The Return of Rove

Whatever his role in the campaign, Rove's unique position as both a campaign adviser and a media figure has created new opportunities for informational self-dealing of a type that would have seemed unimaginable a decade or so ago. Now the McCain camp can watch Rove say that Sarah Palin's nomination was "not a governing decision but a campaign decision" — and then have Schmidt tell Katie Couric that same night that Rove is "wrong" before going to whine that Palin has "been under vicious assault and attack from the angry left."

So long as there are reporters like Katie Couric out there stupid and desperate enough to let situations like this play out on their airwaves, the McCain camp can now create controversies out of thin air by arguing with itself on national television, turning premeditated, planted comments by the "independent journalist" Karl Rove into "attacks" from the "angry left."

One is tempted to call this brilliant tactics, except that it isn't brilliant, any more than pointing a gun at a Korean store owner is a "brilliant" way to make $135. One of the most remarkable aspects of Rove's career is the way the media consistently respond to being lied to, pissed on and manipulated by Rove: They stroke his already swollen gonads even more, hailing him as a singular political genius. Time celebrated Rove's return to the big stage in August by calling him "Bush's resident campaign genius." He is "regarded by many as a campaign genius," added The Hill, while the Sacramento News and Review distilled "Rove's genius" as his "willingness to push legal and ethical boundaries where no man has gone before."

Nobody appreciates just how far Rove has pushed those boundaries more than Don Siegelman, the former Democratic governor of Alabama. While the rest of us spent the last year forgetting just what an evil, conniving bastard Rove is, Siegelman was taking the scandal-plagued last gasp of the George W. Bush era right on the chin. Successfully prosecuted by the Bush Justice Department on seven counts of corruption, Siegelman was chased from office and spent nine months in prison before a judge released him on bond. When he got out, almost the first words out of his mouth were about Rove. "His fingerprints," Siegelman said, "are smeared all over this case."

The U.S. attorney who launched the prosecution of Siegelman, it turns out, is married to a close ally of Rove's named Bill Canary. A witness has since surfaced claiming that old Bill was talking about ridding Alabama of Siegelman way back in 2002, saying that "he had already gotten it worked out with Karl, and Karl had spoken with the Department of Justice, and the Department of Justice was already pursuing Don Siegelman."

When the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Rove to testify about the scandal in May, however, Rove blew it off, insisting that executive privilege makes him constitutionally "immune from compelled congressional testimony" — a curious defense, given that the U.S. Supreme Court has already ruled twice that even sitting presidents can't hide behind executive privilege. But as we're all finding out, Karl Rove exists on a plane that lies somewhere beyond the presidency, a world that includes all the power of the chief executive but none of the legal constraints.

"The longer the Democrats let him get away with it," Siegelman says, "the more influence he'll have on the election."

Rove is not a genius, or even very clever: He's totally and completely immoral. It doesn't take genius to claim, as Rove ludicrously did last fall, that it was the Democrats in Congress and not George W. Bush who pushed the Iraq War resolution in 2002. It doesn't take brains to compare a triple-amputee war veteran to Osama bin Laden; you just have to be a mean, rotten cocksucker.

The reason Rove continues to survive is the same reason that Johnnie Cochran was called a genius for keeping a double-murderer on the golf course — because this generation of Americans has become so steeped in greed and social Darwinism that it can no longer distinguish between cheating and achieving, between enterprise and crime, and can't bring itself to criticize winners any more than it knows how to be nice to losers. He survives because an increasing number of Americans secretly agree with Rove's vision of rules, laws and "the truth" as quaint, faintly embarrassing rituals that only a sucker would let hold him back.

Rove's comeback is evidence that the attack on our civic institutions in the Bush years wasn't an isolated incident, something we can pin on a specific group of now-deposed politicians. It's a trend, a thing that grows in direct proportion to our greed and ignorance. We may be a country at war, facing one of the greatest financial meltdowns of all time. But in the end, the thing that could be our undoing is the kind of generalized boredom with legality and honor that empowers Rovian behavior. If we let it.

[From Issue 1063 — October 16, 2008]

Related Stories:

• More from Issue 1063
• Karl Rove's A-Team
• John McCain: Make-Believe Maverick