

No one can make good on all the lacunae in these books, and in the other coverage of the political thought of Karl Rove. But perhaps I can make a small contribution, from my experiences in California and national politics.

I only met Karl Rove once in my life, and I’m fairly sure he doesn’t remember it. He had just given an after dinner speech at Harvard’s 2001 campaign debriefing meeting. That event, held every four years, brings together representatives from all the campaign organizations of all candidates, winners and losers alike, for frank discussions of issues and strategies in the just finished Presidential contests, primaries and general election alike. It was so inclusive, as we like to say these days, that Quayle, Forbes, and Buchanan were represented. I was the one-man representative for my friend, Alan Keyes. One of my efforts for Keyes in that cycle was a WorldNetDaily piece probing Rove’s oft-repeated use of the McKinley elections of 1896 and 1900 as models for George W. Bush’s campaign in 2000. The Keyes volunteers used reprints of that article, “McKinley, Why McKinley?” in the 2000 Iowa caucuses. At Harvard, I asked Mr. Rove a question arising from the WND piece.

I’ll give the question in a minute. First, I must touch on the article. Its argument may be summarized thus:

1. McKinley had declared that certain political questions were no longer relevant, and the election and the campaign must turn from them. Rove had been quoted by the Washington Post as saying, “the old issues of the Civil War” were “worn out.” McKinley himself said, in 1901, “…sectionalism has disappeared. Division on public questions can no longer be traced by the war maps of 1861. These old differences less and less disturb the judgment." Rove called McKinley, “a superb politician” for acting on precisely this judgment. Therefore, some “old issues” that had formerly divided the American body politic must now, according to Rove, be “worn out.”

2. Rove must have been suggesting that something would play the part of these issues in 2000.

3. The “worn out” issues of 1896-1900 were, in the judgment of McKinley, the Lincolnian or “Declaration” issues of the human dignity of the black man, and equal treatment under the law.

4. It is appropriate to ask what the counterparts of the old issues would be today.

5. It is reasonable to guess that they are divisive issues that have not proved amenable to political resolution, probably because they are rooted in differences in principle, or in proximate deductions from principle, in the people.

6. But, just as it was finally short-sighted to ignore these issues in 1896-1900, so it would prove unwise to ignore their counterparts in 2000.

It was a brief encounter; Rove seemed eager to get away, perhaps to talk with bigger fish, perhaps to retire after a long day’s political jawing. I wouldn’t venture to say why. Had he stayed, I’d have liked to ask him about half a dozen other “old issues” of the conservative movement of the last 30 years. In the event, that was all we had to say to each other.

Now, after the triumph of Mr. Rove’s boss and his party in the 2002 elections, it behooves us to ask about the future of some of those issues, under a Republican President and a Republican Congress.

In thinking about these issues, it will be entirely fitting to consider that politics is the art of the possible, and that Mr. Rove is the President’s principal advisor on domestic politics in the wide sense. Naturally, his concerns will range from electoral tactics and strategy to party and interest group affairs to the public good as such. It is not to be expected that each and every issue that Rove or his President care about receives immediate and intense attention, or that political capital be spent lavishly and indifferently on all alike. In researching this article, I made some calls to contacts in Washington who knew Rove and had been meeting with him since it became clear that Mr. Bush would be inaugurated in 2001. One of them stressed to me that there would be only a few issues that the incoming administration could be expected to act on, the very ones stressed in the campaign. These were, on the domestic front, tax cuts, entitlement reform, education, life, and the Faith-based initiatives.

Consider education. As my source says, this loomed large in the campaign, and it was an early legislative effort of the White House. On the electoral side, Rove and others have trumpeted the seizure of the issue from the Democrats. Polls had long shown voters nationwide to believe the Republicans less interested in education, and those who thought the question important trended Democratic in their voting. When he was campaigning for governor of Texas, Mr. Bush, with Rove at his side, did indeed capture this issue from the Democrats. And his administration moved on from promise to policy. The assessments of public school students in the state showed progress. Tagged “the Texas Miracle,” they were used by then Governor Bush in his presidential primary races and in the general election with considerable success. The charge that Republicans were “mean-spirited” was nicely countered by the slogan later used to describe the legislation, “No Child Left Behind,” and the only example used by candidate Bush to clarify his intentionally vague expression “affirmative access,” his substitution for race-based preferences, was the so-called “10% Solution,” an admissions policy for public higher education in Texas, later copied and expanded in Florida by Gov. Jeb Bush.

