Opinion: Karl Rove’s brain

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It may have been a revealing accident Monday when, as he spoke about resigning as Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to President Bush, Karl Rove made a rare public slip.

He referred to what has been a long 34-year road they have traveled together since the pair first met at Washington’s Union Station where Rove, a young staffer at the Republican National Committee on the other side of Capitol Hill, was sent to pick up the college student son of George H.W. Bush, then RNC chairman.

‘Mr. President,’ Rove said on Monday growing uncharacteristically emotional, ‘the world has turned many times since our journey began. We’ve been at this a long time. It was over 14 years ago that you began your run for governor, and over 10 years ago that we started thinking and planning about a possible run for the presidency.’

That would mean the presidential planning began before mid-1997.

That is more than a year before the official public story line repeated countless times by longtime Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes that she walked into his cavernous Capitol office in Austin in late-spring of 1998 with the ‘surprising’ news that her boss was already ahead in the polls of possible GOP candidates for 2000, thus igniting the candidacy idea.

The discrepancy may be innocent. While Hughes was the often tart-tongued chief public spokesman for then-governor and later candidate Bush and he relied heavily on her for communications advice, it was Rove whom Bush called at all hours to discuss ideas, strategies and worries. It was Rove who was dispatched to consult quietly with key political allies, especially conservative leaders and Republican governors like Marc Racicot of Montana, who went on to head the RNC and chair Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. And it was Rove who lasted far longer in the White House than Hughes.

Rove knew virtually everything about the campaigns and his intuitions about Bush and...

his own extensive national network of political friends and sources, whom he still contacts regularly for gossip and readings, fueled his impressive command of details. For instance, in one 2000 campaign meeting to plan an event in Kansas City, Rove questioned the advance team’s selection of a particular auditorium because of its large size. He wanted to assemble a crowd easily and have no empty seats. So he suggested a switch to another arena, which he knew had 4,000 fewer seats.

On the grey slushy day of the 2000 New Hampshire primary, Rove made a few phone calls and by the end of breakfast knew that Bush would lose to Sen. John McCain, and lose badly. Yet he was still outside engaging in playful snowball fights with reporters. With the signs of McCain’s strength accumulating since the previous summer, Rove already had a plan drawn to recover in South Carolina, starting the next day.

It’s this kind of intimate knowledge of Bush details, accumulated over many years, that would make a candid Karl Rove book fascinating for politicians, political junkies and historians, so circumspect and close-mouthed have loyal Bush staffers been over the years.

Rove openly mentioned his desire to write a book on Monday, which was surprising and implies presidential approval. Rove, who later added the president had ‘encouraged’ him to write the book, has already talked with Bob Barnett, a Washington attorney who’s brokered book deals for Jenna Bush and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

There hasn’t really been a true insider’s Bush book except for an attempt by David Frum, who only joined Bush briefly after the important bonding times of Texas and the nail-biting 2000 election campaign and aftermath. Upon employment, Bush staffers are routinely required to sign a confidentiality pledge.

The Washington Post had an interesting story yesterday on how keen publishers would be for a candid Rove book on Bush. ‘He’s not going to have the slightest trouble selling the book,’ said Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly. ‘The advance I imagine would be in the seven figures.’

The Associated Press’ Hillel Italie had an earlier story. ‘(Rove) is clearly one of the most controversial, notorious and elusive figures in politics,’ said Jonathan Karp of Grand Central Publishing, ‘and I think that people would be interested in looking behind the curtain and seeing what the Wizard of Oz is actually saying.’

The crucial commercial question, publishers must ponder, is how candid would the notoriously loyal and circumspect presidential strategist be? They’d probably seek sample passages before bidding. In private conversations Rove can be garrulous, pointed and quite an accomplished storyteller. He allowed flashes of that to show in a 1999 C-SPAN interview with Brian Lamb, which Rove later said he regretted. The cable network would do well to dust it off for re-broadcast now.

His enemies and opponents, often one in the same, seek to demonize Rove as an evil Svengali or the real brains behind a vacuous Bush, a result in part of the mystery engendered by Rove’s public reticence and ruthless tactics. He ends up getting credit and blame for much more than he does, which made him a convenient lightning rod that protected others on the Bush team. His absence may now somewhat ease Bush’s relations with Congressional Democrats, many of whom had become obsessed with Rove and, before him, Rumsfeld.

Even when jousting with reporters, a group always subject to suspicion within the Bush camp, Rove can be jovial and friendly, as he was Monday in a long conversation on Air Force One after his retirement announcement.

The reality is that a fair number of the quotes from ‘a top administration source’ that we’ve all read in recent years, in fact, came from Rove. And another reality is that so closely tied is he to his image as a political strategist, that many listeners ask themselves what’s really behind any Rove statement.

It’s hard to imagine any Rove book revealing details that would truly embarrass his longtime boss and friend, so strong are those bonds. But since such a volume won’t appear before the end of the Bush presidency in January 2009, it’s also easy to imagine a book chockful of intimate behind-the-scenes details about the inner workings and decisionmaking of one of recent history’s initially most popular and later most controversial presidencies and its chief political strategist.

‘Readers just want a look behind the scenes,’ says Mary Matalin, a Rove friend, former White House staffer and herself now a book editor. ‘and with Karl they’ll get it from a vantage they’ve never had...The book will be its own genre.’

--Andrew Malcolm