Personnel is, as they say, policy, and several of the appointments to the Federal Department of Education, notably Eugene Hickock as Undersecretary and Gerald Reynolds as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and look very promising. Both men have connections to conservative organizations committed to equality and excellence, such as the Heritage Foundation, the National Association of Scholars, and the Centre for New Black Leadership. The President reached back to Texas for his Secretary, Rod Paige, and his man seems to be regarded as a conservative.

Score two, therefore, for Mr. Rove. The appointments are sound, and the voters have been mollified on an issue difficult for Republicans. What about the political costs? And the public good?

Opinions will differ on these questions, firstly, according as one holds that there is, or is not, a constitutional and prudent role for the federal government in K-12 education. I frankly declare that I think there is almost no such role. Until 2000, I believe most conservatives, and a substantial number of Americans of all persuasions, agreed. And many activists had spent time and treasure trying to win the whole public over to that point of view. It was enshrined in the national Republican Platform from Ronald Reagan’s first nomination until August of 2000. Unless Mr. Bush’s Presidency fails badly, an outcome that few wish for, even privately, given his needed leadership in the aftermath of 9/11, we will have neither party even talking about restoring public K-12 education and funding entirely to the states.

Abraham Lincoln pointed out long ago that, in America, public opinion is everything. It will take a generation to recover the lost ground in molding that opinion into the shape it took in 1996. One of the reasons is the following: those who had sought to break up a semi-federalized government school monopoly often used the manifest failures and ideological excesses of the educrats to make their point. And they drew attention to the low test scores and dumbed-down, politically correct curricula that the teachers’ unions and their allies in the Democratic Party had inflicted on children. Those arguments will be harder to make with “our people” in charge of the operation, and especially the accountability mechanisms. Some conservatives and Republicans will shy away from criticism of their friends, some will be bold, and suffer political retribution. The administration, with the accountability mechanisms partly under its control, will experience powerful temptations to lower the bar by degrees so as to have successes to report, or at least to escape angry parents, school boards, and teachers.

All these things happened in Texas, largely, but not entirely, in the period when Mr. Bush was Governor. Let’s look at assessment first. Texas’ students’ SAT and ACT scores did not increase at all on Governor Bush’s watch , and remain relatively low in the state to this day. But the state’s assessment test, the TAAS, showed yearly improvement at amazingly high rates. Hence, the “Texas Miracle.” Some Republican or conservative Texans defended the tests and the Governor. Others, who expressed doubts or criticized the TASS, including some in the policy foundations in the state and the “back to basics” faction on the state board, were treated very harshly by Rove and the Governor’s political apparatus. (For a recent review of the evidence of student achievement in Texas, click here.)

Rove called them, in effect, extremists in conversations with writers from the NY Times. The Governor’s people in the Texas educratic agency, the TEA, disparaged evidence from the NAS’s Sandra Stotsky and Mathematically Correct’s David Klein, evidence that showed incremental lowering of the difficulty of the exams as a cause of higher test scores. When the disgusted leader of the conservatives on the State Board, Bob Offutt, decided to break with the Governor and endorsed Steve Forbes, the Forbes campaign flew him into the early primary states to explain that much of the “Texas Miracle” was smoke and mirrors. GOP money close to Bush went to Offutt’s opponent in the March 2001 election, long after his crime of standing against the Governor was moot. Offutt was defeated, and the promising takeover of the state board by committed and principled reformers is now probably dead.

Bob Offutt’s conservative faction on the state board had been in bad odor with Mr. Rove’s political apparatus earlier, due to their criticism of the School-to-Work boondoggle, and their skeptical view of the other pillar of Texas education reforms, curricular standards. The whole tale takes much too long to tell for inclusion in this essay; suffice it to say that the educrats produced a weak document, the conservatives, such as the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Eagle Forum conducted a promising publicity campaign against it, and a team of volunteer teachers produced an alternative document of high quality, the Texas Alternative Document (TAD). Gov. Bush, in 1997, backed the conservative critics. Then, after winning minor ameliorations in the “mainstream” document, put his weight behind that “improved” product. The conservatives held on until a final losing vote, in the summer of 1998, and have since continued to spread the word that the Texas standards, called the “TEKS,” are less than first rate. Texas teacher Donna Garner, chief writer for the TAD, deserves special mention in this saga. Kudos to Donna for her perseverance!

I know from first hand experience as President of the Declaration Foundation that the Civics and American History Standards in California, which are in part the work of people associated with Claremont, are superior to the TEKS in almost every way. The STW/ TEKS story is told in amusing and well researched detail by an eccentric but award winning independent journalist who used to work in Katy Texas, Dave Mundy. A Google search will turn up the piece, under the title of “the Bush Glitch Project.”

I say, “used to work” there because, when the presidential primary season opened, his employer told him, according to Mr. Mundy, to cease writing pieces critical of the “Texas Miracle.” Dave now writes for another paper, also in Texas.

Karl Rove’s hand in all this is described thus by Mundy:

To make sure the conservatives were stilled, just before hitting the campaign trail to run for re-election as Governor in 1998, Bush turned his personal axe-man, Karl Rove, loose on them. The idea that Republicans never attack Republicans is, apparently, out of favor in the Bush camp. In October, 1998, Rove convinced the New York Times to run a scathing piece on the conservative State Board members – Donna Ballard, Richard Neill, Richard Watson, David Bradley, Bob Offutt and Randy Stevenson. Rove, Christie, Moses and Ratliff all took pot-shots at the conservatives in the article, with Rove himself saying "... in the carnival of life, they are in a very distant booth."

Rove himself was behind one, and perhaps two, most revealing snubs of Connerly several years back, when Ward was riding high after 209’s smashing victory, and Governor Bush was setting up to run for President. This is what happened, according to Connerly:

I was in Austin attending a legislative hearing with Ed Blum, (the co-author of the Houston Civil Rights Initiative, a 209 clone that was frozen out by then Governor George W. Bush, and defeated at the polls in 1997). As I approached the capitol, who should appear but Governor Bush. He warmly shook my hand and said that he wanted me to come to Austin and have dinner with him. When I returned to Sacramento, I called Don Evans and asked him about a follow-through on Bush's offer. Don called back the next day and said that I would be receiving a call from the governor's scheduling secretary to finalize arrangements. The next day after that, I received a call from Don Evans who said that Karl Rove had overruled these arrangements. He said Rove thought it would not be a good idea for me to be seen coming into the capitol to visit with the governor, because some might protest.

I had been a delegate to National Republican Conventions for each of the past three elections in the nation. Given my role as former Statewide Finance Chair of the CRP and a high-profile Republican in California and the Nation as a whole, it is reasonable to assume that, having endorsed Bush in 1999, I would have been a delegate in 2000. I was not. Moreover, I was told that the decision was made by Bush people to keep individuals like me, Pete Wilson and Ron Unz out of sight and out of mind so that they would not "embarrass the presidential nominee.”

Both Unz’s and Connerly’s projects, though national in scope, had their origin in California, and both were favorites of readers of this Review, for what that’s worth.

Turning again to education, and, indulging hope for a bit, one might note the excellent, high-minded rhetoric Mr. Bush has used, both in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 disaster and this fall on Constitution Day. In both instances, he has asked Americans to recover their Declarationist Heritage, in words almost reminiscent of Lincoln’s timeless wisdom. And the White House Conference on Civics and History Education was a promising follow up, with a view to making these words reach fruition in some kind of action. Those who are reluctantly willing to see the federal role in K-12 education expand – and the cost of that expansion in purely fiscal terms is a staggering 40%, according to the administration – may console themselves with the prospect of our friends wielding the instruments of federal power in a field long held by the enemy. On the other hand, one way that power was touted in the campaign as useful to the conservative cause – a pilot program of vouchers targeted at failing school districts – was tossed overboard with little ceremony early in the negotiations for the “No Child Left Behind” legislation.

Indulging in a guess at the thinking that lies behind the retreat from principled conservative positions on this cluster of related issues – bi-lingualism, race-conscious policy, education, and, one must add, immigration and so-called “gay rights” – I would venture the following hypothesis. The reader should note well that I do not know that what I am saying is the case; it does, I think, “save the phenomena.” Here is my hypothesis: Rove aims at forging a long lasting GOP electoral majority. He takes account of the forecasts of increasing population and voting by Hispanics and other minorities, and he does not believe that the positions formerly taken by the GOP and especially by its activists in this policy arena can be presented to the electorate in a wise and benevolent manner, the example of California’s Proposition 209 to the contrary notwithstanding. He calculates that there are powerful and organized interest groups favoring race preferences and bi-lingualism and tolerance of illegal immigration, or at least of the children of illegals. The left has, in these areas, a “standing army,” the right, merely a militia. The matter is not worth a fight.

Perhaps this is what he meant in December of 1999, when he called affirmative action a “dead-end issue” for Mr. Bush. Even when the administration does take a positive step on this issue, as it has just done in Solicitor General Ted Olson’s filing a brief against gross race preferences in Gratz v. Gruber, they yield as much ground or more by effusively praising diversity and recommending surrogate, facially race-neutral measures like the “10% Solution” to achieve race-conscious results by other means. At the same time, following Rove’s political strategy here forces General Olson to engage in doublespeak before the Court, as the following exchange indicates:

QUESTION: So is the Texas plan constitutional? If it's designed solely in order to have a diverse mix in the colleges they take 10 percent, but their motive stated and their purpose is to have diversity in the college?

GENERAL OLSON: Justice Breyer, I don't believe that that is the stated motive of the Texas plan or the California or the Florida plan. Those are intended to open up those institutions to a broader selection, one of the ways in which this Court has accepted the institution such as universities may operate is to make sure that barriers are broken down, accessibility is made more available and that is one very race neutral means of accomplishing that legitimate objective.

QUESTION: General, what do you say to the argument that the only reason [it] accomplishes it is because it depends on segregation at the lower level of the schools, otherwise it would not accomplish that?

GENERAL OLSON: No, there is no evidence that it depends upon segregation of the schools in Texas or in any other place.

It is a diverse selection of the high schools in that state

– Official transcript, Oral Arguments before the United States Supreme Court, April 1, 2003

An astute friend of mine, long a paladin in the “Diversity Wars,” suggested to me that Rove’s thinking here may well be targeted more at sentimental “moderate” urban and suburban white voters, especially women, than at the racialist (and heavily Democratic) special interest groups. One of the rare bits of Slater and Moore’s book that is informative on Rove’s policy thinking supports my friend’s guess. Way back in 1985, Rove wrote a memo for the Bill Clements gubernatiorial campaign that reads, in part, “ …[e]mphasizing your appointments of women and minorities will not win you the support of feminists and the leaders of the minority community; but it will bolster your support among … urban independents.”

In a similar vein, my hunch is that Rove fears that the famous “soccer moms” can never be moved to support a reduction in the federal role in education. All such efforts will come out, in the public mind, as hostility to education as such. Moreover, and perhaps most important, Rove appears not to think the principles underlying conservative stances in these matters fundamental. He simply does not care about resisting direct preferences or surrogates aimed at equality of results, for example, the way Connerly or Tom Wood and Glynn Custred, Prop 209’s co-authors, did. Neither does he figure the success of activists and men of letters, going all the way back to the Reagan Administration and those like Bill Bennett, to have been electorally significant.

Finally, he and the whole Republican apparatus are somewhat insensitive to intellectual and educational issues. It’s not their home turf. The Democrats and the whole crowd of diversophiliacs run the public schools and universities, and the cries of frustrated conservatives from Academia make little impression on the party of business. Or, if Republicans do hear these laments, they come up with corporatist schemes like STW, much to the frustration of social conservatives, who know well that Business Roundtable executives are prime practitioners of appeasement on “diversity,” and not the most avid lovers of properly academic achievement. Witness the awful amicus brief filed by big business in the Michigan cases!

Rove is therefore happy to abandon the activists and infiltrators – the movement types like Donna Garner, Ward Connerly, Ron Unz and Ron Prince, author of Prop 187, or Rep. Tom Tancredo – rather than run the electoral risks of supporting their causes. The most we’ll get on these issues is token appointments, some no doubt good and important, and a hope that the judiciary will save our bacon, while the President holds back from a full throated defense of the key principles. Though, as the Washington whispers suggest in the case of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, there are no guarantees that Bush appointees to the Court will support colorblind law or the strictest reverence for life. Woe to those who put their faith in Judges!

“Faith in judges” describes the creed of all too many not just in education reform, but in the pro-life movement. In the primaries leading up to the 2000 election, a principal argument used on behalf of Mr. Bush was that he could win, and if he did, he would appoint anti-Roe judges. With some qualification I think the story is better than that. Rove and Bush, according to the folks I trust, promise more than good judicial appointments on the life question, and I very much hope my sources are right. Indeed, there have been actions, chiefly by way of resistance to international population control and feminist initiatives, that are as good as anything that came from the Reagan Administration. It is true that Administration rhetoric could be more frequent or fervid, true that Roe v. Wade could be denounced as Lincoln denounced Dred Scott, but the record on many aspects of the life issue, with the striking exception of ESCR, looks like the action of men who do care, and in large measure understand, the vital principle at stake.

Electoral calculations may re-enforce upright sentiment in this field. Rove told an audience at AEI in 2001 that one of the reasons Mr. Bush did not win a popular majority was that his expected 19 million “Christian Right” vote proved to be only 15 million in the event. And he seems determined to do something about those numbers.

Here are his exact words:

“I will say this, I will say one of the ironies is, is that we probably failed to martial support among the base as well as we should have. If you look at the model of the electorate, and you look at the model of who voted, the big discrepancy is among self-identified, white, evangelical protestants, pentecostals and fundamentalists. If they were [the] part of the voters [that] they should have been, if you had looked at the electoral model, there should have been 19 million of them, and instead there were 15 million of them. Just over 4 million of them failed to turn out and vote. And yet they are obviously part of our base. They voted for us, depending on who they were and where they were, by huge margins, 70 and 80 percent margins. And yet 4 million of them didn't turn out to vote that you would have anticipated voting in a normal presidential election year. I think we may have failed to mobilize them …”

Still, if one thinks, as the best and brightest of the pro-life leadership certainly do, that the August 2001 ESCR compromise was a striking exception to otherwise good policy (see "How and Why America Didn't Ban Human Cloning" and "Which Way at the Stem-Cell Crossroads?"), one can at least hope that the influential Mr. Rove was among those who urged keeping the campaign promise to yield nothing to those who would exploit human remains. That, at least, is how I read this quote from a recent AP article on Rove’s role in the Bush White House:

“as the chief inside contact for Christian conservative leaders outside, Rove notably sided against both embryonic stem cell research and international family planning funds …”

“Once embryonic stem-cells research as such was legitimized by President Bush's approval, then suddenly the advantages of "custom" cloning from the patient's own body were advocated – first as desirable, and soon as necessary for the further progress of biomedical research. In a little more than a year, the cloning of human embryos thus moved from being unthinkable to being the latest biomedical "necessity."

In the meantime, I would advise those who take their bearings from the Declaration, both at Claremont and elsewhere, to continue with their own political initiatives, in complete and manly independence. Let Ward Connerly pursue his California Racial Privacy Initiative, let Ron Unz move on to promote English for the Children in other states, let the lovers of life proclaim human dignity, Marlo Lewis at Competitive Enterprise Institute declare the glories of private property and debunk the fantasies of the global warmers, and Tom Tancredo defend the idea of citizenship. All you, all we, can do is good. And, if we prevail, Karl Rove and his boss will take note.

Count on that.